Craig Wright — the Self-Proclaimed Bitcoin Creator

Craig Wright also known as Faketoshi, thinks ethereum has no use cases and believes that ripple’s XRP should be taken down by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for being an illegal unregistered security platform.

Wright says “XRP is the biggest scam in the space” and looks forward to when “this sham offer is revoked.”

Craig Wright has been in the news a lot recently. He’s one of the leaders of the bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision) camp which wants to raise the bitcoin cash block size up to 128 MB.

Born in October 1970, Craig Steven Wright is an Australian computer scientist and businessman. He graduated from Padua College in Brisbane and did his Masters’ at the University of London.

Wright says his PhD in theology, comparative religious and classical studies, was achieved in 2003 with a dissertation titled "Gnarled roots of a creation theory.”

In his Linkedin profile he has claimed to have a PhD in computer science from Charles Sturt University, but the university told Forbes that it only awarded him two master's degrees and not a doctorate.

"Mr. Wright has not been awarded a PhD from CSU," the university said in a statement.

The statement confirmed Wright was handed three qualifications from the university: Master of Networking and Systems Administration, Master of Management (Information Technology), and Master of Information Systems Security.

He has an extraordinary number of certifications from SANS, a much-respected training organization for security professionals.

Wright has worked in information technology for various companies, including OzEmail, K-Mart and the Australian Securities Exchange. He also worked as a security consultant for Mahindra & Mahindra.

Craig Wright designed the architecture for possibly the world's first online casino, Lasseter's Online, which went online in 1999. He was the information systems manager for the accounting firm BDO Kendalls and developed board level security policies and procedural practices within Mahindra and Mahindra, India’s largest vehicle manufacturer.

Wright has written or co-written several books, including “The IT Regulatory and Standards Compliance Handbook: How to Survive Information Systems Audit and Assessments.”

In May 2016 Craig Wright publicly identified himself as bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr. Wright revealed his identity to three media organizations - the BBC, The Economist, and GQ.

At the meeting with the BBC, Mr. Wright digitally signed messages using cryptographic keys created during the early days of bitcoin's development.

"These are the blocks used to send 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney in January [2009] as the first bitcoin transaction," said Mr. Wright during his demonstration.

"I was the main part of it, but other people helped me," he said.

Backing up Wright's claims were two significant members of the bitcoin community: founding director at Bitcoin Foundation and CEO of Hushmail Jon Matonis, and chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation Gavin Andresen.

Subsequent reporting, however, raised serious concerns regarding the fact Wright was engaged in an elaborate hoax. Despite promises to provide evidence to back his claims, Wrights failed to do so.

Dan Kaminsky, a well-known security researcher, wrote in a post debunking Wright's alleged evidence that the whole thing is a scam.

"Satoshi signed a transaction in 2009. Wright copied that specific signature and tried to pass it off as new," he added on Twitter. "He's lying. Full stop."

Longtime Bitcoin developers also pointed out that this signature could have been copied from a public source, and does not prove that Wright controls the associated addresses.

Jeff Garzik, one of bitcoin's original cadres of code developers, agreed that the evidence provided by Wright doesn't do anything to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

"Right now, the cryptographic 'evidence' presented could have been produced by anyone," Garzik told Motherboard. "It was an old already-signed message,” he added.

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 $5,118,266,427.50 worth of bitcoin. According to the filing, Wright and Kleiman partnered to mine bitcoin, and owned and controlled more than 1.1 million bitcoins between them.

In 2011, the pair founded a Florida-based firm called W&K Info Defense Research LLC, which was engaged in bitcoin mining and software development and research. Kleiman owned between 50 and 100 percent of W&K, the lawsuit said.

It alleged that Wright fraudulently created at least three contracts and used a computer-generated signature to lay claim to bitcoins mined by Kleiman.

Craig Wright was the main driving force behind the recent bitcoin cash fork that resulted in two new cryptocurrencies, bitcoin cash ABC (BCHABC) and bitcoin cash SV (BCHSV).

Bitcoin cash SV is supported and led by Craig Wright. The changes to bitcoin cash in this hard forked chain have seen the block size quadrupled from 32MB to 128MB. Changes to the protocol have also been made to ease the transition to smart contracts on the BCHSV network.

Both coins are now trading on various exchanges and are in competition for survival by gaining dominance over the hash power, and Wright threatens to crash the price of bitcoin with a sell-off to fund his ‘Satoshi’s Vision’ (BCHSV) project.

Wright tweeted out his threat to all bitcoin miners warning them that, should they show support for the Roger Ver-backed bitcoin cash ABC over his Satoshi’s Vision project, he would fund his side by selling off a lot of bitcoins.

Earlier this month Wright sent a letter to Bitcoin.com’s Roger Ver, threatening to break bitcoin cash, preventing all trading for two years bringing its value down to zero.

The email came after Bitcoin.com indicated that it would support the bitcoin cash ABC chain promoted by Jihan Wu and Bitmain.

Ver revealed the screenshot of the alleged email in a video posted to Bitcoin.com’s official YouTube account.

Craig Wright has not officially commented on the email, but has accused Ver and Wu of promoting child pornography and drug trafficking with r Bitcoin ABC.

Ver had previously been open to the idea that Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto, but more recently he has walked back his support of Craig Wright, saying recently that he could have been “fooled.”

Cryptocurrency advocate John McAfee has also taken a public stance against Craig Wright, denying the latter’s claims that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

McAfee took to his Twitter feed to declare that Wright isn’t the real Satoshi Nakamoto. In doing so, he appears to have implied that he knows the identity of the person who is.