Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright claims he's the inventor of the digital currency bitcoin.
Wright told the BBC that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the shadowy creator of the cryptocurrency. In a follow-up blog post on Monday, Wright thanked everyone who helped out in bitcoin's beginnings.
"I have been staring at my screen for hours, but I cannot summon the words to express the depth of my gratitude to those that have supported the bitcoin project from its inception — too many names to list,” Wright wrote. “You have dedicated vast swathes of your time, committed your gifts, sacrificed relationships and REM sleep for years to an open source project that could have come to nothing. And yet still you fought.”
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To back up his claim, Wright digitally signed a message using the cryptographic keys that were associated with the creator.
"These are the blocks used to send 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney in January [2009] as the first bitcoin transaction," Wright told the BBC.
Wright said Finney helped turn his vision of bitcoin into reality.
Almost immediately, Wright’s claims came under suspicion, with some saying the real person or ground behind Satoshi Nakamoto has yet to be revealed. And the evidence Wright put forward has left some experts unconvinced.
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For years, news organizations have been investigating who the real founder of bitcoin is, with several names being mentioned. Someone or a group of people called "Satoshi Nakamoto" was always associated with the invention of the cryptocurrency, but nobody knew who was behind the name.
In 2014, Newsweek said that the bitcoin creator was a 64-year-old Japanese-American living in California named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto.