It appears that there is a new candidate in town that has the potential to be Satoshi himself, the creator of Bitcoin. However, the background of this new candidate is not very pretty, as he is a criminal mastermind with ties to weapon and drug trafficking in a large underground criminal empire. And should he turn out to be the revered Satoshi Nakamoto, it could lead to a huge existential crisis for the Bitcoin community.
Meet Paul “Solotshi” Le Roux
He has the perfect name to be the leader of an organized crime syndicate, with plenty of pseudonyms – Paul Calder Le Roux is the subject of a recent wildfire of speculation on whether or not he is Satoshi. And it’s true, there are a suspicious number of similarities.
Le Roux has a strong coding background after creating the encryption software E4M and TrueCrypt. He also uses the name Paul Solotshi Calder Le Roux on one of his false passports. To find out more about Le Roux and the evidence as to why he may be Satoshi we highly recommend this article – it’s an engaging read, and a thorough breakdown of all the reasons Paul Le Roux is suddenly the crypto community’s most infamous personality!
But how does Craig Wright tie into all of this?
New Evidence Leading To Craig Wright
Well, according to released documents from an ongoing court trial between Craig Wright and the Estate of Dave Kleiman, a former friend and associate of Wright, Wright may have been an employee of Le Roux and could have possibly helped to bring down the criminal empire.
Wright had filed a protective order for sensitive information to be removed from the public court documents for fear of retaliation. However, it seemed that one clerk forgot to redact evidence linking Wright to Le Roux in the footnotes on one of the pages:
Source: The unredacted footnote from Document 187
The conspiracy theory then states that Kleiman stole Satoshi’s (i.e. Le Roux’s) 1M BTC by taking the hard drive that contained his private keys. However, it seems as though Wright managed to take this hard drive from Dave Kleiman, either before or after his death in 2013 – which is why the Kleiman estate is suing Wright in the first place.
Should We Be Worried?
Regardless of who really is Satoshi, if it turns out that Wright is in possession of the hard drive holding the 1 million Bitcoin that was linked to Satoshi’s wallet, this could be a huge game-changer for the crypto world.
If he does hold the hard drive – and we are to believe that Le Roux is Satoshi – it’s pretty much guaranteed that Le Roux has encrypted the hard drive with his TrueCrypt software. This would mean that Wright will have a very difficult time cracking into this hard drive before he can gain access to the wallet and spend the 1 million BTC.
However, if he does hold that hard drive, should we be worried? What would he do if he was to gain access to the wallet? How might this affect the market? These are all things it’s worth taking into consideration, but in the short term, Craig Wright’s cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) has exploded in price. Ironically, it’s the only cryptocurrency in the top 10 projects that’s in the green today.
BSV has increased by a further 5.52% over the past 24 hours of trading, bringing the current trading price up to around $231. The cryptocurrency has now seen a surge of 90% over the past 7 trading days, with a further 327% price explosion over the past 30 trading days.
