Alleged Bitcoin Creator Raided By Australian Authorities (arstechnica.com)

wbr1 writes: As reported yesterday, Wired and Gizmodo think Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Australian businessman Craig Wright

Now, Craig Wright has been raided by Australian police. Curiously, a statement from the Australian federal police said that the raids were not related to the recent Bitcoin revelation. "The AFP can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney. This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin." Supposedly not related, but interesting nonetheless.

Reuters adds,"At Wright's rented home, a modest brick house in the leafy middle class suburb of Gordon, three police workers wearing white gloves could be seen searching the garage, which contained gym equipment. A man who identified himself as the owner of the house, Garry Hayres, told Reuters that Wright and his family had lived there for a year, and were due to move out on Dec. 22 to move to Britain. Hayres said that Wright had a 'substantial computer system set-up' and had attached a 'three-phase' power system to the back of the house for extra power."

Comments

You'd be raided too

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine if the IRS suddenly found out you had four hundred million dollars' worth of undeclared capital gains.

Re:You'd be raided too

[PPH]

I thought Bitcoin was a commodity. Capital gains aren't realized until you sell them for actual money.

Re:You'd be raided too

[prunus.avium]

Supposedly unrelated. He was already having tax problems before the story broke...at least, that's what the authorities are saying.

Re: You'd be raided too

[thegarbz]

but the timing was related

Could not possibly be. There's a lot of words used to describe the federal police, but fast is not one of them. Raiding a house literally hours after news broke on some internet magazine? If the government actually possessed that kind of efficiency we would have solved all the world's problems by now.

Re: You'd be raided too

[fafaforza]

Well, governments are good at moving when it involves money coming their way. Witness red light cameras, how quickly meter maids spawn out of thin air, and how fast they garnish your wages. But you try to get money out of them, or another private citizen, and all of a sudden it's like trying to squeeze water out of a brick.

Re: You'd be raided too

[TWX]

Kinda makes me wonder about that initial founding block of bitcoins that has never been used, and if this person has necessary information to actually access that block, what the legal issues for that would be for both him and for that initial unused block. Some have cited that block as part of the reason why bitcoin is reasonably stable, but if that block now somehow became Australia's property and if they chose to start spending it, what that would do to the scrip.

Re: You'd be raided too

[pla]

Kinda makes me wonder about that initial founding block of bitcoins that has never been used

BTC clients don't allow transactions against the genesis block (#0). Originally this resulted naturally from the the way the client inserted transactions into the local database (often called a bug, but possible done by design to address exactly what you ask); Newer versions handle it as an explicitly disallowed transaction (and even if you rolled your own version that allowed it, no other clients would honor it).

So no, gaining control of Satoshi's private keys couldn't compromise the blockchain; they could at best spend his BTC starting from block #1.

Re: You'd be raided too

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

If the government actually possessed that kind of efficiency we would have solved all the world's problems by now.

Err, not likely. The US government at least was made to be inefficient. Because they had a taste of how efficiently the king could levy taxes against them. Slowness in a 3 branch government is a designed in feature, not a bug.

Re: I think I've missed something

[ArmoredDragon]

It's simple; some drugs mysteriously showed up in his house after he raped a teenager. You know, the usual life sentence type stuff.

Getting "outed" as Satoshi Nakamoto is new SWATing

[sinij]

Getting "outed" as Satoshi Nakamoto is the new SWATing, I suggest we call it IRSing and it is much, much worse.

Re:I think I've missed something

[Tailhook]

Because there are a lot of zeros involved. The creator supposedly holds a large amount of bitcoin mined early on and now it's worth a fortune; $400-$1000 million, depending on who you believe.

Authorities see all those zeros and all precedent and due process go straight out the window; instant door kicking time. You could offer them proof positive of an ISIS cell with a chemical weapon in a Sydney residence and they wouldn't move this fast.

Parallel Construction

[Anonymous Coward]

Well either its an ex-employee whose a master hacker... or its a parallel construction thing.

NSA will have grabbed satoshi@vistomail.com emails, the email associated with Satoshi Nakamoto.
It hands the emails to the Aussies (remember the illegal spook surveillance of Kim Dotcom of MegaUpload?).
Now how do you explain how the Aussie police have private emails from a server of an unrelated person who has committed no determinable crime? This Satoshi Nakamoto figure?..... you leak the same emails to Gizmodo and Wired anonymously, and claim you received an anonymous tipoff.

It's likely this part (From Gizmodo):

"The hacker also provided a PDF file of what appears to be an unfinished draft of a legal contract between Wright and Kleiman forming a secret Bitcoin trust in the Seychelles, a notorious tax haven in the Indian Ocean. The contract shows Dave Kleiman in receipt of 1,100,111 bitcoin, to be repaid to Craig Wright on January 1, 2020. Several reports, including an oft-cited technical analysis by Bitcoin expert Sergio Demian Lerner, estimate Satoshi Nakamoto’s legendary Bitcoin fortune at around 1 million BTC — a figure that nearly matches the amount in the Seychelles trust. It also lists five PGP keys — files that are used to establish encrypted lines of communication over email — that will be used to manage the trust. Searching for those keys in a public database reveals that one belongs to Wright, one belongs to Kleiman, and two belong to Satoshi Nakamoto."

Re:Why?

[UnknownSoldier]

Why does *anything* have 'value' ?

It can be either:

- intrinsic (like metals or silicon because of how they can be used)
- extrinsic (because of greed of an artificial market, like diamonds)

The medium is irrelevant -- be it physical or digital. Why do you think some people pay hundreds of dollars for a digital weapon? Because they have more money then time and want it "now."

Never underestimate the price some people put on greed.

--
~2022 The greatest discovery: First Contact
~2024 The greatest tragedy: World War 3

Re:Three-phase power

[Z00L00K]

3-phase is a lot more common outside the US than in the US.

When you run 3-phase you have 230-240 V to ground, but about 400V between the phases. If it had been a 2-phase system then it would be almost 500V.

Many residential dwellings in Scandinavia actually runs 3-phase 400V, even 2 and 3 room apartments. And many appliances are available in more variants in 3-phase than in 1-phase.

Another reason for running 3-phase is that you will lower the current through the neutral wire causing less problems with ground currents.

And then we have the Norwegian 3-phase system with 230V between the phases and no neutral. But there's a historical reason for that - Norway have a lot of ground with high resistance where a neutral/ground wire don't work well.

Re:Why?

[Solandri]

The value of anything is how much other people think it's worth. A friend made a fortune importing Pokemon cards for sale to retailers even though he (and I) thought they were the stupidest things. They are just a few cents of cardboard with ink printed on them. But arrange that ink in a certain way so a bunch of people (rightly or wrongly) think it's valuable, and suddenly they're worth several dollars.

So even if you think bitcoins are stupid (I do), that doesn't mean they're worthless. They're worth what someone else is willing to pay for them, which is quite a lot.

On a more abstract level, that enough people value bitcoins enough to raise it to its current price does indicate substantial discontent with traditional financial systems. That's a real problem irrespective of whether or not bitcoins make sense.

Re:Why?

[PRMan]

I think they have value for EXACTLY the reason of your last statement. They solve a real problem, that of who can control your money.

Re:Mining

[amicusNYCL]

The potential mining aspect doesn't make much sense. Why would you go to great expense to try and mine bitcoins if you already have over a million of them?

If this is true, I doubt he's mining much of anything. The Wired article contains a video which appears to be from a Bitcoin conference in October of this year where Wright appeared via Skype. He mentions that he currently has a computer in Iceland that is the 15th most powerful supercomputer in the world. He's not using that to mine bitcoins, he's using it to model the scalability of bitcoin. So, he's not going through the great expense to try and mine bitcoins, he's going through the great expense to model the system and see what's ahead. Maybe that is a direct result of the recent debate over the size of blocks. The additional power coming to his home could also be used for modeling, or it could be used for additional research or work unrelated to bitcoin. If this is a man with the kind of resources to set up a major supercomputer in Iceland to take advantage of the cheap electricity, I don't see any reason for him to run additional power to his house in Sydney for the purpose of mining bitcoins. That doesn't make sense. If mining was his goal then he would do it in Iceland, not metro Sydney.