‘How do you organise him?’ I asked Pedersen.
‘I’m the organised type,’ he said. ‘When Craig comes into the office he’s always in the middle of a sentence. And I’m trying to work out what this sentence is and manage things around what he’s saying. I’m sort of grounding his latest thoughts, placing them in what we’re trying to do. I’m the glue between Craig and the developers.’
It had become obvious, mainly from things Wright himself had said, that he often found it difficult to get on with people who worked for him. He got rattled when they said things couldn’t be done, or were too conventional in their thinking, or too stupid, as he saw it. Ramona told me that forty per cent of his staff in Sydney had been in a state of rebellion. ‘I’m an arsehole,’ Craig said to me once again, ‘and I know that.’ Pedersen had the job of keeping things cool with the developers, whose job it was to turn Wright’s ideas into a form in which they could be patented and eventually licensed. ‘I’m making sure the ideas get executed,’ he said. ‘Craig’s not that interested in that part. He’s always moving on.’
‘Craig’s great at research,’ Wright said of himself, ‘but his development and commercialisation sucks. I build it, and then it works, and then I walk off.’
‘You’re losing interest?’
‘I’ve lost interest. I’ve proved it, and off I go.’
‘It’s getting easier,’ Pedersen said, with a smile. ‘It was quite complex in the beginning.’ Wright had strong views about how the technology should develop, and how it could ‘scale’ to meet greater demand. ‘It can go to any size,’ Wright said that day. ‘I’ve tested up to 340-gigabyte blocks, which is hundreds of thousands of times greater than it is now. It’s every stock exchange, it’s every registry rolled into one … Ultimately bitcoin is a 1980s program, because that’s what I was trained in … The idea is good, the code is robust, it runs and does the job, but it’s slow and cumbersome. There were some things early on that needed to be fixed and were, but it wasn’t as perfect as everyone thinks. At the end of the day, it needs to be turned into professional code. It needs to move away from the home user network and into a server network environment. And then it can do much more and be faster.’ There are those who feel it should remain small, and that making it bigger is a betrayal of its first principles.
‘This is the future of the blockchain,’ Pedersen said.
‘People are saying, “It’s not really something we can run yet”,’ Wright said, ‘but it’s time that we grew up and that bitcoin becomes professional.’
Pedersen shook his head. ‘We’re not working in a world where we know exactly what we’re doing,’ he said. ‘It’s coming from Craig. And then I start establishing the ground rules and we begin rolling it out. I’m putting people on a certain track and I keep going back to Craig, saying, “We need to sort this or that out,” and I’m constantly keeping them and him in the loop. The good thing about Craig is that he wants me to task him, so it’s a very strange relationship we’ve got. I’m reporting to him but I’m tasking him at the same time and it seems to work beautifully.’ He was tired, and so was the whole team, but they felt confident the patent applications would be filed on time.
When Craig left the room to take a phone call, Pedersen took pains to close the door properly. ‘He’s a really nice person,’ he said, ‘but he’s a fucking nightmare. Every single morning he comes in and I think, “What is he talking about?”’ Pedersen told me how he handled him, how he made him focus, and how he worked hard to keep him on track. ‘When I’ve got new people here,’ he said, and there were many new people, ‘I have to train them how to talk to Craig. That’s what I have to do. Sometimes he can’t explain things and this is where the anger comes from. It’s the interesting part. You can’t be in the same room with him. He’s constantly telling you something. He’s like Steve Jobs, you know – only worse.’
As we made our way to the new office – it was a building site that day, but would be up and running four weeks later – Wright presented himself as a man who was ready for anything. In a pinstripe suit and ruby tie, he looked like a hellbent 1980s bond dealer, except the cypherpunk glint in the eye suggested he was getting away with something. He wasn’t the king of all he surveyed, he was the joker, and, crossing Oxford Street, he joked that he might be Moses. The traffic parted and he made his way to the promised land, a brand-new suite of offices down a side street.
*
Pedersen had come along. ‘This is how it works in this company,’ he said. ‘You’re sitting in Vancouver in October’ – Vancouver is where nTrust, the parent company, is based – ‘and suddenly Rob MacGregor says: “We need these thirty-odd patents by April and when can you go to London?”’ The hurry for the patents was to help with the giant sale to Google or whomever. The men behind the deal were very keen to beat other blockchain developers to the punch, especially the R3 consortium of banks and financial institutions which late in 2015 started spending a fortune trying to deploy the technology. We were accompanied by a young Irish woman who had been put in charge of designing the new office. MacGregor’s firm had invested millions in Wright. The new company, nCrypt, had pretty much been built around him, and its offices showed it. He was to have the enormous corner office with a view all the way along Oxford Street. MacGregor clearly believed in Wright, however obnoxious he could be, but I never understood why he wasn’t interrogating his uncertainties before spending his money. He was a lawyer, but he put trust in front of diligence, which is unusual in someone so intelligent. MacGregor never, incidentally, used the words ‘off the record’ with me – only once, later on, did he imply it, when he said something and then said he’d deny saying it if I quoted him – and he was a generous source of information. At no point, however, did he tell me where the money for this project was coming from.
The designer was waving a colour swatch. ‘We’ve gone for a kind of Scandi look,’ she said.
‘This place will work,’ Wright said, striding through the open space, ‘mainly when it comes to protecting me from myself.’ Amid the hammering and drilling, Wright stood in an office about twenty feet by twenty feet, with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view down into the heart of Soho.
‘You remember J. R. Ewing in Dallas?’ I asked.
Wright laughed. What he most enjoyed, he said, was that all this was going on in secret while the world outside had written him off as a mug and a fantasist. ‘If Satoshi has to come out, he’ll come out in style.’ He turned back to the designer to tell her how the frosted glass should work in the meeting room. ‘We do a lot of work on whiteboards,’ he said. He pursed his lips, then smiled. ‘Will the interactive whiteboards be set up so that I can contact the guys in Sydney?’
We spent an hour at the new office. ‘And they say nothing is going on,’ Wright said as we stepped back into the lift. ‘It’s all a figment of our imagination. I’m not Satoshi, and none of this is real.’ Out on the street again, he told me he had all the money he would ever need. ‘And I’ll have the monkeys off my back for ever and just get on with the one thing I’m good at, not business, not managing people, but doing research and honouring this thing we made.’ Wright was enjoying himself, but nCrypt was already, as MacGregor told me repeatedly, negotiating the sale of the whole package to the highest bidder: ‘Buy in, sell out, make some zeros,’ as he had said, and he’d always been honest about that goal. Wright wasn’t facing up to this. The next time I visited his corner office it was finished and decked out with claret-red leather armchairs and sofas flown in from Sydney. It looked, as I’d joked earlier, like the office of a Texan oil magnate. A host of management certificates were framed on the wall next to a signed photograph of Muhammad Ali.
I told Pedersen I thought Wright was struggling with the fine print of the deal – coming out. ‘He’s sold his soul,’ Pedersen said. ‘That’s how simple this is. And the combination of Craig and Ramona is dangerous here. They can’t just sign all these [legal] papers and think it’s going
to be all right, that they’ll sort something out. It doesn’t work that way. They now have to go to the end and live with it. But they’re doing it on first class. When this Satoshi thing comes out I can see a lot of bad things happening, and they are not geared up for this, any of them.’
‘I’m concerned for him,’ I said.
‘There’s not really a happy ending here,’ Pedersen said.
‘Was it the same in Australia?’
‘It was the exact same,’ he said, ‘except in Australia you could say he was in control. He’s learned absolutely nothing. He’s now in this box, he can’t move, he can’t do anything, and this box is getting smaller and smaller.’
‘Do you think he wants to be outed as Satoshi?’
‘Yes I do. It’s in his personality. He wants to be recognised. He says too much. After two weeks of working with him, I knew.’
‘He and Ramona tell me they had a pact never to come out.’
‘My feeling is that she doesn’t want him to come out, but he does. He’s been pushing for this to happen.’
I spoke to one of the scientists, a shy, unexcitable man in his late fifties, who has been working on this technology for several years. He and Pedersen are old-school IT people, quiet-spoken and completely uninterested in the limelight. Both of them thought Wright was working at a different level from everybody else. The scientist, who spoke to me from the beginning on condition that he wouldn’t be named, worried about Wright’s attention to detail and about his conspiratorial nature, but he had no doubts about Wright’s command of the big picture. The scientist was helping to oversee all the white papers and patent applications and managing a large team of IT specialists and mathematicians. I asked him if he was worried about the R3 consortium’s work on blockchain technology. ‘They are going to fail,’ he said. ‘They don’t have Satoshi. There is a panic out there, a misunderstanding about how the blockchain and bitcoin works. They hire people who know about bitcoin and are attempting to buy into it rather than being left behind. I’ve read some patent applications that are pending, applied for by the Bank of America. What I saw was ultimately unimpressive in comparison to what Craig is trying to do with the blockchain.’
The scientist described how the staff try to get the ideas out of Wright’s head. ‘You can’t say: “Explain this to me.” If you ask a question like that, he’ll just go off on giant tangents. First, he’ll have difficulty explaining what’s in his head. Often he’s just coming up with ideas on the spot that he’ll throw into conversation. You want to try to get yes and no answers from him. We film him at the whiteboard and someone will type out the text.’
He described moments when everyone in the research team thought what Wright was saying was impossible. It couldn’t be done, the software wasn’t up to it, the blockchain couldn’t scale to the task, and then suddenly everyone would understand what he was saying and appreciate its originality. ‘I need to be able to go over what he’s said,’ the scientist told me, ‘to find the pearls of wisdom and find out what the hell he means. If I don’t get it then I might have to make some guesses. I had to train my team to work in that mode. They have to be good researchers. They have to understand the technology as well as be able to work with it.’
Often, the scientist said, the staff were amazed by an unexpected turn in Wright’s thinking. But he admitted to being amazed, too, by certain gaps in Wright’s technical knowledge. It was bizarre. Wright had what the scientist and the team regarded as vast experience and command of the blockchain, which he spoke of as his invention and appeared to know inside out, but then he would file a piece of maths that didn’t work. Or he would show a lack of detailed knowledge of something the team took for granted. Nobody I spoke to could explain this discrepancy. ‘One of the problems with him is that he’s a terrible communicator,’ the scientist said. ‘He’s invented this beautiful thing – the internet of value. But sometimes he’ll just talk in equations but can’t or is unwilling to explain their content and application.’ His mistakes could also, he implied, be a result of laziness and lack of attention to detail.
I knew this for myself, but I was, to some extent, vexed that the technologists had the same experience. At the same time, I was impressed that people like the scientist and Pedersen could live with such a high degree of ambivalence about their boss. When I asked Pedersen if he thought the work was truly revolutionary, a non-native weariness came into his blue eyes. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think he’ll get the Nobel Prize because he’s too political. He’s coming out as a street fighter and could end up in prison or whatever.’
*
The main players in this story were keen to help me, to talk about what they knew and to show me the documents, but, in every case, there were topics they would avoid, and that were never cleared up. One of the most helpful individuals was Stefan Matthews. He pointed me in the direction of people from Wright’s personal life, and sent me a typed history of his association with the man who would be Satoshi. Matthews noted that, when he signed the deal with MacGregor, Wright didn’t have a feasible business plan for any of his companies. The Wrights’ financial situation was dire. They couldn’t pay their staff and a number had already left. Pedersen and some others had stayed on without pay; Wright owed his lawyers one million Australian dollars. Superannuation remittances were overdue and loan repayments unpaid; the companies needed the equivalent of £200,000 just to make it to next week. Craig and Ramona had sold their cars. One of the companies was already in administration and, with the ATO closing in, ‘all related entities were on the brink of collapse’. Before signing the deal, MacGregor, sources say, tried to assess the value of Wright’s research, commissioning a ‘high-level overview’ of the companies. MacGregor instructed Matthews to be in Sydney on 24 June 2015, when a final appraisal of the businesses was undertaken and a draft arrangement negotiated for nTrust ‘to acquire the intellectual property and the companies themselves’.
One night I went to have dinner with Matthews on my own. We met in the restaurant at the back of Fortnum & Mason, on Jermyn Street, and he seemed incongruous among the red banquettes – a large, bald Australian with a rough laugh and wearing a plaid shirt, keen to tell me everything he thought useful. Matthews seemed a much more affable character than MacGregor, both upfront and very loyal, without perhaps seeing how the two might cancel each other out. One of the tasks of the eager businessman is to make himself more sure of his own position, and Matthews spent a lot of time, as did MacGregor, selling the idea of Wright as Satoshi rather than investigating it. They drafted me into telling the world who Wright was, but they didn’t really know for sure themselves, and at one point their seeming haste threatened to drive a wedge between us. It seemed odd that they would ask a writer to celebrate a truth without first providing overwhelming evidence that the truth was true. I took it in my stride, most of the time, and enjoyed the doubts, while hoping for clarity.
Matthews drank a little wine but not much. He was talking about the night in Sydney when they signed the deal. ‘We pulled up outside Rob’s hotel. He said: “Do you realise what you have just done? You have just done the deal of a career. This is a billion-dollar deal. Fucking more. Billion dollars plus.”’
‘Why is Rob so convinced?’
‘Don’t know, don’t know.’ (MacGregor later told me he was convinced because Wright had shown Matthews the draft Satoshi white paper. ‘I always had that,’ MacGregor said.) ‘If it turns out that he’s a fraud, I don’t know how he’s managed to do it because you couldn’t make this up.’
Matthews told me about a meeting at the Bondi Icebergs Club in Sydney that Wright had with Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, now serving two life sentences. Silk Road used bitcoin to trade all kinds of contraband items because the transactions could be made anonymously. Wright later confirmed that this meeting took place, but said only that Ulbricht was full of himself and they didn’t discuss bitcoin. Matthews seemed to think this was unlikely. He wondered whe
ther Kleiman had had more to do with Ulbricht; other sources suggested the same.
‘Wright signed a deal to come out as Satoshi,’ I said to Matthews. ‘Does he realise everything that involves?’
‘You’re gonna have criminal groups that paid him lots of money and there are people who know about that,’ Matthews alleged. ‘If they quack? You’ve got Ross Ulbricht who’s in prison and apparently going to appeal trial this year or next. What happens when Ross sees Satoshi’s name splashed everywhere and Craig’s name everywhere? Is he going to say, “I had lunch with that guy. We made a deal”? I’m not worried about what Craig has done, I worry about people who have associated with him.’ It was very strange to do an interview with someone who would come out with this stuff, given that he was also trying to market the guy. In fairness to Wright, Matthews might just have been running his mouth off, and I’ve left out the worst of what he said at any of our meetings.
We talked about some of the difficulties that had arisen between Wright and MacGregor. ‘Craig and Ramona are in a state about the keys leaving the room,’ I said. ‘He feels it is an act of self-annihilation to let them go. Rob has a Hollywood ending in mind and it’s looking incredibly unlikely. You can’t go into a marketplace claiming full legitimacy when the proof hasn’t been produced.’ I told Matthews that there were emails still missing between Wright and Kleiman, emails that the public would want to see before accepting him as Satoshi, because the correspondence would presumably go into the kind of detail about the invention that only the inventors could know. Wright had told me he would produce the missing emails by the following Wednesday, but he never did.
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