Bitcoin is just nine years old and the identity of its creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, is still unknown. This week I came across a story of Bitcoin’s origins by someone named “Scronty.” It’s a long but compelling narrative, basically claiming there were three main founders of Bitcoin: Phil Wilson (a.k.a. Scronty, from New Zealand), Craig Wright (an Australian who has already laid claim to being Satoshi, but failed to provide proof), and American Dave Kleiman (who sadly passed away in 2013).
In other words, Wilson (pictured to the right) claims that Satoshi was a group. What’s more, according to Wilson’s narrative, he came up with the crucial blockchain concept that made Bitcoin possible.
I got in touch with Wilson via Reddit’s messaging system, where he also goes by the user name Scronty. I told him I wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth or not, but I thought his story was (at the very least) a great explanation of how Bitcoin works and its likely inspiration. I was also titillated by the idea that Satoshi might be at least partly a New Zealander, since that’s where I hail from too.
Wilson/Scronty’s story has been online since March 2017, but it recently resurfaced due to New York Times reporter and Digital Gold author Nathaniel Popper mentioning it in a tweet earlier this week:
A new person claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto has come forward with the website https://t.co/FZ7xg4RSNG, which describes the story of Bitcoin’s origins.
— Nathaniel Popper (@nathanielpopper) February 13, 2018
Popper then promptly dismissed Scronty’s claim, after seeing early Bitcoin developer Martti Malmi’s tweet regarding the same website. It “never happened,” said Malmi about Wilson’s description of how the three founders and Malmi had came up with the Bitcoin logo together.
However, bear in mind that Malmi has no idea who Satoshi is either. He thinks Satoshi was originally one person, but he doesn’t know for sure since he never met Satoshi in real life.
Now, let’s get to the nub of Phil Wilson’s story.
First things first: is there any evidence that Scronty was in fact part of the Satoshi group? In his article, Wilson himself admits there isn’t any proof. He writes that “all evidence was purged in late 2011.” We find out later in the narrative that he purged the evidence because he was afraid of being caught up in the Silk Road government crackdowns on Bitcoin at the time. “I pretty much did a forensic clean of my system again and again,” he writes.
Wilson even deleted the bitcoins that he claims he owned, at the time worth US$40,000 (now they’d be worth tens of millions of dollars). When Wright and Kleiman allegedly expressed surprise at this, Wilson responded:
“The types of folks who are hunting us would not care whether they can access them of not,” I said. “They just need to see that we’ve got something to hide and that it’s Bitcoin-related. The governments around the globe have been locking up folks on suspected-aiding-terrorism charges and throwing the key away. I had to make sure there was absolutely nothing on my computers that showed I had any idea what Bitcoin or crypto was. I even deleted the crypto stuff I’d picked up during my assembly language days.”
The upshot of all this is that Phil Wilson now cannot verify that he is (part of) Satoshi by revealing a private key that could only belong to Satoshi.
Of course, this may just be a very convenient excuse. I threw away the evidence is like saying the dog ate my homework – there’s no way to prove it many years later. But I do think it’s at least plausible. At that time, late 2011, Bitcoin was being used primarily as a way to buy illicit drugs on Silk Road. While Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht wasn’t arrested until October 2013, it’s reasonable for someone deeply involved in Bitcoin in 2011 to be worried about the legality of the system.
Prior to Wilson deleting all his Bitcoin records and bailing from the project, what exactly did he claim to do?
According to the narrative, Craig Wright (who is referred to as “(2)” in the story) was collaborating with Dave Kleiman (referred to as “(3)”) on an “an online betting company.” Wilson says the pair were trying to figure out how to prevent punters from reversing their credit card payments if they lost their money. Wright “was attempting to implement a working example of electronic cash,” says Wilson.
Wilson says he got involved in early 2008 after meeting Kleiman in an online chat room. He suggests that Wright and Kleiman wanted to “find someone who wasn’t a cryptographer to look over the ideas.” Wilson is a programmer who at the time was involved in assembly language projects on the Win32 platform (in his LinkedIn profile, he now describes himself as an iOS developer).
Long story short, Wilson started collaborating with Wright and Kleiman. Shortly after, Wright reached an impasse with his initial white paper:
It was becoming clear to me that the whitepaper that (2) had already written wasn’t going to work due to its reliance upon a third party server for time-stamping.
In June 2008, Wilson decides he wants to try and figure out the solution himself. Wright reluctantly agrees to help. They come up with a project name, Prometheus. There’s a very long section after this, where Wilson explains how he came up with various concepts. The main one, the key to Bitcoin in many ways, was the blockchain. Wilson claims it was he who came up with this:
I email (2) and let him know about this idea of hooking together the dataChunks like a chain so that they couldn’t be modified without redoing the proof-of-work hashing.
He liked the idea of a chain.
Another long explanatory section follows, until apparently Wright is finally convinced of Wilson’s breakthrough:
(2) said, “My original white paper has been completely thrown out now, and two-thirds of the code I’d developed has been binned. This stuff you’ve come up with is absolutely out of this world.
Wright wants to re-do the white paper, but Wilson is reluctant:
“I don’t want to release a white paper. Not just yet in any case. There’s still too much to figure out and test first. Due to the nature of this project I really don’t think it’d be wise to release it under our own real names.”
This is when they allegedly come up with the name Satoshi Nakamoto, as a pseudonym.
We’re not even halfway through the narrative, but those are the main points about Phil Wilson’s claim to be part of Satoshi. Indeed, he’s basically saying his ideas were the key ones that led to the breakthrough that became Bitcoin.
It’s easy to see why Craig Wright does not like this version of the story. Since Wilson’s website came out in March of last year, Wright has hit back on at least a couple of occasions.
In a May 2017 chat in a Slack channel, Wright stated, “No, scronty and I did not work together.” On a news post on Bitcoin.com about the same time, Craig Wright and Wilson appeared to have a back and forth in the comments section (although I can’t be certain this was in fact Wright, as the Disqus profile may be faked). In reply to something Wilson said, the person claiming to be Wright replied: “You are also scamming and no, there is no project Prometheus. No, I will not entertain you nor your want o be claims either. You did not help Dave and I. We did not go to you for help.”
Now let’s look at Craig Wright’s attempt to come out as Satoshi in 2016. Despite seemingly showing the proof (in a private meeting) to early Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen, Wright ultimately refused to provide evidence to the public that he had Satoshi’s private keys. Afterwards, most people assumed that Wright had tricked Andresen.
According to Phil Wilson, it was he who tricked Craig Wright. Wilson messaged this to me about why Wright failed:
when he attempted to “come out” as Satoshi in May 2016, he tried using my PGP key which was attached to my GMX Satoshi account.
That back-fired on him because I’d purposely generated that key in 2011 and backdated it so that it would appear to have been created the same date as the Vistomail PGP key in 2008.
I told Dave to never tell Craig so that, if he ever betrayed us, he’d be caught out.
You can imagine the total confusion in Craig in 2016 when everyone descended upon him pointing out that the PGP key was a fake and backdated.
He never knew I’d placed the integrity test into it.
Knowing that my hidden hand had caused him such embarrassment would be too much for him.
And so he backtracked and posted a message publicly saying he didn’t have the strength to go on with proving he was “Satoshi”.
Okay, so what do we make of Phil Wilson’s claims?
There’s absolutely no evidence that anything he’s written is true, he says he cannot access Satoshi’s private keys because he wiped all the evidence in late 2011, and the only other surviving supposed Bitcoin founder – Craig Wright – has angrily refuted Wilson’s claims (hardly surprising, since they’re not very flattering of Wright).
It’s clear we’ll never see Wilson use any private key associated with Satoshi, since he deleted all his records. For some people, that will be sufficient to dismiss his claims. But is there any other evidence that would at least keep the case open?
I think we’d need to see two or three more people come forward with some evidence that backs up what Wilson has said – a copy of an old chat transcript, for example, or some type of record that shows Wilson communicated with Wright or Kleiman in the 2008-11 timeframe. Either that or we need an early Bitcoin developer, like Martti Malmi or Gavin Andresen, to come forward and vouch for at least a part of Wilson’s narrative (and as we’ve seen, Malmi has already dismissed him).
So I cannot say that I believe Phil Wilson, a.k.a. Scronty, at this point. He wrote a compelling tale, but he’ll need to find a scrap of evidence from somewhere. Perhaps this blog post will help unearth it. We’ll see.
In the meantime, Scronty left me with these words via a Reddit message:
There’s no such person called “Satoshi Nakamoto”.
It is a character with a role in a play on a global stage.
Three actors played that character in different ways.
Thanks for this article!
For me personally this part is a major “scam alert” in Scrunty’s narrative:
“I pretty much did a forensic clean of my system again and again.
Every time I went through everything and was certain all bitcoin-related material was removed, I’d come across another item.
I went everywhere from typical document folders, into the Windows Registry, to removing any “Recents” from the Registry and from the physical folder location itself.
It’s amazing how many places various applications squirrel away bits of data.
It took me a few days, purging a couple of hours at a time.”
So let me get this straight – this guy is a genius ivolved in crypto who’s never heard of low-level HDD formatting, and so he goes on a few days “forensically” cleaning his PC of evidence by fumbling about in folders and Windows registry? He’s also never heard of forensic HDD recovery? Now give me a break.
Also, if, as he claims, all email prior May 2011 were “lost”, how can he recall the email conversations with CSW to such detail?
Thanks for your comment. You raised a couple of good points. Re the forensic clean, I agree it doesn’t seem that technical how he describes it. But there are a lot of ways to get rid of data, e.g. throwing the computer into a dumpster.
As for the emails, he says he is only now remembering a lot of this. As I mentioned in the article, there’s no proof though. I do wonder if there’s some creative license happening with some of his story, which after all does give himself a lot of credit and Craig Wright hardly any.