The Secret Life

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘I know what’s in there,’ Matthews told me. ‘It will be chatter to do with illegal stuff that he and Dave were doing in Costa Rica – particularly around Costa Rican casinos where they got $23 million of income. And you don’t get paid that amount just for doing a security review … He mined all those bitcoins himself using equipment that he bought with money that he got from Costa Rica.’ Again: why was Matthews saying this? It was obvious to me that Wright was going to have a problem telling the full story, whatever it was. I wasn’t even sure he’d told the full story to his wife, but perhaps he had, because she referred, several times, to the fact that there were things that she just couldn’t tell me. ‘They’ll come after us,’ she said, in a state of high emotion. ‘They’ll destroy us.’ Matthews said he didn’t know what that was about. He did tell me something he said he had told MacGregor when MacGregor asked him what he was getting out of the deal. ‘Absolutely nothing,’ Matthews said. ‘I get what I get paid by Calvin. Calvin is the only allegiance I have, then and now.’

  Calvin Ayre is one of the topics the team routinely went dark on. When I first met Wright, he called him ‘the man in Antigua’. MacGregor never mentioned him at all during our early meetings. When I later told him that Ramona had mentioned a big man in Antigua, he said he didn’t mind talking about him, but didn’t bring his name up again. When, in February 2016, they took Wright to Antigua for a pep talk, I emailed Matthews to ask if I could come too, and he didn’t reply. Wright, in a low moment, later asked me if I’d told MacGregor they were the ones who let the cat out of the bag about Ayre. I said it wasn’t them: Ayre’s name had first been mentioned to me by Matthews. The Antigua meeting was being arranged when I went out for dinner with Matthews, and he referred to Ayre freely without ever asking that it be off the record. MacGregor never went into detail about Ayre’s involvement but both men’s regular visits to Antigua made me wonder about the extent of the connection. Matthews, explicit as usual, always spoke about Ayre as if he was the capo di tutti capi of the entire affair, though I have no other evidence that Ayre was anything but an interested observer. Interestingly, nCrypt’s only shareholder (one share worth £1) is nCrypt Holdings, registered in Antigua.

  Like MacGregor, Calvin Ayre is Canadian. His father, a pig farmer, was convicted in 1987 of smuggling large amounts of Jamaican marijuana to Canada. When Calvin left college he went to work for a heart-valve manufacturer called Bicer Medical Systems and was later charged with insider trading, agreeing a deal where he was fined ten thousand Canadian dollars and barred from running a public company listed on the Vancouver Stock Exchange until 2016. ‘I clearly made some mistakes,’ Ayre told the Vancouver Sun, ‘but it was not a criminal issue and nobody got hurt from anything I did.’ Ayre later started a software development company intended to help offshore betting companies take online bets. He relocated to Costa Rica in 1996, where he worked with two online casinos, WinSports and GrandPrix. Unlike most bookmakers, Ayre would send cheques directly, without using Western Union or an equivalent. He then set up Bodog, which would become the biggest name in the online gambling industry. (It’s the company Matthews worked for after Centrebet.) Bodog was a huge success. In 2005, it handled more than $7 billion. Ayre appeared on the Forbes billionaires list in 2006. In the same year, Bodog moved its global headquarters to Antigua. The IRS had started following the company in 2003 and US Customs and Immigration were also on his tail. A joint inquiry was started in 2006, and in 2012 Ayre, along with two of the website’s operators, was indicted on money-laundering charges. He entered no plea, but he maintains his innocence, seeing the indictment as ‘an abuse of the criminal justice system’. In one profile of Ayre, we find him drinking coffee and paraphrasing Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. ‘I’ve put a lot of energy into finding ways not to fight my enemies,’ he says. My researcher showed me this interview, then remembered a note from my first meeting with MacGregor, in which he, too, had quoted Sun Tzu. ‘You build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat over,’ MacGregor had said, drinking coffee. When he said this, I wasn’t sure who the enemy was. The only person MacGregor had built a golden bridge for, so far as I knew, was Craig Wright.

  At the Jermyn Street dinner, Matthews didn’t tell me any of Ayre’s history, referring to him simply as a great guy. ‘Do you know how many bitcoins Craig’s got left of the original 1.1 million?’ he asked later on. There are conflicting stories about the ‘Satoshi millions’. Many people refer to a Satoshi-mined hoard that has never been spent, and the figure – always around a million – is the same one admitted to by Wright and Kleiman. The difference is that Wright says he spent a lot of his. This was what Matthews was getting at. ‘He told me last week,’ Matthews said, ‘and I’ve been having some sledgehammer conversations with Craig. I said to him: “Time for straight answers on this one, my friend. How many coins are left under the control of the Seychelles trust? And don’t tell me you don’t know because you’re a grown man, and don’t lie to me.” And his answer was 100,000. I know that 650,000 was taken out to fund all the research and development stuff. And 350,000 is on Dave’s hard drive. “Why has Dave got 350,000 of your coins on his encrypted hard drive?” Because he gave them to him. They’re Dave’s. Those wallets are encrypted on his hard drive, with three or four keys to his trust. Now, why did Dave die in squalor?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because bitcoins weren’t worth that much when Dave died. They skyrocketed around that time and in the weeks thereafter. But he was a man of principle apparently and wouldn’t spend those coins unless Craig told him to.’

  ‘And you don’t think Dave mined coins himself?’

  ‘Of course he did. No doubt. But how many? Who knows … We know they ran a business together based in Florida. They did stuff for contractors. We know that they lost money jointly in Liberty Reserve. And they would both have lost money in Mt Gox.’

  Wright had told me he’d lost quite a bit when the bitcoin exchange Mt Gox was hacked and then collapsed. He also referred, in a later email, to information that was seeping from the collapsed Mt Gox database, some of it linking him to Ulbricht. ‘The amount to a large wallet was me,’ Wright told me. I took him to mean that there was evidence of a bitcoin transaction between him and Ulbricht. He wouldn’t explain further.

  As I was paying the bill, Matthews reared up. ‘You know Craig has gone out and bought himself some cars? One hundred and eighty thousand dollars’ worth of cars.’ (When I checked this with Wright he said the cars were leased.) ‘One of them stands out like the dog’s balls in the proverbial moonlight, and this is from the man we’re trying to keep fucking secret. How many custom BMW i8s are going around London? He’s spending every fucking penny that we’ve paid him … Does he think this is just a game? You know, these guys have gone from being backyard scrappers and they’ve suddenly found themselves in a high-stakes poker game.’ Matthews said he wouldn’t take any rubbish from the Wrights, and that they’d end up on a plane back to Australia and jail if they didn’t fulfil their end of the bargain, to reveal Satoshi. ‘The people that I work with are capable of deciding this was a $30 million bad decision and write it off,’ he said. I thought this a curiously revealing line, and wondered again just how he expected me to use such information.

  ‘You haven’t asked me why I’m doing this,’ Matthews said at the end of the evening. He worked his way round to an answer, but it wasn’t an answer, just more questions. ‘Part of me’, he said, ‘has asked over the past three or four months, why did I ever get involved in this? Why did Craig keep coming back to me? Why did he never shake out of my life? Why did he show me the Satoshi white paper in 2008? Why was he delivered back to me in 2015? I didn’t go looking for it.’

  *

  Satoshi Nakamoto is not really a man; he is a manifestation of public acclamation, an entity made by technology, and a myth. Old-fashioned journalism might bring you to him – or cause you to miss him altogether – but he was born of relationships that depend on concealment. A reporter
was once a person who could rely on visible evidence, recordings, notes, statements of fact, and I gathered these assiduously, but this was a story that challenged the foundations on which reporting depends. I fought to uphold familiar standards of truth, and fought to discover new ways to uncover it in this underworld of companies with a vested interest in disclosing some things but not others, but it felt like the walls of virtual reality were forever pressing in on my notepad. It is standard practice in Silicon Valley for everyone, from bagel boy to research chief, to sign a non-disclosure agreement. This is because every company – Apple or Microsoft or Google or Facebook – has a mission not only to make money but to control the narrative of who they are. A writer requires determination if he is to write anything about that world that isn’t paid for or manufactured by a company. There is nothing particularly underhand about this: they offer you big money up front and ask you to sign over your allegiance. But when you turn down this offer and they don’t banish you from the court, your version of reality might end up clashing with theirs. This happened several times during the months I was working on the Craig Wright story. Wright himself never mentioned rights or agreements or privacy – until the very end, when he asked for two particular aspects of his private life not to be discussed – but when I went to Australia at the end of February to talk with Wright’s family and friends, the nCrypt men began insisting I sign an NDA.

  Why they hadn’t asked me to sign one at the beginning I’ll never know. I had roamed freely for three months, noting and recording, going to meetings and interviewing everyone, and only now did they want me to sign. Early on, MacGregor told me in an email that he had advised Craig and Ramona to tell me ‘everything’. He went on to express, on Wright’s behalf, worries about how the material would be used. This was especially sensitive, I gathered, because of the government security work Wright had done. I replied that we would be judicious about what was published. MacGregor still wanted to discuss contractual issues, and I replied, on 6 March, that I would have to see proof that Wright was Satoshi, and see it presented before his peers and selected journalists. MacGregor replied that the proof package was in train and that he didn’t understand why I wouldn’t sign. I replied on 7 March that I couldn’t write the story, no matter how good my access, if there wasn’t proof that Wright was Satoshi, and I was still waiting for evidence. ‘My commitment is clear,’ I wrote, ‘but the book turns to dust if we do not have unanswerable and generous proof.’ I insisted that I wouldn’t sign any document and eventually MacGregor accepted this. We fell out over it, but I saw their point and I still do. Despite my refusal they continued, without binding agreements or legal constraints, to provide me with access to every meeting and every aspect of the story, which was set to change fast, and in ways none of us could ever have prepared for. My story and nCrypt’s deal seemed to be on the same track, aligned and friendly, but none of us discussed what would happen if the deal came unstuck.

  Proof

  When I asked Wright what kind of martial arts he did as a kid he gave the following answer. ‘I did a few actually. I have studied in the Chinese forms Wing Chun, Tánglángquán, Kuo Shu, Duan Da, Zui Quan and lóng xíng mó qiáo. I have also mastered Muay Thai, Kenpo and taekwondo and Chito-ryu karate. I started with karate and ninjutsu.’ As with most things about him, it’s not that it’s not true, it just smells of self-doubt and a need not to hide anything positive about himself. It’s the kind of truth-telling that expresses fear and gives rise to doubt, but it’s not the same as a lie.

  Wright’s mother had told me about her son’s long-standing habit of adding bits on to the truth, just to make it bigger. ‘When he was a teenager,’ she said, ‘he went into the back of a car on his bike. It threw him through the window of a parked car. That’s where his scar comes from. His sister accompanied him to the hospital and he’s telling the doctor that he’s had his nose broken twenty or so times, and the doctor is saying, “You couldn’t possibly have had it broken.” And Craig says: “I sew myself up when I get injured.”’ What his mother said connected with something I’d noticed. In what he said, he often went further than he needed to; further than he ought to have done. He appeared to start with the truth, and then, slowly, he would inflate his part until the whole story suddenly looked weak.

  In the time since I’d last seen Matthews, he and MacGregor had been to Antigua with Wright and had agreed a ‘proof strategy’. I had been pushing hard for the proof, and Ramona had asked me several times what Wright could do to prove to me that he was Satoshi. MacGregor asked the same thing during a meeting I attended with him and the public relations firm they’d hired, the Outside Organisation. ‘It’s not about proving it to me,’ I said. ‘It’s about proving it – full stop. You just prove it for the whole world to see and then everybody goes home.’ The nCrypt guys, pointing out that they had always intended to set up a proof session, organised a series of events with the help of the PR company, intended to bring Satoshi into the open. Originally, the plan was for the London School of Economics to host a panel discussion about the evidence and the findings, but someone seems to have blabbed to the Financial Times, which ran an article on 31 March. ‘After nearly four months of silence,’ the FT blogger Izabella Kaminska wrote, ‘and a bitcoin community mostly resigned to the notion that the story was an elaborate hoax – conditional approaches are being made to media and other institutions in connection to an upcoming “big reveal” of Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto.’ Her source was clearly inside the project. ‘Wright will publicly perform a cryptographic miracle which proves his identity once and for all,’ she wrote. MacGregor was outraged, and the LSE was sacked from the project. But the first and biggest of these proofs was to involve Wright using Satoshi’s private encryption keys in sessions with the most important members of the bitcoin community. Jon Matonis, former head of the Bitcoin Foundation, agreed to take part. So did Gavin Andresen, one of the most respected bitcoin core developers, someone who had been there since its inception. These proof sessions would begin the denouement of this search for Satoshi.

  Just before these sessions took place, in April, I asked Wright what had happened in Antigua. ‘We discussed the whole PR strategy,’ he said. ‘The truth thing is going to happen.’ He talked about Matonis and Andresen. ‘We’re going to bring them in on reveal sessions in the next few weeks. I guess that’s the way it has to be. Do I like it? No. But I haven’t really been given a choice. I’m between a rock and a hard place because of whoever outed me last year.’ He said very clearly at a meeting with me that he would not sign with the key in public. We agreed that he would do it for me at home, signing with the private key from one of Satoshi’s original blocks. He would do for me what he was going to do for Matonis and Andresen, and this would prove beyond doubt, he said, that he was Satoshi. We made a plan, then Wright asked me to come to his office so he could draw something for me on his whiteboard, a new timelock encryption scheme he’d come up with. He wanted to add it to the list of patent applications. I didn’t always know what he was talking about, but his expertise in certain areas was startling, and so were his obfuscations.

  *

  It was exactly 9 a.m. when I turned up at his house in South London, on one of those clear mornings when the planes leave trails in the sky. I knew his house by the BMW in the driveway, and I pressed the bell. He opened the door and a cloud of cologne came to meet me. In his study, there were three computers and seven screens. Options, Futures and Other Derivatives by John C. Hull was sitting on a grey sofa. There were rows of computing books and seven dead laptops stacked on top of a bookshelf. Even after all these months, Wright couldn’t really do small talk, finding it hard to summon anything easy in himself. I asked him about his sofa and told him about a pain in my shoulder and he just said: ‘Very good.’ He made me a cup of tea and then beckoned me over to his main computer: it was time for him to prove to me that he was Satoshi. His manner was still that of a man who mildly resented having to prove anything. He smiled and
pointed to the screen. ‘This is his wallet, which is open,’ he said. I saw a list of transactions with addresses specified. ‘The initial Genesis block was hardcoded,’ he said. ‘There are no conflicting Genesis blocks. If a piece of code crashed on this machine it would still start on another machine with the same Genesis block. Always.’ As I was looking at the screen in front of me and watching his hand move the mouse, lines from the Wikipedia entry on the blockchain came into my head. ‘The blockchain consists of blocks that hold time-stamped batches of recent valid transactions. Each block includes the hash of the prior block, linking the blocks together. The linked blocks form a chain, with each additional block reinforcing those before it.’

  ‘It can’t be moved or changed?’

  ‘No. It’s hardcoded into the original program,’ he said.

  Everything on his screen was time-stamped. I was looking at transactions from early January 2009. ‘I was officially canned from my job at BDO on 3 January,’ he said. He told me he went to his house at Port Macquarie and settled down to do the final work to get the bitcoin software up and running. ‘The original definition was published by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 and implemented in the original source code of bitcoin published in 2009,’ the Wikipedia entry said. As he explained what was in front of me, he clicked through the sequential blocks, the transactions database that underlies bitcoin. He was looking at the very earliest ones, and all included dates, amounts of bitcoin and public keys. A long list of transactions showed incoming small amounts to Satoshi’s wallet. ‘Lots of people send micro payments to me,’ he said. ‘They think so much of Satoshi that they want to burn their pennies.’