Now Bitcoin features on GQ, a fashion and trendy magazine.
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Bitcoin: inside the £8bn swindle
Is this man the multimillionaire genius behind bitcoin: the digital currency now worth over £8bn and threatening to do for banks what Uber did to cab offices? Or does he just really want people to believe he is?
Just f*** off! Either validate or f*** off right now!”
The computer scientist, Craig Wright, had stood up and was displaying the universal sign to tell someone to f*** off (the V), while also backing this up by repeatedly shouting it. A broad 45-year-old Australian man with TV hair, he wore a boxy, dark-grey business suit, wide gold tie and red socks that now matched the colour of his face. He claimed to be the inventor of bitcoin, the first genuinely successful virtual currency in the world. In total, it is now worth over $10 billion (£8bn), and he personally possessed a fortune of more than $672 million of them – assuming his identity wasn’t also virtual. This is what we were here to confirm. It was not going well.
“F*** off!”
Until this point, the creator of bitcoin was known only under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, ostensibly a 37-year-old male living in Japan. Perhaps due to that, or perhaps due to his blog posts, which were precise, calm and erudite, Nakamoto was imagined to be a gentle, even shy, individual. This was not proving to be the case.
The object of Wright’s ire was Dr Nicolas T Courtois, a French-Polish expert in cryptology, code-breaking, virtual currencies and specifically bitcoin, who was sitting to my right. He was here as GQ’s expert witness, having made the short walk from his office at University College London, where he lectures, to the offices on the fourth floor of a narrow building on Tottenham Court Road. A big man who spoke in halting English, he wore a smart shirt and boasted trousers so blue they looked like they were part of a costume. The other people in the room were economist and Bitcoin Foundation founding director Jon Matonis, who was the expert witness for the PR agency brokering the interview, and its two representatives, who were attempting not to look too panicked.
We were barely eight minutes in when Wright took issue with Dr Courtois’ suggestion that his evidence was not conclusive.
“You’ve got this one thing,” said Wright. “If you don’t like it, then f*** off.”
There was an audible groan from the PR side of the room.
“No more bullshit. F*** off!” he shouted a few moments later, when it was suggested the evidence he was presenting could have been compromised or stolen.
“It’s absolutely possible,” countered Courtois.
“F*** off. F*** off.”
“I have over 100 papers in cryptography…”
“Over. F*** off.”
It was at this point he walked out.
GQ had first been approached over a month before about the interview. The deal was this: the fabled inventor of bitcoin would unveil himself to be Craig Wright. The BBC and the Economist would do news stories; we would do the profile piece.
Read more : The search for Nakamoto had become the digital age’s hunt for the white whale