If Film Noir did Bitcoin – would Wright be the wrong man?

But if this was a Film Noir cut of events, like Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man, Craig Wright could never turn out to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto. He’s too corporate, too neatly suited, too needy of the world’s attention.

Today, a good deal of the Bitcoin community seemed to agree with that. But maybe that’s just the disappointment in discovering the supposed anti-establishment tech innovator lived in a semidetached suburban house with two kids, a dog and a midlife-style sports car.

While the price of Bitcoin jumped on the back of the Wright discovery, chatrooms and digital currency enthusiasts seemed sceptical.

The enduring conundrum at the heart of Bitcoin’s evolution – namely the mystery about its creator’s identity – has so far produced two discredited claims and countless speculation about other bit part players.

It seemed the question about who was the real Satosho Nakamoto had finally been answered.

What seemed to add credence to stories published by Wired and its rivals was the apparent synchronised raid by Australian tax authorities on Wright’s home. The regulator has since claimed it was not related to the headlines. But the timing sure was Hitchcock-esque.

And the proof? The main smoking guns from the stream of leaked emails, tax documents and investigation-transcripts seem to be:

1) a blog posts from 2008, pointing to plans for a ‘cryptocurrency’

2) A leaked communication from Wright during a meeting last year with his lawyers saying: “I did my best to try and hide the fact that I’ve been running Bitcoin since 2009”

And 3) the fact the he created and owns the world’s most powerful private super-computer – one he is interviewed as claiming could soon take on the NSA’s system.

There are other nuggets emerging too, like the fact that he told an online business magazine in 2014 that he was planning to start the world’s first Bitcoin bank through his company Hotwire. While the company has reportedly gone into administration and is now facing questions from Australia’s tax office, the fact that he was able to direct so much accumulated bitcoin wealth towards his entrepreneurial endeavours seems to finger him further.

So, on the one hand you have a 44-year-old who has collected two PhDs and eight master’s degrees. A tech genius who has launched a series of businesses, and has built a super computer. Well, Alan Turing eat your heart out.

But then you have a man who is a prolific writer on crypto currency – except no one has really noticed his contribution to the sum of knowledge before he was named as Satoshi. A man who is a cyber-security consultant on the payroll of big corporates and banks. A man who is publicly critical of hackers. And through the countless video entries under his YouTube page, a man more chippy than secretive visionary.

But does it all matter anyway? The issue in the crypto community is where Bitcoin goes from here. Since its code was released in January 2009, the total value of all bitcoins has grown to nearly $US5bn – but the dilemma is its scalability for the future.

Unlike traditional currencies, it is not backed by a government and has no central authority. Instead, the various pioneers involved are all arguing for competing strategies for its future. If its creator – Satoshi Nakamoto – re-emerged, then belief is that he would have a definitive answer. With his supercomputer, cutely named Coin, Craig Wright has neatly been trialling just these type of solutions.

But the truth is that Bitcoin is no longer the preserve of nerds conjuring up coin through their computers. And it is not Bitcoin per se that will prove revolutionary but the technology and architecture that underpins it: Blockchain. A central public ledger that can’t be faked.

Blockchain is now being adopted and investigated by more than 40 of the world’s most powerful banks and has even triggered interest from the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England. It is already on the high street and in the coding of countless other applications.

And its central premise – that it is decentralised. It is a community, without hierarchical control, which is why the obsession with Nakamoto is so interesting. So, does the identity of one individual change that? In the long run probably not.