Writer Evan Ratliff spents years tracking Paul Le Roux, and eventually rejected the theory that the drug dealer might be bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. But the the theory never quite went away. Then, a court case brought it right back into his inbox. He recounted the gripping story for Wired.
Over a few days, I found myself uncovering surprising correlations I’d missed or discounted the first time. After a couple more, I’d built a spreadsheet mapping the evidence for and against the proposition. Within weeks, I’d poured over every piece of writing credibly attributed to Le Roux or Satoshi, and found myself perplexed at the growing size of the “for” column on my spreadsheet. I called up experts, ran my evidence by them, and found no one who could really shoot it down. After a month, I was able to convince a colleague with deep cryptocurrency knowledge, someone who’d followed every twist and turn of the Satoshi saga, that Le Roux was the odds-on solution to the mystery of who created bitcoin. And then, just as I was ready to go out and publicly place my bet on Paul Le Roux, to make the case for him from every thing I’d found, I started to wonder about what I hadn’t.
Check It Out: Investigating Whether A Drug Dealer Founded Bitcoin