
In May 2016 an Australian named Craig Wright told the BBC he would be offering “extraordinary” evidence to prove, once and for all, that Satoshi Nakamoto was him. He was going to move coin from one of bitcoin’s earliest blocks, known to have belonged to Satoshi’s account.
Wright’s claim had some backing, with independent investigations by both Wired magazine and Gizmodo providing initial, albeit circumstantial, evidence. Gavin Anderesen, perhaps Satoshi’s closest partner during development of the platform, was said to have believed it, as well as other prominent figures in the field. Just as many were, on the other hand, not convinced. When Wright’s “proof” was published on his blog, researchers and media outlets–including Wired magazine–smelled a hoax.
As recently as November 2018, Wright has continued to refer to himself as the real Satoshi. In an interview with the BBC in 2016, he claimed he would finally demonstrate “extraordinary proof” of his identity. He then failed to do so, producing neither proof that he wrote the original white paper, nor the one key to it all: Satoshi’s original private key, associated with the genesis block.
Various members of the field, as well as journalists from The New Yorker, Vice, Fast Company, and other outlets, have nominated candidates for the title, though each subject is as vaguely as plausible as the next, yet each writer more confident in their evidence than the last.
Two names that have shone above the rest are Hal Finney and Nick Szabo–individuals more inherently qualified for the title than the grad students and darknet criminals that have been dug up for stories past. Finney is an early pioneer of cryptography, and the first person to use and work on the Bitcoin platform (after Nakamoto himself, assuming they’re different people). A Forbes article noted that Finney lived within walking distance of Dorian Nakamoto’s California home and that his writings closely resembled Satoshi’s. After meeting with Finney himself, the article’s author concluded that he’d got the wrong man.