Craig Wright on the start of Bitcoin
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Dr. Craig Wright looks at a screenshot of the early Bitcoin website that someone posted on Twitter. It is from January 3, 2009. He remembers what was going on at the time: “First launch of the code, made sure everything was running. The first set of problems shortly after that week when it had to be restarted.”
Dr. Wright, who signed himself “aka Satoshi Nakamoto” at last week’s CoinGeek Conversations, this week reminisced about how it all began. He was testing his systems, and the transaction in question was one he sent to himself between two of his own computers.
He is happy to admit that the Bitcoin website “demonstrates my lack of design skills.” There were other features he would have liked to have added, but it was early days and “you can forgive me for not having everything perfect.”
He says he would probably have done this particular transaction in the computer room he had built in one of the outbuildings of his Australian farm, a few hours’ drive from Sydney. It would be a very technical scene: “Computers, printers, more computers, screens everywhere. And me in the middle with wheelchairs so I could get back and forth between the seats.”
So it must have been a big moment when the Bitcoin software finally worked? “Having it actually run, yes, it was good,” he says, adding with a smile, “having it crash shortly afterwards was not.”
A Eureka moment indeed? “Yes, I would say that would be the way you would look at it. I mean, I had been working on trying to find a solution to micropayment problems since 1997. So yeah, it was nice to finally have something that worked.”
To develop Bitcoin as a technical and economic system, Dr. Wright had studied in a wide variety of fields: “Bitcoin is really a combination of computer science and economics and game theory, and having a background in all these subjects makes it much easier. “
Asked who knew he was Satoshi Nakamoto at the time, Dr. Wright says it was more known than he realized at DeMorgan, the business he founded to exploit blockchain opportunities. He did not tell his employees that he had invented Bitcoin “but I found out later that they all knew anyway”.
It seems the staff were keeping a secret from him, rather than the other way around, as he discovered when he asked a colleague, “‘So you know I’m Satoshi?’ He said, “well, yes.” “Okay, so why didn’t you talk to me about this earlier?” He went well, we didn’t think you would. Obviously you wanted to be private, so we just didn’t tell.'” As to why he hadn’t told them himself, Dr. Wright says only, “I didn’t think there was any reason.”
There may be an opportunity to hear from some of those who knew Dr. Wright at this time when he calls witnesses to the appeal hearing in Oslo later this year in the case he is defending against Magnus “Hodlonaut” Granath. The appeal follows the original case that was heard in September 2022, where several character witnesses gave evidence on his behalf. In the re-run, Dr. Wright promises that there will be “more” such witnesses talking about his work with Bitcoin.
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