Craig Steven Wright (born October 1970) is an Australian computer scientist and businessman.
He has publicly claimed to be the main part of the team that created bitcoin, and the identity behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
These claims are regarded as false by much of the media and the cryptocurrency community.
1987
Wright graduated from high school in 1987 from Padua College in Brisbane.
Wright was an adjunct academic and researcher at Charles Sturt University, where he was working on his PhD entitled "The quantification of information systems risk".
1999
He claims to have designed the architecture for possibly the world's first online casino, Lasseter's Online (based in Alice Springs, Northern Territory), which went online in 1999.
He was the information systems manager for the accounting firm BDO Kendalls.
2003
Wright says he has a doctorate in theology, comparative religious and classical studies, awarded in 2003 from United Theological College.
Wright has written or co-written several books.
Wright has been a trustee of the Uniting Church in New South Wales.
Wright worked in information technology for various companies, including OzEmail, K-Mart and the Australian Securities Exchange, as well as working as a security consultant for Mahindra & Mahindra.
He was sentenced to 28 days in jail for breaching an injunction that prevented him from approaching customers of DeMorgan Information Security Systems, from which he resigned in 2003.
The sentence was suspended on condition of performing 250 hours of community service.
2004
In 2004, Wright was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court of New South Wales.
2005
After appealing the decision, the ruling was upheld in 2005 and also in a subsequent appeal to the High Court of Australia in 2006.
2009
Jordan Pearson and Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai said that "Wright simply reused an old signature from a bitcoin transaction performed in 2009 by Satoshi."
Earlier in an interview with the BBC, Wright had promised to give "extraordinary proof to an extraordinary claim."
He has yet to provide any verifiable evidence of his authorship of the original Satoshi whitepaper or collaboration with known early developers.
In theory, his claim should be easy to prove, by simply supplying a message verifying the claim using the original Satoshi Nakamoto GPG private key; however, he is either unable or unwilling to provide this.
2014
Wright was the CEO of the technology firm Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence Group (Hotwire PE), which planned to launch Denariuz Bank, the world's first bitcoin-based bank, though it encountered regulatory difficulties with the Australian Tax Office and failed in 2014.
Wright is the founder of cryptocurrency company DeMorgan Ltd., which claimed to receive $54 million AUD in tax incentives via AusIndustry.
2015
In December 2015, two parallel investigations by Wired and Gizmodo suggested that Wright may have been the inventor of bitcoin.
Subsequent reporting, however, raised concerns that Wright was engaged in an elaborate hoax.
Hours after Wired published their allegations, Wright's home in Gordon, New South Wales, and associated business premises in Ryde, New South Wales, were raided by the Australian Federal Police.
According to the AFP, the raid was part of an Australian Tax Office investigation.
2016
On 2 May 2016, a blog post on the website www.drcraigwright.net associated Wright with Satoshi and posted a message with a cryptographic signature attached.
Security researcher Dan Kaminsky said in his blog that Wright's claim was a scam, and bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik agreed that evidence publicly provided by Wright does not prove anything.
On Thursday, 5 May 2016, shortly before closing his blog, Wright sent around an email link to a news story site saying: "Craig Wright faces criminal charges and serious jail time in UK".
Wright stated, "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."
The article Wright mentioned to O'Hagan has since been retracted.
In June 2016, the London Review of Books published an article by Andrew O'Hagan about the events, later included in his book The Secret Life: Three True Stories, in which O'Hagan spends several weeks with Wright at the request of Wright's public relations team; which, as revealed in the book, was set up as a result of a business deal between Wright and various individuals including Calvin Ayre.
O'Hagan was with Wright during the time of his various media interviews.
O'Hagan also interviews Wright's wife, colleagues and many of the other people involved in his claims.
2017
His PhD was awarded by CSU in February 2017.
2018
In February 2018 the estate of Dave Kleiman initiated a lawsuit at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against Wright over the rights to US$5,118,266,427.50 worth of bitcoin, claiming that Wright defrauded Kleiman of bitcoins and intellectual property rights.
2019
As of 2019, he lives in the United Kingdom.
Wright told Finder in 2019 that bitcoin's creation was a group effort, that he drove the project, and that Dave Kleiman and Hal Finney were involved.
Wright registered US copyright in the bitcoin white paper and the code for Bitcoin 0.1 in April 2019.
A spokesman for Wright told the Financial Times that this was "the first government agency recognition of Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin"; the United States Copyright Office issued a press release clarifying that this was not the case, and that "the Copyright Office does not investigate whether there is a provable connection between the claimant and the pseudonymous author."
In order to resolve Wright's claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) opened a lawsuit against Wright in United Kingdom on 5 February 2024 in London High Court.
