The Secret Life

by Andrew O'Hagan

  When I asked Andresen if he thought ending the Satoshi mystery might be good for the technology, he wasn’t sure. ‘On one hand,’ he said, ‘having a mysterious founder is a great creation myth. People love a creation myth. Knowing the real story might make bitcoin less interesting to people. On the other hand, money is supposed to be boring – something that “just works”, used by most people without understanding how or why it works. I’m excited to see how Craig contributes to making bitcoin work even better than it does today.’ I later met with Jon Matonis, who had been through his own proof session with Wright. He was equally impressed and relieved. He too believed the search for Satoshi had come to an end and he was looking forward to working with Wright, to seeing the patents and the new blockchain ideas. During our lunch in Notting Hill, Matonis suggested that this technology would change the world. One of the scientists said to me, ‘This isn’t Bitcoin 2.0. This is something magnificent that will change who we are. This is Life 2.0,’ and Matonis agreed.

  The idea was now to use the ‘proofs’ – the gathered papers, the testimonies of the two bitcoin experts, the use of the keys, plus solid, document-heavy answers to every criticism previously made of Wright – and roll them out to selected members of the press on a certain day. I told MacGregor and Matthews I didn’t want to go first with the story. I wanted to sit in on the interviews and proof sessions with the media organisations, and fold their reports, and the response to their reports, into my story.

  Wright began to fade as we entered the proof sessions. He went from being a man with a clear picture of himself, to being a fuzzy screen. He would email me at all hours with a pressing sense of anxiety. He appeared to be losing it. Yet we all forged ahead to a conclusion that would be much more conclusive to him than anything he had ever expected, or could ever bear. He had signed up for it and was now faced with a full-frontal assault of cameras and lights. I had once asked him if he felt happy hiding in the internet and he said yes, it was his home. On a good day it is the bright field that contains all souls but on a bad day it is the final darkness, where misery is gapingly exposed. I came to believe that Wright, that whole year, was fighting for his soul on that plain, like Aeneas with his ships at his back and all hell in front of him, going down to an underworld where he might meet his own father. Wright told me, without demur, that his life had been an attempt to prove himself to his father. In the wee small hours, he seemed like a child whose fantasy had gone too far. And the fantasy was not that he is Satoshi. He may well be Satoshi. The fantasy was that he could live as Satoshi, and take his place among the great men, and forget the little boy who was slapped for losing at chess. Like Aeneas, he knew that his journey was as much ordeal as opportunity, and though, again like Aeneas, he had asked for it, the process was increasingly unendurable. ‘It is easy to descend into Avernus,’ the Sibyl in Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI of the Aeneid tells Aeneas:

  Death’s dark door stands open day and night.

  But to retrace your steps and get back to upper air,

  That is the task, that is the undertaking.

  Only a few have prevailed, sons of gods

  Whom Jupiter favoured, or heroes exalted to glory

  By their own worth.

  The Reveal

  By my last weeks with Craig Wright, I was in two minds about the money men, probably because I liked them. And while I wanted to assert my journalistic doubts – preserve my innocence, stand back from the parade – my wish for the reveal to turn out well was beginning to cajole my judgement. I was wise enough to say no to the world exclusive; I still wanted material I didn’t have and I was convinced that the real proof of the pudding would be in the world’s tasting of it. The internet is great at crowdsourcing facts and establishing the accuracy of stories, and I had always felt this could be important. But in the meantime, I had to fight to give my doubts the oxygen they needed. The nCrypt boys said they understood – but did they? They appeared to have no Plan B if Wright couldn’t prove to the world that he was who he said he was. People can start off by saying, ‘Write everything, warts and all,’ and end by saying: ‘I don’t exist, maybe you shouldn’t mention me.’ In a conversation with MacGregor at this point, I allowed for the possibility that I might give him a made-up name in the story. I said it because he seemed anxious, and because, as I told him at the time, he had brought the story to me and I meant him no harm – but this possibility depended on its being proved that Wright was Satoshi. Our discussion about using real names was inconclusive – during a later meeting at Berners Tavern, Matthews expressed the view that I should put their names in and make a final decision later – but the decision was really made by what the story became. The men in black seemed not to have prepared for any of that. They believed that only one big thing was going to happen: Craig Wright was going to emerge as Satoshi Nakamoto, the great mystery figure of the digital age, and the evidence would be ‘overwhelming’. In the final week, as the men prepared the reveal, I found my independence slipping. No doubt about it: I felt like part of the team. I wanted to please MacGregor – pleasing people is my chief vice as a man and my main virtue as a reporter – but I could have told him my work so far might only be fieldwork. I wouldn’t know how the story would turn out until it had turned out. Only in public relations is the story straight in advance.

  In private, Wright was still saying he wouldn’t ‘jump through hoops’, but then I’d find him agreeing to do exactly what was asked of him. Only a few nights before the media appointments, I was sitting with him in the Coach & Horses in Greek Street. The PR company, he told me, had asked if he wanted to go on TV, and he’d said there was no way in hell they’d get him in front of a TV camera. Yet it was all happening. I mentioned the fact that MacGregor, when I first met him, had spoken about all this ending with a TED talk in which Satoshi would be revealed.

  ‘Rob always said “eventually”,’ Wright replied.

  ‘But what does “eventually” mean?’ I asked.

  ‘It originally meant, “if you came out”,’ Wright said.

  The PR team, at MacGregor’s behest, had been in touch with a number of journalists; the ones who were interested were from the BBC, the Economist and GQ. The inclusion of GQ had irked Wright from the start (he sees himself as an academic), but the Outside Organisation had a connection there – their founder was a contributing editor – and said the magazine would love the story. But did the PR men explain to the editors there who was behind this project to out Satoshi, and who was paying their fee? I later asked them by email and one of them replied: ‘It is not at all unusual to be instructed to represent an individual through an independent company. Our conversation with [GQ] and the other journalists was about the proposed story.’

  I emailed him again. ‘But did you tell them’, I wrote, ‘that the outing of Satoshi was being done at the behest of a commercial company?’ He didn’t reply.

  All the journalists had signed NDAs and embargos. They would each be allowed a brief interview with Wright after he had demonstrated to them his use of the Satoshi key. These meetings would take place at the offices of the PR company in Tottenham Court Road on Monday 24 and Tuesday 25 April. I found all this a bit odd: Wright was being difficult, for sure, but the PR strategy was crazily old-fashioned. Everyone in the cryptography world knew that all Wright had to do was send an email from the famous Satoshi email address, alert people he was going to sign a message using Satoshi’s keys, do so online and move a single bitcoin from an early block, and the entire internet would light up as if Coney Island was hosting the World’s Fair. The piecemeal feeding of ‘proof’ to these journalists was compelling but anachronistic. I supposed it was an attempt to get the story out of the world of cryp-to-gab and into the real media, but it was set up with an alarming sense of security paranoia. Wright could never have handled a celebration, but the journalists were being managed to an extent that might have raised more questions than it answered. I was just an observer, and was worried about Wr
ight by then, and, though I believed in him, I felt distinctly that there was something missing and something wrong.

  When I turned up at Starbucks in Tottenham Court Road, Wright, Ramona and Matthews were already there. Wright was sulking a little. It had been decided that, as well as the demonstration, the journalists would be given a memory stick to take away with them, showing the signed Satoshi message. (Wright later told me the stuff he put on the sticks was fake. There wasn’t anything on there they could understand, but it certainly bore no relation to any of Satoshi’s keys.) Matthews was dressed smartly and wearing dark glasses and Wright was wearing a gold tie and a business suit. Ramona sat beside him stroking his ear. ‘Let me know if you have trouble with the guys upstairs,’ Matthews said. He meant the PR guys. ‘Sometimes they forget their role.’ As usual, I found Matthews likeable and easy to talk to, but he seemed not to appreciate the difference between his way of talking and the circus of manipulation surrounding us.

  Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent, was led into a conference room with his producer, Priya Patel, and Mark Ward, a technology correspondent for the BBC News website. Wright sat at his laptop, hardly looking up, and a screen on the wall showed what he was looking at. Matonis was in the room, and so was Matthews. Ramona had gone upstairs. Cellan-Jones was decent and professional, ready to get to the bottom of the story. He appeared to feel the tension, with Wright already behaving as if being asked questions was grossly humiliating and the questioner openly hostile. But Cellan-Jones was not hostile: if anything, he was mildly pre-convinced, and just going about capturing the story for the layman.

  ‘When I started out I asked myself what I’d need to see to know if someone who claimed to be Satoshi was Satoshi,’ Matonis said. ‘And you can break down three distinct lines of evidence: the cryptographic line, the social line and the technical line. Obviously, the social and technical lines are going to be more subjective … On the cryptographic side, I’ll explain what I witnessed personally and give you a lead up to what Craig’s going to demonstrate this morning.’

  He then went into more detail about the cryptographic proof. ‘The Genesis block is block zero,’ Matonis said. ‘And you can’t spend any of the blocks in that chain – which means that the ones that come after that (which are spendable) can be attributed to the creator of bitcoin.’

  ‘And what would they be called?’ Cellan-Jones asked.

  ‘In succession they’d be called block 1, block 2 etc. Now this morning, Craig is going to demonstrate signing blocks 1 through 9. I personally witnessed the signing of blocks 1 and 9, so this is not going to be a transfer of bitcoins, it’s going to involve a signing of a message, which he’ll do with the private key and which will be verified by the public key. Are we clear on that?’

  Eventually, Wright asked Cellan-Jones to give him a message. ‘Um. “Hi, historic message to the BBC.”’ Wright typed the message and added a bit of commentary as he did so.

  ‘This message will verify, but if I change a single digit, it won’t,’ Wright said as he signed the message using block 9.

  ‘This is the only key that we know is definitely owned by Satoshi because it was used with Hal Finney,’ Matonis added.

  ‘So,’ Cellan-Jones said, ‘just getting this clear in my mind. We’ve seen Craig use a private key known to have been used with Hal Finney. And we’ve seen it verified with the public key.’

  ‘Yes,’ Craig said. Then he proceeded to sign a message with the key associated with the first ever mined bitcoin.

  ‘Out of interest,’ Cellan-Jones said, ‘how many bitcoins do you have?’

  ‘Well, that would be telling,’ Wright said.

  ‘Do you still mine bitcoins?’

  ‘Only for fun.’

  Wright then went into an aria about Sartre’s speech when he turned down the Nobel Prize. He planned to use a hash function – which turns information into a unique set of letters and numbers – to attach Sartre’s famous speech cryptographically to block 9, and then later verify it publicly on his blog. ‘He gave up the prize,’ Wright said, ‘because “If I were to accept it, I’d become the institution.” I never wanted to sign Craig Wright as Satoshi,’ he continued. ‘I haven’t done this because it’s what I wanted, I just can’t refuse it. Because I’ve got staff, I’ve got family. It’s what I am and I’m not going to deny it because that’s not the truth. So I’m choosing to sign Sartre because it’s not my choice, I’m not choosing to come out, I’ve been thrust into it.’

  ‘In what way have you been forced into it?’ Cellan-Jones asked, quite reasonably.

  ‘I’ve got people mudslinging,’ Wright said. But that wasn’t true: he wasn’t feeling forced because of what people said. He felt forced, or obliged, to come out because he’d signed the deal with nCrypt in June 2015. And he deepened the lie when Cellan-Jones asked him why he hadn’t revealed himself before. ‘I liked to go to conferences, put out papers,’ he said. ‘I can’t do that now. I can never just be Craig again.’

  He was asked whether he wanted to be the public face of bitcoin.

  ‘I don’t want to be the public face of anything.’ He paused and looked down. He then said that his blog would explain everything and help people to download the material and understand how the keys work.

  ‘When does that go live?’ Cellan-Jones asked.

  ‘Monday or Tuesday.’

  ‘There will be people out there who will try desperately to prove this isn’t the case. Are you confident that there are no chinks in your armour?’

  ‘They’ll say I stole keys, that I buried Satoshi in a ditch, they’ll say all sorts of things.’

  The BBC planned to come back the next day with cameras. Then a man arrived from the Economist, Ludwig Siegele, a man in a grey suit. He was less immediately friendly but his questions were fine-grained. You could see he wasn’t entirely comfortable with this very PR-managed way of outing Satoshi. Wright signed a message for Siegele using block 9, and had the private key verified by the computer. ‘I’m sorry,’ Siegele said, ‘but I’m still a little unsure what that proves.’

  ‘It proves I have the private keys,’ Wright said. ‘All the original private keys.’

  ‘OK, so. The first question that my readers are going to ask is: “Why now?”’

  Wright didn’t hesitate. He was using his media training. ‘I’ve tried to avoid media,’ he said, ‘but it’s starting to affect other people. I’d prefer to stay quiet. Why now? I have staff, I have family … All the innuendo, the falsehoods.’ He had never suggested to me, in all our months of interviews, that he was outing himself because of media misrepresentation. I accepted it, though, when he said it to these journalists, imagining that perhaps he had realised that the tax office pressure was the real pressure in his life, the thing that forced the outing. I said this later to the nCrypt guys and they agreed.

  ‘Why conceal your identity anyway?’ Siegele asked.

  ‘I don’t want to be a public figure,’ Wright said. ‘I hope people don’t listen to Craig Wright. They will look at the facts, not decide based on what Satoshi says.’

  That afternoon, I went to another appointment while Wright went off to Parsons Green to have his photograph taken for GQ. The next morning, at Starbucks again, Matthews was ridiculing the whole business with the photographs, and making fun of the magazine’s original idea that he wear a mask in one photograph and rip it off in another. Matthews described what happened at the interview with the magazine’s senior commissioning editor, Stuart McGurk. ‘It actually went quite well,’ Wright told me. ‘The journalist was nice, but he brought along this complete wanker of an “expert”.’

  The man they were talking about is a university lecturer in cryptology. McGurk brought him along to help verify the claims. ‘It was hilarious,’ Matthews said. ‘Craig threw the guy out.’ According to one witness, he’d questioned Wright quite forcefully about his understanding of public and private encryption keys. ‘He was totally in the guy’s face a
t one point.’

  ‘He was telling me he was more qualified than I am,’ Wright said. ‘It became a nice interview but this guy was a complete idiot and I told him to get the fuck out.’ Matonis – who was there – said the scene was intense. I wasn’t sure it was wise to greet dissenters and opponents, even ones who might be wrong, that way, but Wright was roundly applauded for doing so. I confess I felt it was wrong to tell journalists only half of the story, allowing them to misunderstand the reason he was suddenly coming out as Satoshi.

  *

  That day, the BBC came back. Wright was more irate than he had been the day before and less co-operative now that the camera crew was here. He felt he had done much more than he had ever wanted to and he said so, mainly under his breath. The cameraman set up the camera and then Cellan-Jones got into position. ‘So who are you? And what are you about to show me?’ he asked.

  ‘My name’s Craig Wright, and I’m about to demonstrate the signing of a message with a key that is associated with the first transaction ever done on bitcoin – a transaction of ten bitcoin to Hal Finney.’

  ‘And who did that first transaction?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And whose name is associated with that transaction?’

  ‘The moniker is Satoshi Nakamoto.’

  ‘So you’re going to show me that Satoshi Nakamoto is you?’ Craig looked bewildered for a second and hesitated.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Are you confident that this will prove to the world that you are Satoshi?’

  ‘It proves I have keys … other things we’ll be releasing will help … Some people will believe and some people won’t, and, to tell you the truth, I don’t really care.’