Did Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, finally return to the crypto scene he created? No, but the Twitter account @satoshi wants to make you think so, with a new post Tuesday focused on the 2008 white paper.
The apparent reactivation of an account bearing Nakamoto’s name and a “verified account” blue checkmark calls into question the value of the blue checkmark.
“Bitcoin is a predicate machine,” the account bearing the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted on Monday. “Over the following months, we shall explore different aspects that were not explicitly contained within the white paper.”
It was the second post on the account this week. Prior to those tweets, the last activity was in October 2018.
Twitter users added community notes to the post, clarifying that the @satoshi account was connected to Craig Wright, who has claimed for years to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
“Isn’t it a coincident that @satoshi account is used during this time when I expose Craig?” wrote entrepreneur and former nChain CEO Christen Ager-Hanssen. “That account has been taken over by Craig.”
Ager-Hanssen left his post last week, and has been tweeting constantly about Wright and developments at nChain since then. He even remarked on the appearance of the blue check mark on the @satoshi account yesterday.
A representative from Twitter did not immediately return Decrypt’s request for comment.
For nearly a decade, Wright has claimed to be the inventor of Bitcoin, the largest digital currency by market capitalization. Wright has been involved in several legal battles surrounding Bitcoin, including one involving 12 Bitcoin Core developers. The developers are backed by the Jack Dorsey-backed Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund in a dispute over 111,000 Bitcoin allegedly stolen from the Mt. Gox cryptocurrency exchange.
In February, Wright lost a copyright legal case in a UK court after claiming that forks of Bitcoin violated his intellectual property. This despite the fact that nChain—the company where Wright still serves as chief scientist—launched Bitcoin SV, a fork of Bitcoin Cash, itself a fork of Bitcoin, in November 2018.
“Whilst I accept that the law of copyright will continue to face challenges with new digital technologies, I do not see any prospect of the law as currently stated and understood in the caselaw allowing copyright protection of subject matter which is not expressed or fixed anywhere,” Judge James Mellor said.
Over the years, several names have surfaced, including Wright’s, of possibly being the creator of Bitcoin, including SpaceX CEO and Dogecoin champion Elon Musk, British cryptographer Adam Back, physicist Dorian Nakamoto, and computer scientists Hal Finney and Nick Szabo.
In December, Finney’s Twitter account came back online after a decade of inactivity following his passing in December 2014. The account was used by Finney’s wife, Fran, to post a statement and keep the account from being purged after the site was taken over by Musk earlier in the year.
