The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the 13th (local time) that the identity of the creator of Bitcoin, ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, will be revealed through a trial in Florida, US.
The trial in question is a lawsuit filed by the family of David Kleiman, who died in April 2013, against his business partner, Craig Wright, 51, over ownership of about 1 million bitcoins. One million bitcoins is equivalent to $64 billion (about 75.5 trillion won) at the current market price.
It is argued that Kleiman and Wright are both Satoshi, so half of Satoshi’s more than 1 million bitcoins belongs to the bereaved family.
Wright, an Australian programmer and currently living in London, UK, has claimed that he created Bitcoin since 2016, but the cryptocurrency industry has rejected his claim.
Kleiman’s family claims that Wright and Kleiman jointly mined 1 million bitcoins initially, claiming that the bereaved is entitled to half of the 500,000 bitcoins.
Wright dismisses the claims of his family, saying he has evidence to show that he was the sole creator of Bitcoin and that Kleiman did not play a role.
Bitcoin first appeared on October 31, 2008, when someone by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine-page “Bitcoin White Paper” describing the Bitcoin system on the Internet.
Bereaved families claim that in early 2008, Wright asked Kleiman for help in writing the white paper.
Satoshi, who was active in the Internet space, disappeared in December 2010. In the early days of Bitcoin, nobody cared about Satoshi’s identity. Because Bitcoin had no real value and had only a small group of backers. However, as the price of Bitcoin skyrocketed, interest in his identity began to grow.
Since then, several people claiming to be Satoshi have come out, but none have provided conclusive evidence.
The Bitcoin industry agrees that the only way to prove Satoshi’s identity conclusively is to disclose a ‘private key’ that can control the account where Satoshi has stored 1 million bitcoins. But so far, no one has made it public.
Many critics say that Wright is only a hacker and a con artist, but many experts say that Kleiman may have actually created Bitcoin, given his computer knowledge, according to the WSJ.
Meanwhile, the current price of Bitcoin is around $64,000.
