Australian police raid alleged bitcoin founder’s home and office
The home and office owned by the man attributed as the founder of crypto-currency bitcoin has reportedly been raided by federal Australian police.
Police said that the raids on Craig Steven Wight’s properties in Sydney were related to tax as opposed to bitcoin.
Wright was named by Gizmodo as the real Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym used by the creator of bitcoin, as a result of being sent emails and document files accessed by a hacker showing Wright making repeated claims to being Nakamoto.
Speculation was also created by an article in Wired which also reported on leaked emails it had obtained connecting Wright with Nakamoto, as well as transcripts and accounting forms.
A leaked transcript of a meeting between Wright, attorneys and tax officials that took place in February last year appears in the Wired article and quotes Wright as saying: “I did my best to try and hide the fact that I’ve been running bitcoin since 2009. By the end of this I think half the world is going to bloody know.”
Bitcoin, which was founded in 2009, is used by several online gambling operators but can be used anonymously and in some cases players are able to register and play using only an email address without further identification.
It was reported by Newsweek in March last year that Satoshi Nakamoto is not a pseudonym and the man behind Bitcoin is a 64-year-old Japanese American.
Nakamoto is reported to be the holder of approximately one million bitcoins, worth roughly $407m at the time of writing.
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