- Bitcoin core developer Greg Maxwell has told Craig Wright that the walls are “closing in around” him
- Blockstream founder Maxwell is a long time critic of Wright, bashing his claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto
- Maxwell once volunteered to fly to Australia to “offer expert testimony against this fraud”
Greg Maxwell, a long time Bitcoin core developer and the founder of Blockstream, has told Craig Wright in an email that “the walls are closing in” and that he should come clean about his fraudulent attempts to claim that he is Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Maxwell, a divisive figure who many think is the person behind Monday’s signing of 145 addresses allegedly held in Wright’s Tulip Trust account, added that Wright was tangled in a “web of lies” that threatened to continue unraveling, which represents the latest round in a four and a half year battle.
Greg Maxwell Urges Wright to “Confess”
In the email, Maxwell urges Wright to “confess” to the fact that he has been lying for all these years about creating Bitcoin and “expose the truth of everything”, stating that Wright could become a “reformed conman” if he did so.
Maxwell’s email comes on the back of further evidence that Wright lied to the court about the addresses he claimed to have mined Bitcoin to in 2009 – the owner of 145 of those wallets cryptographically signed them with a message slating Wright’s claims to have created Bitcoin on Monday. Many think this person was Maxwell, partly because of his known mining exploits in the early days and his animosity towards Wright.
Maxwell’s Four and a Half Year War
Maxwell’s claims of Wright’s illegitimacy to the title of Satoshi Nakamoto date back to 2015 and the publication of articles by Gizmodo and Wired which first raised the prospect of Wright creating Bitcoin. In a Reddit post in December of that year, Maxwell raised the suggestion that one of the PGP keys associated to Satoshi’s original wallets was fake:
This key was…not on the keyservers in 2011 according to my logs; which doesn’t prove it was backdated, but there is basically no evidence that it wasn’t and non-trivial evidence that it was.
This is not the first time that Maxwell has challenged Wright’s claims to have invented Bitcoin. In 2017 Maxwell offered to fly to Australia to prove that Wright was a fraud following a dispute on Reddit, during which Maxwell also cast doubt on Wright’s Bitcoin wallet ownership:
I am quite confident that you’ll discover the high value Bitcoin addresses which Wright was claiming were his property… are in fact those of the MTGOX bitcoin exchange and were never his property at all.
Wright will likely shrug off the criticism from Greg Maxwell, given that the developer has been on his case for some time now, but it does draw more attention to Wright’s situation and is reflective of a growing amount of speculation about his past activities and current claims.
