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.

Got a tip? Send us an email or ProtonMail. For more informed news, follow us on X, Instagram, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

Edit 13:05 UTC, Dec 5: Edited piece to remove references to Calvin Ayre and his alleged relationship with Wright and Le Roux.

The post This wild Satoshi theory links Paul LeRoux and Craig Wright appeared first on Protos.

Calvin Ayre, a gambling magnate who has funded many Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) projects, has taken to X (formerly Twitter) to announce that he is taking a break the day after the UK High Court ruled that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. 

Earlier this month, Ayre was confident that “Craig is winning” the lawsuit he has since lost. Despite this court ruling, Ayre claimed that he still knows that Wright is Satoshi. 

Ayre has been the principal financier behind nChain, a firm that has attempted to market a collection of ‘intellectual property’ it contends is related to ‘blockchain.’ 

Ayre has also reportedly provided the funding behind various other lawsuits related to BSV, including a class action lawsuit that accuses Binance and other exchanges of hurting investors by not describing BSV as ‘Bitcoin.’

Read more: Former nChain CEO claims Craig Wright is lying about Satoshi

BSV has fallen nearly 20% to less than $90, or approximately 0.0013 bitcoin for each BSV, over the last 24 hours. 

Before Ayre involved himself in a ‘Satoshi Vision’ created by someone a court ruled isn’t Satoshi, he made his fortune in the gambling industry, eventually agreeing to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge related to the transmission of gambling information. 

Got a tip? Send us an email or ProtonMail. For more informed news, follow us on X, Instagram, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.

The post Calvin Ayre leaves X after court finds Craig Wright is not Satoshi appeared first on Protos.

A single miner who has taken over 80% of the Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) mining hash rate has, as a result, taken complete control of the BSV chain.

The miner has accumulated more than 9,000 BSV coins, valued at around $450,000, since September 9, three days before Craig Wright’s defamation trial against Hodlonaut in Norway. BSV is Craig Wright’s creation and what he alleges is the real Bitcoin. BSV is a fork of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), itself a fork of Bitcoin.

The takeover event is bizarre for a number of reasons, primarily because the hash rate was virtually constant before this particular individual began mining. They have also been mining blocks without any transactions and of just 254 bytes resulting in the chain becoming unusable at times.

Earlier today, it was reported that the Switzerland-based Bitcoin Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to “advancing Bitcoin SV,” has asked miners and exchanges to block the miner in question.

Craig Wright and BSV still struggling to win over bitcoiners

The price and trading volume of BSV has been trending down throughout this year’s bear market, but BSV has also been trailing in market cap even behind its parent BCH, with a market cap of just under $1 billion. Market caps can however be deceiving because they’re only the aggregate price of the supply according to current bids. In fact, BSV has seen a trading volume of around just $60 million per day over the past few weeks.

Read more: Bitcoin’s longest-serving Lead Maintainer calls it quits, names no successor

Craig Wright has so far failed to convince the majority of bitcoiners that he’s the real Satoshi with BSV trailing further and further behind other cryptocurrencies in market cap as time goes by.

He is also currently battling two libel cases against Hodlonaut for calling him out on his claims that he’s Satoshi, one in London and another in Norway.

Wright has previously been called a scammer by Vitalik Buterin and earlier this year failed to win any damages against Peter McCormack in a libel case he opened against him in London.

For more informed news, follow us on Twitter and Google News or listen to our investigative podcast Innovated: Blockchain City.

Edit 18:20 UTC, Oct 25: Edited paragraph 6 for clarity re Craig Wright’s involvement with BCH and BSV.

The post Craig Wright’s BSV chain has been captured by a single miner appeared first on Protos.