This wild Satoshi theory links Paul LeRoux and Craig Wright
Following the release last week of an HBO documentary naming Peter Todd as Satoshi, renewed speculation around the whereabouts of the Bitcoin creator’s private keys has breathed new life into an old theory involving ex-crime boss Paul LeRoux, and one of the Bitcoin community’s earliest participants, Craig Wright.
As the theory goes, Wright supposedly took computer files containing Satoshi’s private keys from crime boss LeRoux, could not decrypt them, and so enlisted help to attempt to “brute force” the keys.
The theory also states that LeRoux, the leader of a transnational criminal operation involving sophisticated arms and drugs payments, was or knew the creator of Bitcoin. Bitcoin as a pseudonymous, international, and irreversible payment method was eminently useful for his money-laundering and gambling activities.
A brilliant cryptographer in his own right and a perennial top 20 guess for the possible person behind the Satoshi pseudonym, LeRoux supposedly helped secure Satoshi’s private keys using his self-coded encryption technology, E4M.
Eventually, LeRoux’s criminal empire collapsed, and amid the chaos, Wright — who lied about being Satoshi Nakamoto according to the UK High Court of Justice — somehow managed to get his hands on his E4M-based TrueCrypt storage volumes containing Satoshi’s keys.
Read more: Craig Wright posts video from bare closet as he dodges payments
Craig Wright’s court filing cites Paul Le Roux
In response to deposition questions about people that Wright and Dave Kleiman had helped law enforcement apprehend, Wright’s lawyers forgot to redact a citation to LeRoux’s Wikipedia page. This somehow adds credence to the idea that Wright became a government informant who aided in LeRoux’s downfall.
With Le Roux safely offline and serving a 25-year sentence at FCI Fort Dix, a low-security US federal correctional institution, Wright was supposedly now in possession of his encrypted volume containing Satoshi’s private keys. Protected by TrueCrypt’s powerful E4M security and unable to crack the code himself, Wright needed help.
It was a treasure worth hunting. From 2009 to 2011, Satoshi mined approximately 1.1 million bitcoin. When Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator disappeared, this stash was worth virtually nothing. However, today, that same bitcoin is worth $74 billion.
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Edit 13:05 UTC, Dec 5: Edited piece to remove references to Calvin Ayre and his alleged relationship with Wright and Le Roux.