Since the founding of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency in 2009, its inventor has been shrouded in mystery. Until now. Australian tech entrepreneur Craig Wright, long-suspected of having created crypto-currency Bitcoin, has confirmed his identity to three media organisations - the BBC, the Economist and GQ.
Wright presented proof that only the true creator of the crypto-currency could have provided, the BBC said.
The hunt for Bitcoin's founder had become a cottage industry among some journalists. The chase has veered from a Finnish sociologist to a Japanese mathematician to a Japanese-American engineer, all of whom denied it. (Also read: What Is a Bitcoin? All That You Need to Know About the Cryptocurrency)
Why would anyone care about who is the founder of bitcoin? Three reasons why.1. Bitcoin is designed for secure financial transactions that require no central authority — no banks, no government regulators. That makes it attractive to off-the-grid types such as libertarians, people who want to evade tax authorities, and criminals, even though Bitcoin doesn't guarantee anonymity, since it documents every transaction in a public forum. Still, it has attracted conspiracy theorists interested in the very conspiracy that created it. It is a part of the mystery of bitcoin.2. Bitcoin is still working out kinks and problems, one of which is a dispute over an arbitrary cap on the number of bitcoins transactions that are processed each day by so-called miners who keep the system running. Some advocates have wanted the bitcoin founder to re-emerge and resolve the conflict, even though the founder hasn't been involved for years.3. The bitcoin creator's encrypted PGP key can unlock a huge stash of bitcoins — a million or so worth more than $400 million, accounting for about 7 per cent of all bitcoins in existence. No one has touched that bitcoin hoard. Should the real founder begin cashing in those bitcoins, it could destabilise the cryptocurrency.
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