Why the 145 Bitcoin Addresses Calling Craig Wright a Fraud in 2020 Were Probably Signed by Jack Dorsey

On February 14, 2018 the estate of Dave Kleiman sued the now discredited Craig Wright on the basis that Wright owed the estate billions of dollars worth of bitcoins. That’s because Wright was claiming to be Satoshi, had told the Kleiman family that Dave Kleiman had helped him build Bitcoin, and asserted that the two of them had become incredibly wealthy as a result. Since Kleiman had passed away, his estate believed it had been deprived of its share of the wealth and sued Wright to turn it over.

The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of Florida, became a public spectacle, and on more than one occasion Wright informed the Court that he could not access the list of his bitcoin holdings because it had supposedly become inaccessible after a technical issue with the Tulip Trust he placed it in. On January 14, 2020, however, Wright mysteriously recovered the list of his bitcoin holdings and turned it over to the plaintiff.

On May 21, 2020, plaintiff filed a motion for sanctions and cited the list Wright had provided as an exhibit. Plaintiff said that the list contained 16,404 bitcoin addresses and was probably a forgery. At first, plaintiff filed the exhibit into the public record but then subsequently asked the judge to seal the record. It was too late, however, the list went viral. Since Wright had claimed to be Satoshi, his alleged holdings in this list went back as far as block #1.

And that’s where Wright’s problems began, because on May 25, 2020, the private keys to 145 of those 16,404 bitcoin addresses were used to sign a message that said:

“Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn’t have the keys used to sign this message.

We are all Satoshi”

The bitcoin addresses are on the left and the signatures on the right. By using all three factors: the message, the address, and the signature, anyone can paste them into a bitcoin wallet like Electrum to verify that they were signed by the person with the private key to each address.

For research, I pulled the date that each address came into existence through its coinbase award and sorted from oldest address to newest.

What you’re seeing in the first and last entry are vanity addresses, a cute little system that Satoshi introduced from the beginning to put names or messages in a bitcoin address. All legacy addresses start with a 1 so the first one is Jak, Jack Dorsey’s online nym for more than a decade, and the last one contains “HiSQ” which reads as Hi Square since SQ is the ticker for Jack’s company. Jack -> Hi Square.

While this is not proof that Jack Dorsey is Satoshi it is possible evidence that Jack Dorsey was the miner of the coins and the signer of the messages. It’s also possible that the miner/signer was simply a big fan of Jack or working with him at the time OR that these addresses occurred organically and the signer handpicked them to signal that they had Jack on their side. Although they had more than 16,000+ options from Wright’s list to choose from to send a message, they would have specifically needed the keys to these addresses in order to have pulled it off, as well as the keys to 143 others in between them.

For readers that are unaware, Jack Dorsey took it personally that Craig Wright used legal measures to try and establish that he was Satoshi Nakamoto and the author of the Bitcoin White Paper. In January 2022, Jack announced the formation of a Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund on the Bitcoin Mailing List, and as will be detailed in a later article, the war to debunk Craig Wright’s claim to be Satoshi was ultimately financed by Jack. It was part of a bitter feud between the two that went on for years.

If it is true that these messages were signed by Jack Dorsey, it would be the first evidence of his actual involvement in bitcoin in 2009 and substantially increase the likelihood that he is indeed Satoshi Nakamoto.