Kurt Wuckert Jr., the "Bitcoin Historian" at CoinGeek, discusses with David Lin, anchor for Kitco News, evidence that points to the real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the supposed founder and creator of Bitcoin is one of the most revered mysteries in all of cryptocurrencies. Our next guest claims that he knows Satoshi very well. He's well acquainted with who he actually is, and he has proof and evidence of why he thinks this particular person is.
We'll get into that with occurred worker Jr. He is a Bitcoin historian and he has followed the crypto markets for many, many years and has an insight track on who Satoshi may really be. Kurt. Welcome to the show. Thank you, David Kurt, let's talk about yourself first and why it is that you've become known as the Bitcoin historian.
And we'll talk about the rest of the story as it unfolds. I guess the shortest answer is I've been around a long time. Uh I've I've been a Bitcoiners since 2012. I've been involved in infrastructure consulting. I ran a mining operation in 2013 to 15, uh, but in software development, cybersecurity, uh, but always had, uh, Bitcoin as one of the things I was up to I'm also was involved for a time in like mining Ethereum and Monero and some other things.
So I just kind of have a, a pretty wide grasp of, of the crypto space and. Ultimately, I work as a, as sort of a storyteller now, uh, I get to sort of write the wrongs and, and talk about all this stuff that people don't really talk about anymore. But I, I experienced a lot of it. I know a lot of the people that.
Our big players today from back when they weren't much. And, um, yeah, so I read it, I wrote a column. I do a weekly live stream take live Q and a, and I like to tell the history. So that's what I you're like me. You're a journalist focusing on the crypto space with a, obviously a more storied, uh, history, uh, pun intended of, uh, following the space and a much more knowledgeable than I am.
Uh, I'll have to. So Kurt, let's talk about how it is. You follow the space. So primary information, you have a lot of, uh, contacts within the space. Tell us how it is that you become acquainted with, uh, people like Craig, right? Sure. So, uh, in 2015, uh, the Bitcoin scaling work really heated up, so it was big blockers versus small blockers.
How should Bitcoin scale? What is Bitcoin even for. Uh, basically just a long, long fight, still ongoing, um, ultimately, uh, Bitcoin split into BTC and Bitcoin cash. And then the Bitcoin cash community is split up into BCH and BSB. I'm a big BSB supporter, uh, by default because I like big blocks and BSB is the biggest block implementation of Bitcoin, which means basically it has the lowest fees and the most capacity.
It's the most, uh, frictionless version of Bitcoin to use in. Uh, it's closely associated with Dr. Craig Wright. And so I've just kind of become a, uh, a friend colleague acquaintance by defacto. But, uh, he was not my first choice of guys that just, you know, be friends with and hang out, but we just we'd happened to agree very fundamentally about the Bitcoin protocol.
And so here we are, I'm talking about BSV, uh, towards the end of the interview, but let's, uh, before we get into the case, who is Craig. Well, Dr. Craig Wright is the chief scientist at a research and development firm called N chain in the UK. Uh, he's one of the most decorated cybersecurity professionals of all time author.
He's a, an academic, he's a whole bunch of things. And I happen to believe that he has also said Toshi Nakamoto, the creator of. Okay, let's talk about that. Let's talk about the case first. So the recent, uh, case involving, uh, Craig Wright and David Kleiman, um, now the Miami jury did rule in favor of Dr.
Wright, give us a primer and backstory of this. Sure. So in 2013, uh, Dave Kleiman died, uh, Dave Kleiman was a mostly unknown computer, uh, computer scientist and, and, uh, digital forensics expert. He wrote a few white papers with Craig Wright. Uh, the, the biggest one was the Dr. White fallacy white paper. Um, But ultimately Dave was a pretty simple dude from south Florida, uh, w w worked well, did did his stuff.
He was well-known in certain circles, but, um, he in fact called himself some guy named Dave, and this was in stark comparison to Dr. Craig Wright, uh, who was his best friend in life, uh, and a colleague and a great many thing. They authored, uh, books and white papers together. Uh, but when Dave died, um, Dave's brother.
Got it in his head that, that Dave must have helped Craig create Bitcoin because they partnered on so many things. And ultimately after a couple of years of bickering IRA representing the Dave climate estate sued Craig Wright for 1.1 million Bitcoins, which is an estimate of how many Bitcoins were mined by Satoshi Nakamoto in the first two years of Bitcoin's existence.
And it's, it's been in litigation since 2018 and just wrapped up on Monday of. Okay. Now did climbin assist Craig Wright in writing the original Bitcoin white paper? So maybe not in writing, it's actually a little unclear. Craig Wright was happy to admit that Bragg wrote continue to continue. So preg rate was happy to admit that Craig wrote the original draft or drafts, and that it went to Dave for final editing.
And this was their ongoing long-time relationship. Is that. Would write out some high level computer science, academic, mumbo jumbo, uh, and then he would give it to Dave because Dave was really good at translating high-level stuff to something that could be read at, at a lower level, a little more generalist.
And so, um, that, that's what Craig said he did with Dave and, and there really wasn't any evidence to the contrary. Um, obviously I reclined in a saying, no, no, no, D like Dave helped code, you know, write the first Bitcoin code and, and helped write the first white paper and blah, blah, blah. Uh, ultimately the evidence for that was non-existent and ultimately Craig Wright was vindicated in that.
Well, currently earlier question rested on the assumption that Craig wasn't D the author of the original Bitcoin white paper. Do we have any evidence of this? Uh, we have sworn testimony of a number of people who saw it. Uh, there was Don Lyneham from Australia. Uh, we, we had notes from Alan Granger, from the accounting firm BD.
Uh, these were minutes from 2007 on BDO letterhead that was entered as evidence. Uh, basically Craig explaining the timeline that he would write the white paper and issue code. He was actually attempting to make it a BD BDO project and BDO rejected it, which is why Bitcoin became a w what it was issued by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Um, there was tons of email evidence. Uh, there was lots of emails. Uh, Dave and Craig talking about, Hey, you know, what, should we, should we call it a bit cash? Should we call it Bitcoin? I need your help with some of the trimmings here. Um, a lot of stuff like that, a lot of stuff entered into evidence, a lot of sworn testimony.
Uh, we also had sworn testimony of cryptographic proof from Gavin Andresen, who was the lead developer of Bitcoin after the exit of Satoshi Nakamoto. And people contend that, um, uh, Gavin. Has it has reneged on that, but I, it, it came back up in court under oath and he said, no, I didn't like the way that I was treated.
But ultimately I believe that it's much more likely than not that Craig Wright is sotoshi and that I saw a cryptographic proof of him having Satoshi's keys. So what do you mean by cryptographic proof? So there's a little bit computer sciency, but if you have private keys and a public key pair, you can designate a message.
And if everybody knows the public. Uh, you can decode the message using your private case, showing that you are the holder of a specific private key. Uh, this is commonly used or used to be more commonly used in PGP, uh, which is a concept that made its way into Bitcoin. Um, so rather than moving coins, which is one way to, to prove that you can, uh, control coins is to give a predesignated message and prove that you're the one that can decode it essentially with your private keys.
So. A little bit complicated, but in math circles, people would agree that that is an attestation of identity or holding a certain private key. Okay. This is what I'm wondering. And we can talk about the history of, uh, the founding of Bitcoin up until the court case. If, if Dr. Wright wanted to be anonymous, which I presume he did, because he chose a pseudonym of Satoshi.
Why is he coming out into the limelight now? Fighting for his right in a very public way. Sure. Well, to be fair was sued anonymous. So he, he was not trying to be anonymous, but he was trying to be private. So he didn't want to be a public figure. But, uh, as we learned in court, there were, uh, uh, you know, 20 ish people who knew that he was working on Bitcoin and knew that he was basically said Toshi Nakamoto.
Um, so it wasn't something that he was, he was hiding per se. Um, th this included family members, this included work colleagues, this included, uh, employees of his, uh, accountants and in fact, the Australian tax office. So, um, what, he didn't want us to be a media sensation and ultimately the way that things came out, um, it, it, we discovered in the case that the doxing of Craig Wright, which was a pretty famous event, uh, late 2015, wired and Gizmodo magazines, um, published a story saying Craig Wright, and maybe Dave.
Our Satoshi Nakamoto. Preg was never sure where that information came from, like how it leaked out, but that's when he became a public figure. We discovered in this case that it looks like I recline in concert with a couple of employees at Greg's, uh, companies in the, uh, the country of Australia, as well as working with the Australian tax.
Seemed to have basically colluded to out Craig us at Toshi Nakamoto to put public pressure in order to actually build up precedent for this lawsuit. So it's a, it's a, it's a weird one. Yeah. Let's talk about the details of this lawsuit. So climbing versus right. It was ruled in favor of, right. What exactly did he win?
Let's be specific here. So he was being sued for that, depending on how you measure it somewhere between 300 and $600 billion. Worth of intellectual property value, uh, Bitcoins and all, you know, and plus punitive damages and whatever else. Um, ultimately IRA was saying that, uh, the intellectual property that, that helped create Bitcoin helped create Bitcoin mining software and then ultimately made it possible to mine.
Bitcoin was created at least 50% by Dave, uh, in the trial. Like we had nothing but circumstantial evidence of. And ultimately with the, the burden of proof was not met, uh, according to the jury and the jury thought that it was very clear that while Craig had the ability, the credentials, the time, uh, and evidence of Craig working on these things, there was just no evidence of them working on it together.
Until a very late stage. The only evidence was essentially, Hey, Dave, this is basically ready to go. I could really use you to edit this white paper. Maybe helped me bootstrap it. Like, Hey, maybe you can help mine, but not mine in a partnership. It's like, Hey man, fire up a laptop, mine it, we need nodes and you get paid to mine.
So, um, it seems very much. Good friends. Uh, two did work together sort of, but they were definitely not a legal business partnership. And that's how the jury in Miami found it. Well, skeptics of Dr. Wright would say that the, uh, the. Proved that, well, I guess the outcome of the trial proved that climbin did not in fact work with right where at least there wasn't enough substantial evidence to prove that climate worked with.
Right. But it doesn't prove that right. Worked on this alone. Right? Th that is what critics say. Absolutely. Um, I, by the middle of this trial and I was every single day of the trial, there was 15 days of trial. There was seven days of deliberation after there are a couple of holiday spots. Um, it was a good 75 hours or so of watching evidence and testimony.
And by about four or five days into the trial, I started to say, publicly, man, if credit rate is not Satoshi Nakamoto, he's been pretending to be since like 2006 or seven and has done almost nothing else since it's frankly. Um, I don't know when he would have had time to do anything else. If he was not Satoshi, like the whole thing just really doesn't make any sense.
Uh, and ultimately the, the attorneys on both sides and all of the, all of the research that went into this, I mean, I reclined and was able to procure funding in order to get this litigation. So yeah, there has been a very serious group of people researching this case before it went to litigation into litigation, there was multiple rounds of settlement discussions that went in before this actually went to trial.
And over the course of about three, three and a half years before this. Everyone that looked at, it said, absolutely it is worth suing Craig for Satoshi's fortune. So, um, either everyone's a fool or there's at least as much evidence as is needed to say, Hey man, we're going to spend $50 million to try to get this multi-billion dollar fortune.
So, w what's interesting to me is that nobody else that I know of has come forward to challenge Craig on his, on his ownership. No, no serious candidates. There's, there's, you know, a goofball here and there that pops up, but they're their stories fall apart very quickly. Uh, and any real analysis of any other plausible Sitoshi candidate falls apart with about 30 to 60 minutes of real research and looking at time and place and their basic skill set or the way that they communicate.
Um, you know, some of the things that make sense about Craig being Satoshi or the. Uh, he is a Queen's English speaker, he's Australian. So he speaks with the tongue of the Commonwealth, which is something that was very notable about Satoshi saying words like bloody as an adjective as is something that you would get from an Aussie or a British person.
And, and that's, that's how Craig speaks or something. There's also something to be a British person perhaps. But then there's also things like the background and like math, economics, statistics, and, and all of these different things. Like Bitcoin is a polymath. Invention. And Craig is one of the very few people on earth that has both the cryptographic experience, but also the economic experience to have come up with even the idea with any real.
Well, just to play devil's advocate. And I'm not the only one with this. Uh, what this question is if Craig Wright were the original or if he was the original, uh, founder of Bitcoin, if he is actually Satoshi wouldn't he have the keys to the original coins that he mind, like, why, why does he need to go through a trial to prove that he is the, the, the, the founder, he could just access those coins, right?
T to be fair. He didn't want this trial. He was sued. So Craig would have very much liked for this trial to not happen. I'm sure he's, he's become a, a more litigious character, uh, over time as people continue to, uh, say that he's a fraud and he just keeps saying, okay, well Sue me, I guess. And, um, but, but yes, in the most simple sense, right.
If you're sotoshi sign or, or, or move coins, they're your coins. Right. Uh, but, but one of the things that came up in the trial is the fact that. Um, they're not, Craig's the person there, Craig, uh, as an officer of various business entities and, and some of these coins are also held or quite a bit of the coins are held in trusts and these trusts, uh, specifically are set up so that Craig is not a trustee.
And a lot of this is, is for protection reasons. Um, and, and, and just legal, you know, taxation and, and stuff like that. So he's said from the beginning, um, Hey, I didn't ask to be outed. I was. Um, I don't really owe the world anything. Um, I gave the world Bitcoin, and if you don't want to believe me, I don't care.
I'm not asking for anything. And so he's, um, you know, particular about his privacy and understand that that can come across as convenient, but, but ultimately, uh, since, uh, 2017, when these things, um, start when this case started as roughly, when Craig started to become a contentious public. And so when people say, Hey, move coins, he's had to say they're under litigation.
Like I can't move assets under litigation. I'm going to get, I'm going to get nailed for conversion or whatever else in this trial. So, uh, really Craig has only had these coins unencumbered since Monday. So, uh, that's the tact you mentioned to me. Okay. He was, he was hacked, uh, at least twice that we're aware of.
So in 2014, among the ATO investigation, it looks like employees of his company, uh, basically worked or colluded with the Australian tax authority. Uh, and his servers had to be rebuilt from scratch. So that was a major point where there was document loss and, and all metadata, basically as updated to 2014, making it very difficult to.
Uh, time and place of files that happen before that point. And then he was also hacked again, I believe it was early 2020. Uh, he became aware of a very sophisticated attack, uh, on his private server that may or may not have destroyed his private keys, but at the very least they were compromised. And that was a major, the major issue for him.
Uh, he actually has not made it. Uh, whether the keys were destroyed or if they're just compromised or whatever, but he's been in court to try to figure out, Hey, what is, what is the legal ramification? How do I protect myself? And this precedent setting situation stepping for a minute, maybe if you know the details, can you explain the details of how his keys were hacked?
Because a lot of people watching the show who are crypto investors might be wondering, okay, what can I do to prevent that from happening? So I'm actually a cybersecurity expert myself, or at least I was a professional myself. So I want to say that everyone is hackable. Uh, it's it's about cost benefit analysis.
So if you're very rich, then it makes sense for hackers to, to spend money, trying to hack you nonstop. The, the best advice is look poor and keep your stuff offline. Um, for Craig, what it looks like happened, there was some kind of listening device that was put on his home network. So he had somebody. Maybe come in as a contractor, maybe it was a staff member in one of his homes or something, but somebody connected a listening device to his home network that was listening for, for passwords.
And ultimately at some point a password was put on the network. It was Keilani and it was, it was sent out to some malicious actor. Um, so that's, that's a, that's a very sophisticated attack. It would have required physical entry to his home, uh, or access to his network. So. Could've been somebody pretending to be from his ISP or, or, or we don't really know, but it was discovered well, fast forward to today, does Craig now have the right and the ability to move Satoshi coins?
It would seem so. Uh, I don't know how long the appeals process, like how long, um, the, the plaintiffs have the opportunity to appeal the decision from the court case. Uh, it hasn't happened yet. And as I understand that, it's, it's very customary to make that announcement very quickly. While upon judgment these coins, are they currently being held in custody somewhere?
No, they are held, uh, as far as we know that they are the property of Satoshi Nakamoto. According to Craig, they're held in custody of this trust and or various business entities. But, but that somebody has those keys. Presumably we believe they do. I believe they do. People. People argue that they do not.
People would say that either they're destroyed or they've been damaged and they cannot move. Or, uh, people have said that. Greg never had them at all. Well, so a digital file. It's like a corrupted file, for example, would mean that your password is, is gone. Yeah. Well, well, hackers better get to work. Find those keys.
Um, Craig Wright owes $110 million, uh, according to the trial outcome. What does that mean? Exactly? What w why, why does he owe 110 million. So ultimately there were seven counts in the trial. It included a fraud conversion, civil theft, a breach of fiduciary duty, et cetera. Uh, Craig was found, uh, on one of the counts to have, uh, converted assets in a way which was, uh, not, not good.
He was found guilty on that, on that point. Um, the conversion of assets, however, were the assets of WUN K corporation. So they were not, I reclines assets. They were the assets of a corporation. That appears to be owned at least 66, but maybe up to 75% by, uh, the right family. So it would be great investments international.
Uh, his wife Lynn Wright was very often an officer at the companies that he set up. And then Dave was legitimately a 25% owner of that company. And so the a hundred million dollars that needs to go to w and K and for defense, uh, at most, it looks like about 25% would go to the estate of Dave climate, but also.
This a hundred million dollars was, was procedural and the jury made it very clear. We're not assigning punitive damages to that. We believe it was a procedural mistake and not a malicious action on behalf of. I believe you were with Craig right after the hearing ended. Right? How did he feel personally?
How did he, uh, w w did you perceive this to be a victory on his, uh, on his end reading the, the, the, the verdicts down the line? Uh, you could see Craig very visibly breathing, a sigh of relief leaning back in his chair, like rubbing the top of his head with both hands. Like very, very excited. It was stand up, shake, hands, hug.
Uh, Craig was very excited about this. I mean, he could have essentially lost the $600 billion fortune, right. So will only pay a hundred million dollars, uh, was, uh, was a very serious outcome. And the plaintiffs, uh, looked, I mean, th they, they walked out quietly. It was that they felt that as a loss, it can probably one of the richest people in the world, right.
The outcome, the verdict of this. Absolutely. If these coins are unencumbered, um, I on paper, yeah, he, he is very much one of the richest men in, in theory. He could be the richest man, depending on, uh, I haven't checked the charts this morning, so, well, I don't know if he was the guy that bought pizza with Bitcoin, the first transaction.
Actually that's an, that's a known person. So that's Laszlo. His name is Laszlo Hyatt, right? Yeah. There wasn't no person BSD. Let's talk about BSV real quick. What is it? You mentioned earlier in the interview that you're a believer in BSV Y so BSV is the unbounded Bitcoin protocol. Uh, it is the most scalable blockchain in existence.
It has the lowest fee. Every single thing across the network has proof of work. So essentially everything that you've ever heard that was really cool about Bitcoin and Ethereum, uh, is done better, faster, cheaper on BSV. So this is smart contracts, tokenization. You can actually put applications like full, juicy, functional apps up in the Bitcoin stack.
You can monetize all data. It is a data storage solution. That is a very, very unique blockchain, but it is uniquely. In fact, there are more transactions some days on BSB than there are on the rest of the entire blockchain economy combined. And it's because it scales, it does what it says it's going to do.
And ultimately it is just a reimplementation of what Satoshi Nakamoto created, meaning that the rest of the blockchain economy really never needed to be invented at all. We could have just stuck with Bitcoin from day one, but it was delisted by a bunch of exchanges. Right. What, why do they do. Uh, a couple of things.
First is his drama with Craig, right? Uh, people don't, people don't like being sued. And when, uh, when Craig starts threatening to Sue people, there was definitely a circling of the wagons, uh, by financing, Coinbase and cracking and a few others. But ultimately these, these are the people that are kind of colluding to, to Sue.
Again, so there's this Copa, the crypto open patent Alliance has come together to Sue him basically in order to prove that he's not Satoshi Nakamoto. So there's, well, that's a real ax to grind there. That, that, that leads me to my ultimate question as to why there is this other side. I mean, look, I'm not playing one side or the other, I'm just saying you're red.
You're representing. One point of view, which is that Craig has a Toshi and of course there's the other side that he is not. But if you're going to argue that Craig is not Satoshi while at least present an alternative to who is actually Satoshi. So again, so far, I haven't heard of who that person may be.
The real Satoshi may the real Toshi, please stand up if you are watching this. But, uh, my question is why, why the, uh, why the dissent, why the disagreement over the evidence, at least you have. Sure. I think the best thing to do is to look at Coinbase as public offering documents and they listed a few reasons why it might be a bad investment to invest in Coinbase or cryptocurrency in general.
And their main point was that Satoshi Nakamoto is the largest holder of Bitcoin. And if you were to re-emerge, he would have so much control over the markets that he could dump the entire market down. Basically zero, he could make it a valueless investment. And so there's a gigantic existential risk that if so Toshi Nakamoto does not believe in the investment thesis of, of all the stuff that they've built, that, that he's a very dangerous figure to their wealth and their power and what, and what they've been doing.
And, and I, I don't blame them. Uh, so if Craig right, um, is Satoshi Nakamoto and does control those. He said plain and simple. I do not like that. It has become essentially Ponzi scheme, illegal gambling. He does not like the tax evasion aspects of things that have occurred. And in the blockchain economy, he advocates for a micropayment system that disrupts global commerce.
He wants people to build businesses that couldn't exist without the technology. And nobody's doing that. They're building exchanges and, and basically unregistered banks. And these are the business models that have been created. Uh, the white paper that, uh, Satoshi wrote, uh, advocated for a peer-to-peer system, which ultimately became Bitcoin.
Do you think Bitcoin has kept the original framework with the original intentions of Satoshi? Or do you think it has evolved in its YouTube? Uh, no, in fact, I think it is devolved. So if you look at, at BTC, uh, you know, the, the, whatever it is today, $55,000, $50,000 today, and coin price, uh, it's, it's changed immensely that the fees have gone up.
It has become less useful in business than it was a decade ago. Uh, and ultimately has had everything stripped away from it that didn't matter. Uh, a good investment for the venture capital partners that have turned it into what it is and what it did is it created the opportunity to create other coins to trade.
So this is your Ethereum, your XRP, et cetera. So now you're creating market opportunity to play with volatility, and that's what the people really want out of it. They don't see it as an opportunity. You know, make some data intense business and, and create a data integrity opportunity that you can sell back to the economy.
That's a lot of work. You can just buy a coin, wait for it, to go up, sell it or do something else with it. And you're very rich with very little work. And so, um, the peer-to-peer cash system part, I think, has been, um, heavily ignored and it's to the detriment of the, of the whole global economy. It's, it's an amazing invention and we're not using it.
It's really unfair. Well, let's, let's, let's go back to that risk. You mentioned earlier if Craig right were actually Satoshi, do you think he would dump the majority of his coins? He may. I mean, when, when he's been angry about people's attitudes, he's threatened it. So, uh, you know, when somebody calls him a liar and a fraud and a scammer, he's like, you know, I could, I could wreck this entire industry and I don't.
Um, he, he, he may, I mean, if, if he owns the, the assets, he has every right to it's his property course. Uh, but, but I don't think, you know, when he's, when he's in a normal mood and in a normal business situation, he looks at it and says, look, it made me one of the richest men in the world. I don't want to destroy the world or other, but market value of his coins again, suppose it to ownership.
So at the peak, um, I think there were worth about $75 billion just to the coins that we know that Satoshi has. Right. Yeah. Pretty, pretty good chunk of change. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Wow. Yeah, life could be worse. Um, let's end it here, Kurt. So I'm going to give you three possibilities and we're going to just evaluate each one quickly and maybe assign a probability.
I mean, just, it doesn't have to be exact hard, you know, science behind the number. It's just, you know, just less than 50, greater than 50. So there's basically three outcomes from, from what I've gathered basically, uh, Satoshi could be. Uh, so Toshi could be somebody else besides Craig who wants to stay anonymous because he hasn't come forward to challenge Craig right.
Yet. Or if the Toshi could be Craig Wright, right. So let's go through these three outcomes or three possibilities. So Toshi being dead. Do we have any literature pointing to that outcome?
Dave climate is dead. Uh, Dave Kleiman helped with the white paper, as I understand it. Uh, there's also a David Reese who helped with the math. Uh, some of the high-level cryptography stuff. He is dead. And then the guy that actually helped make the software, uh, finally stand up. Craig is, uh, a good programmer, but not a great.
Uh, Kalfiney, Kalfiney made it, made it actually work and how Finney is also dead. So, um, it's, it's like, how do you keep a secret between three people and two of them are dead? Well, I, Craig Kirk happens to be in the position where everybody who seems to know their whole story is dead. So we have out of the names of Toshi come about how did that, how did that, uh, how was that.
Um, so if, if you believe Craig, uh it's so Nakamoto is a Japanese economist. He's basically the Japanese, um, Adam Smith. He's a free market capitalist, uh, philosopher. And then, so. I, I don't even know if he was joking, but, but he, uh, said it had something to do with Pokemon and whatever else, Craig is a big fan of Japanese culture.
So he came up with it on his own. Uh, no, any Pokemon called Satoshi maybe, but maybe I only know the original one 50. I don't know. I don't know where the other ones now. Okay. I think he said it was an anagram of the Japanese pronunciation of Ash. But this is way above my pay grade. Okay. All right. What about the second possibility that, uh, Craig Wright is indeed somebody else who chooses to stay anonymous?
Of course, if that entity or person or organization wants to be anonymous, they're doing a fine damn job. I may say. Yeah. I mean, if, if Satoshi, if the real Satoshi is out there watching Craig Wright and all of this stuff, I dunno, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty weird that he would care so much and build this thing and participate in the community for, for two years and, and really have a big passion for what Bitcoin is.
And then not have an opinion during the whole Bitcoin civil war and everything. Like man, say something, he just doesn't care. Maybe, maybe he just doesn't want the 65 or $70 billion worth the coins. Maybe he wasn't in it for that. Right. It's a possibility, but you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a human nature guy. I mean, I don't, I don't see human nature making that a, an obvious, I don't mean to make conspiracy theories, but maybe it's a government entity that wants to remain, you know, uh, separated from, from what people are talking about.
They don't like the government entity doesn't want to be identified. Th th there's a million maybes and the rabbit holes are fun, but I'd rather do it over drinks than over a finally Craig. Right. Okay. Well, you've talked about, we've talked about Craig Wright, um, extensively. What does he now need to do to prove to skeptics that he is indeed Satoshi.
If Craig Wright is in fact interested in actually proving that he has. I think for some critics, there will never be sufficient proof. Um, but I do think he would win. He would win the hearts and minds of a lot of people in the middle by, by moving Satoshi coins. I mean, if he were to do that, there would be no reasonable person left who could say that, that it isn't him.
Uh, however he's winning tons and tons of hearts and minds. Now with the proof that we've seen. I mean, there's, there's an incredible amount of evidence that we've seen just again, sworn attestations, tons of physical level. Uh, sworn testimony from, from people who he's done signing sport privately. Um, but, but yeah, I mean, as a, as a fan of all of this, and as someone who, you know, I'm a historian and I get to get a big bump and talk about really cool stuff.
When it happens, it'll be a pretty big day, uh, when, and if Satoshi coins move and, and all of that, all he has to do is move one coin, right? Once he can make a 25 cent transaction. And that is what. Yep. All right, Kurt, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Excellent insights, great history lesson from the Bitcoin historian.
Thank you, Kurt. Thank you, David. I appreciate it. And thank you for watching kicker news. I'm David Lynn. Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel. .