We spoke about Wright’s possible lies. I said that all through these proof sessions, he’d acted like this was the last thing he ever wanted.
‘That’s not true,’ MacGregor said. ‘He freaking loves it. Why was I so certain he’d do that BBC interview the next day? It’s adoration. He wants this more than we want this, but he wants to come out of this looking like he got dragged into it.’ He told me if everything had gone to plan, the groundwork was laid for selling the patents. It was a really big deal. He said Ramona had said that if Wright doesn’t come out you still have this really smart guy who has made all these patents, who knows all about bitcoin. ‘Yeah,’ MacGregor said. ‘You and five hundred other guys who have called today.’ I shook their hands and wished them luck, thinking I would probably never see the men in black again. And as I descended in the lift, I thought I would miss their brio and their belief, despite everything.
Craig was lost in some labyrinth of his own making, or mostly of his own making. He didn’t want to be Satoshi. And he didn’t want to be Craig. And he didn’t want to be a letdown. And yet the messageboards lit up and the walls closed in. Over the next twenty-four hours, he agreed to move Satoshi’s coin and his blog advertised the fact. It said, ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof,’ and he was set to provide it.
The next day, Wednesday 4 May, Matthews was at Wright’s house organising the movement of coin. The new (and final) proof session was intended to blow away the doubts created by the first. Many commentators felt it was too late, that Wright was beyond the pale, but Matthews and MacGregor had agreed with Andresen that the movement of coin, to Andresen and also to Cellan-Jones at the BBC, would undo the damage. Wright spoke to Andresen on the phone from his house – Andresen was in New York – and told him he was worried about a security flaw in the early blockchain, a problem in the way those first blocks were constructed that would make it dangerous for him to move coin, exposing him to exploitation or theft. My sources later said that Andresen understood the problem and confirmed that it was all right, it had been fixed. But Wright continued to worry and was showing great reluctance about offering the final proof. Then he left the room abruptly and didn’t come back.
The next day, he sent me an email. It linked to an article headlined ‘UK Law Enforcement Sources Hint at Impending Craig Wright Arrest’. The article suggested that the father of bitcoin might be liable, under the Terrorism Act, for the actions of people who used bitcoin to buy weapons. Under the link, Wright had written an explanation: ‘I walk from 1 billion or I go to jail. I never wanted to be out, but if I prove it, they destroy me and my family. I am the source of terrorist funds as bitcoin creator or I am a fraud to the world. At least a fraud is able to see his family. There is nothing I can do.’ I am still not sure if Wright was faking his fear of the FBI. He’d certainly never mentioned them to me before that day, and there seemed little evidence that they were seeking to arrest him. Indeed they never have. The truth, as usual with such men, seemed to be closer to home: he was a mass of paranoia that went all the way back to the fundamentals of his life. His online existence had stripped him bare and he was no longer sure if he was anybody at all. I believe that self-sabotage is in his nature, as it is in Julian Assange’s nature, exacerbated by an ego that would sooner die than admit to being wrong. Wright never for a second admitted to me that he’d been caught out. He simply wallowed in the bad decisions he had made and said it was beyond his power to correct them. He was Satoshi, he said, but even he couldn’t prove it the way people wanted it proved.
He knew his dream was over. He was devastated. He was the runner who failed twenty yards short of the finishing tape, the man who froze at the moment of truth, and started walking backwards. He said he feared prosecution on the one hand and humiliation on the other. The borstal boy in Alan Sillitoe’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ comes from a family who make much of running, ‘especially running away from the police’. He hates being understood, feels authority is only there to grind you down, and holds on to his essential privacy, knowing ‘they can’t make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves’. The boy lives on his own terms, which means not faking it for power, even when the pressure is high and the rewards are obvious. So he refuses to win. Representing the borstal in a championship race, he is well ahead of the other runners, but he stops, and lets them pass, and at the end jogs up to the tape: ‘I got to the rope,’ Sillitoe writes, ‘and collapsed, with a murderous-sounding roar going up through my ears while I was still on the wrong side of it.’ In another email that day Wright wrote: ‘Andrew, I don’t know what I can say. If I was to do the proof and save myself, I damn myself.’ That afternoon, he closed down the blog – the one that was intended to lead cryptocurrency fans into a new era – but left a final posting:
I’m sorry. I believed that I could do this. I believed that I could put the years of anonymity and hiding behind me. But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot. When the rumours began, my qualifications and character were attacked. When those allegations were proven false, new allegations have already begun. I know now that I am not strong enough for this. I know that this weakness will cause great damage to those that have supported me, and particularly to Jon Matonis and Gavin Andresen. I can only hope that their honour and credibility is not irreparably tainted by my actions. They were not deceived, but I know that the world will never believe that now. I can only say I’m sorry. And goodbye.
*
The next morning I drove through the traffic to a London suburb. It was early in the day and the high streets were empty, the happy boutiques, the delis and the wicker-and-candle dens where people come to improve their mood or do something about their lifestyle. Craig and Ramona were sitting in the corner of a popular cafe. They were holding hands and staring at the table. He was wearing his Billabong T-shirt – I remembered it from his description of the clothes he’d bought in Auckland when he began his long-distance run last December. He looked as he’d looked the first night I met him in Mayfair: unshaven, unslept, the scar on his face more livid, his pupils like pinpricks and his breathing heavy. He wasn’t just white, he was empty-looking, and his hands were trembling. Ramona was crying. The light of the cafe seemed too much for the darkness enclosing them. I went to shake his hand but we hugged instead, and it was like embracing a drowning man. He hadn’t really slept since Monday, and this was Friday. He wasn’t drinking his latte; he made clouds on the spoon, and stared.
‘Well, it was worth about a billion dollars to them,’ he said. Ramona talked about jail and I asked if they were afraid of being prosecuted.
‘They say it’ll never happen,’ she said. ‘Of course it will … So how can he? How can he?’ He spoke of men he knew who had sold bitcoin and had been prosecuted for money-laundering and said they might try to do that to him. ‘It was always a present danger,’ Ramona said. MacGregor, Wright alleged, had always had a plan to move him if necessary to Manila or Antigua if it looked like he might be arrested.
‘It’s always been incremental,’ Wright said. ‘One step, one step, and nobody realises that eventually that takes you over a precipice.’
‘That’s the thing,’ Ramona said. ‘Your happiness doesn’t count at all. But now we’re stuck. You come out – you go to jail. You don’t come out – you’re a fraud. It’s got to the point where it’s almost better if he’s a fraud.’
‘So what happened on Monday,’ I asked, ‘when it came to writing that blog?’
‘I gave them the wrong thing,’ he said. ‘Then they changed it. Then I didn’t correct it because I was so angry. Which was stupid. I put up the wrong one. No one wants SN. I will never be SN. I’m not personable. You can lock me in a room and I’ll write papers, I’ll never be personable.’
Ramona was sobbing. ‘They could take us down,’ she said. ‘They could really take you down if they w
ant to.’
They spoke about money-making ventures Wright was involved in a long time ago. Wright alleged Matthews knew about these activities, which was true, because Matthews had mentioned them to me.
‘I just couldn’t do things any more,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
They wanted to talk about the trust, but they didn’t really explain it. He said it was to hide the bitcoin. ‘It’s not meant to be spent,’ he said. ‘Too many problems.’
‘It’s also a guarantee that you can’t flood the market,’ Ramona said. ‘That we can’t use it to pay the bills, no matter how desperate things get.’ When I asked who the trustees were they went quiet.
Ramona began to worry about my story. She tried to strong-arm me. She began to tell me what I should say and what I shouldn’t say, and how I should hide from MacGregor and Matthews the comments she and Wright had made about them. ‘I want to write the truth,’ I said.
She said I knew too much. She said that Craig would go to jail or harm himself if I told everything I knew. I was stunned. There were many things that were said to me by every party in this story that I would choose not to print. Not only things they said about one another, but business arrangements and unsubstantiated allegations about the past, and things I knew in the present. But I had been recording this as a documentary from the start, as I’d said I would when we met at Claridge’s in December. Now I was being told that my material was too hot and my story posed a threat.
Wright suddenly got very upset. His face crumpled and he put his head in his hands. ‘And the Brits have their equivalent of Guantánamo Bay as well,’ he said. ‘I’ll never write, I’ll never see anyone. I’ll be in a little room. I won’t even have a pen and paper. I won’t see my wife again. I’ll never see …’ He sobbed and was inconsolable. ‘I’ll never write again.’
‘They won’t do that,’ Ramona said. I suggested they might get a lawyer to advise them on the possible threats they faced. Ramona said it was too expensive. She said the bills would run into the millions. Wright talked about Ian Grigg and others who’d ‘outed’ him last year by nominating him for various awards. Satoshi was nominated for a Nobel Prize and a Turing Prize. Wright told me that people in the bitcoin community wanted him to come out and receive recognition. He said it had never been in his interest to come out, but in other people’s interest. ‘I don’t care if people like my work,’ he said. ‘I just have to do my work. That’s the only thing that’ll keep me sane.’
‘I would like that his reputation gets redeemed but I don’t know if that’s possible,’ Ramona told me. ‘This is what I propose, if you can do it, you do it, if you can’t, it’s up to you. If [you say] he didn’t choose to come out … then the company gets put in the spotlight. If you say you know he is Satoshi then we’re in trouble. If you say you have your doubts then he looks like a fool.’
I’m sure I looked at her disbelievingly. ‘You’re basically saying that every version of the truth of this story is untellable.’
‘But if you say it, Andrew …’
‘If you were sure that this could never be said in the end, then you should never have allowed it to happen.’
‘It was one step, then one step …’ Wright said, again.
‘And you let a writer into your life?’ I said.
‘Do you know how much this meant to me?’ Wright said. ‘The company. The people. To be doing that. To get all these papers out. To be in that position. It’s my idea of heaven, but the cost is hell.’
‘If we didn’t co-operate with you,’ Ramona said, ‘they’d stop …’
I reminded them that every time I’d tried to walk away from this story – like when they tried to make me sign an NDA – she’d begged me to come back. I told them that full disclosure was much less damaging than any other option. Naturally enough, that was my view.
‘No one wants to believe me,’ Wright said.
‘And I think that’s great,’ Ramona said. ‘It’s great that no one wants to believe you.’
Wright said he’d filed all these patents and they were all from him, ‘not just Dave’.
‘What do you mean,’ I asked, ‘“not just Dave”?’
‘I mean I wrote those patents,’ he said. ‘It means I knew all this shit.’
‘Have you been able to talk to Matonis or Andresen?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Ramona said. ‘I don’t know if they’ll even talk to us.’
‘I think you should have some crisis management advice.’
‘From who?’
‘From a therapist.’
‘We don’t have time for that,’ she said.
I walked home with them and he slumped on a sofa, looking wan, gone. ‘His mental health is fucked,’ she said to me when he was out of the room. ‘If he goes to jail, he’ll kill himself. I can’t leave him alone.’
When he returned he seemed almost paler than before. ‘This is all because I wrote code,’ he said. ‘Not because I blew up something, because I wrote code.’
‘Just out of interest,’ I said. ‘If you are a fraud … How hard a fraud would it have been to perpetrate?’
‘It would be the best one in human history,’ Wright said. ‘It’d be Ronnie Biggs on steroids times a million. I invented a new form of money. Who has ever had anything to do with money that wasn’t to do with government? Who has ever really succeeded?’
‘You mean it’s a thankless task?’
‘It’s always Prometheus,’ he said.
*
This was a story in which everybody wanted their story told, then untold, then hidden, back in the vaults. It seemed like a very new story, but, in fact, it was a very old one, a story of metamorphosis, and of Prometheus unbound. Craig Wright proved cryptographically that he had Satoshi’s keys, his emails seemed to show his involvement, his science extrapolated from the technology of the blockchain, and he spent a full year engaged in a business plan to reveal it all. But, when it came to it, he behaved like a fraud, he shape-shifted and he dissolved.
I began to wonder whether Craig Wright might be a man who had never known who he was, a missing person, constantly in discussion with some inner lost boy, unable to bear the conditions which forced him to say definitively who he was. Some people, it could be said, really aren’t anyone, in the sense that the complications of being themselves have wiped them out. The internet eats its own ciphers, and Wright is one of them. He might have sabotaged his own proof or simply flunked the paternity test because he isn’t the right man, but his own doubts about himself are the real drama. He was sick, he was brilliant, he was manipulative – but much of what he said was true. And as I drove away that morning, it was the sickness that seemed predominant. Wright was a clever man who had gone to the very end of himself to prove who he wasn’t. ‘We are all Satoshi now’ became a tagline for bitcoin’s early fans. And in the end we all are Satoshi, and we’ll begin to accept it as paper currency starts to look stale, and our minds merge with our computers. There are new networks up ahead that will have grown from the seed Satoshi planted, and it was odd, after all my travels, to believe that the only man who wanted to opt out of being Satoshi was Craig Wright. A week after his ‘proof sessions’ with the BBC and others, he was in complete disgrace, his corner office at nCrypt had been emptied and his leather sofas had disappeared, removed from the building with the signed Muhammad Ali picture and the rest of his stuff. Without ceremony, the best room in the office became a conference room and his name was spoken in whispers.
My last meeting with MacGregor and Matthews was a time of conjecture and anger, devastation and apology. They felt Wright had perjured himself, and for no good reason. He had never admitted to problems with the trust, problems that would make the Satoshi reveal very difficult for him. They still believe, as do Andresen and Matonis, that he is Satoshi. To them, there is just too much evidence to accept Wright’s late attempt to cloak himself in deniability. But no matter. He was now fired, they said, and the deal with Google was off. ‘He put a
gun to our head and pulled the trigger,’ MacGregor told me. ‘The world is still going to think we got fooled, but I know the facts. He has the keys.’ There was a moment in our meeting when I realised this had gone all the way to the bone with MacGregor. He said he never wanted to see Wright again. ‘This was supposed to be so noble,’ he said, ‘and it became so dark.’ Matthews told me that Wright’s office, his house, his job, his work visa, everything, was set to go. They had spent as much as $15 million and maybe lost a billion. MacGregor said the PR company would never deal with him again, and there were investment bankers who weren’t picking up his calls. A way would be found, however, to continue developing the blockchain technology. The company would go on. MacGregor shook his head. The whole thing was unfathomable. It was baffling. For no obvious reason Wright had found a way to disappear back into the shadows.
Coda
He seemed to miss me. Wright wanted to meet. It was a few weeks after the abortive ‘reveal’, and I saw when I got to Patisserie Valerie that he was happy again and ready to take on the world. ‘It was unfair of me to request you not to publish certain things about our situation,’ Ramona had written to me in an email. ‘As you said, you have a debt to the truth, and that is as it should be.’ And yet, as we all know, the truth has more faces than the town clock.
Wright told me in Patisserie Valerie that he felt free again. He had lost a third share in a billion dollars but he felt unburdened. He was sorry to have let good people down but now he could work in peace. Sherlock Holmes’s central precept came into my mind. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’
‘Do you want to know what I think?’ I said to him after he told me again that all would be well from now on.
‘Yes.’
‘What if you were thirty per cent Satoshi. You were there at its formation and you were part of a brilliant group. You coded and you synthesised other people’s work and you shared in the encryption keys. Then, sometime in the last year, you upgraded yourself to eighty or ninety per cent. You were already a lot more Satoshi than anybody else has been hitherto, but the deal, in your eyes, required you to be more and in the end you couldn’t carry that off.’
The Secret Life Page 21