Police have raided the alleged 'founder' of Bitcoin
Reuters
The home and offices of the mysterious person believed to be the founder of Bitcoin have been raided by Australian police.
Nearly a dozen police officers were spotted entering the Sydney home belonging to 44-year-old Craig Steven Wright on Wednesday, The Guardianreported.
His offices were also raided,according to Reuters' Jane Wardell.
Wright, a technology entrepreneur and IT security consultant, is the man Wired Magazine and Gizmodo reported on Tuesday as most likely being behind the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakomoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin.
"Either Wright invented Bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did," Andy Greenberg and Gwern Branwen wrote at Wired.
Australian authorities have denied the raids have anything to do with the cryptocurrency, of which more than 1 million Bitcoins are in the possession of its founder. If Wright truly is Satoshi Nakamoto, that means he's sitting on a $415 millionfortune.
“The Australian Federal Police can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon [a suburb in Sydney’s north] and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney,” the police told The Telegraph in a statement. “This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency Bitcoin.”
The raid is apparently due to a tax dispute between the Australian Tax Office and Wright's former company, Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence. The company planned to launch a Bitcoin-based bank but ran out of cash in 2014. On Hotwire's tax return that year, it claimed $3.4 million in tax credits, which the ATO is now disputing, BI Australia reported.
"The ATO has disputed the validity of the amounts claimed and has levied a penalty on Hotwire of $1,716,608.00 in respect of the lodgement," wrote McGrath Nicol, the administrators now in charge of Hotwire. "We understand that the Directors dispute the position adopted by the ATO."
George Frey/Getty Images
Who is behind the cryptocurrency that has exploded in popularity since its launch in 2009 has been a source of investigation among enthusiasts and media outlets alike for quite some time. Most notably a California man named Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto was outed as its creatorby Newsweek in 2014, a claim he has "unconditionally" denied.
According to the Wired report, an anonymous source leaked documents to Branwen in November, which include a number of blog posts, emails, transcripts, and accounting forms that corrobate at least a substantial link between Wright and the creation of Bitcoin.
In one now-deleted blog posted right before Bitcoin went live in Jan. 2009, Wright apparently wrote, "The Beta of Bitcoin is live tomorrow. This is decentralized... We try until it works."
Interestingly, Wired was not the only publication on the trail. Gizmodo also received a cache of leaked documents and published a competing report on Tuesday, which apparently links Wright and his now-deceased friend Dave Kleiman to the creation of Bitcoin.
"I hacked Satoshi Naklamoto [sic]," an anonymous emailer wrote in their first message to Gizmodo. "These files are all from his business account. The person is Dr Craig Wright."
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