Pag. 28

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"...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 (CSW) too political. He’s coming out as a street fighter and could end up in prison or whatever."

"....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.6 Pedersen and some others had stayed on without pay; Wright owed his lawyers $1 million. ..."

Pag. 28

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"...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’".

Pag. 29

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"Matthews told me about a meeting at the Bondi Iceberg 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 whether Kleiman had had more to do with Ulbricht; other sources suggested the
same."

Pag. 29

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"... 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.’"

Pag. 30

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"December 2015, Gizmodo and Wired, May 2016 signing in private sessions with Jon and Gavin, then BBC, The Economist... You, probably, already know the story and there are many recourses online for you who don't".


Huis Clos
Perica
https://www.yours.org/content/huis-clos-226b68dc6a34

"... . 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 one pound) is nCrypt Holdings, registered in Antigua..’"

Pag. 30

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Calvin Ayre
https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAE_gvHidyy-KZoxXAQ

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 $10,000 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,..."

Pag. 31

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"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?’"

Pag. 31

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

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

"‘Of course he did. No doubt.
(Answer from Stefan Matthews)
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."

Pag. 31

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Ross Ulbricht News
https://t.me/joinchat/AAAAAE43D07PuY3QgGIHcw

"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".

Pag. 32

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"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."

Pag. 33

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Craig Wright | Financial Times

MAY 2, 2016
FT Alphaville
Izabella Kaminska
Oh my! Craig Wright’s ‘Keys of Revelation’


MARCH 31, 2016
FT Alphaville
Izabella Kaminska
Craig Wright’s upcoming big reveal


DECEMBER 11, 2015
FT Alphaville
Izabella Kaminska
Doubts grow over Craig S. Wright’s connection to Satoshi Nakamoto


DECEMBER 9, 2015
FT Alphaville
Izabella Kaminska
So, Satoshi is an Aussie?


Craig Wright | Financial Times
https://www.ft.com/stream/0cc7bf50-ea3a-3db7-97d7-c510df0235f3?format=&page=1

"...., 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 key 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".

Pag. 34

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"The address was 12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX. I could see that people had left messages – ‘public notes’ – for Satoshi: ‘Hey satoshi, change my life, send me some bitcoins!’
‘God bless you, China.’ ‘If you are reading this, please take some time to remember those who died 12 years ago today in the WTC attacks.’ ‘The bitcoin blockchain can be used as a trusted timestamp for arbitrary messages,’ Wikipedia said.

If you scroll back to the very first transaction associated with this address –
12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX – you find that it is the first bitcoin transaction
recorded. It was for 50 bitcoin and remains unspent. Anyone can enter that bitcoin address
into a search engine and inspect the history of transactions associated with it. ‘The Genesis block was hardcoded on 3 January 2009,’ Wright said to me, ‘and that was the first run. There
was no previous block.’ (Under the heading ‘Previous Block’, there is a line of 74 zeros.) ‘Then the code was reworked,’ he continued, ‘and fired up and the first address that was ever
created from the hardcoded Genesis block – the first mined address – is the one I’m sending you a message from.’ He was about to use the original cryptographic key to sign a message to me and it was as if he was dropping a sugar lump into my tea. He typed the words, ‘Here I am,
Andrew,’ and rested his fingers. ‘This gives us that little block there,’ he said, before verifying
the signature. He looked sheepish and resigned in his blue checked shirt. ‘Welcome to the bit I was hoping to bury,’ he said. He leaned back and I noticed a samurai sword by the desk."

Pag. 35

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair