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.

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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. 

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

On July 12, Forbes’ Michael del Castillo revealed that Calvin Ayre had 260 staff members working at nChain, a pro-Craig Wright and pro-Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) patent company.

Well, plot twist: its CEO just quit.

Ex-nChain Group CEO Christen Ager-Hanssen now believes Wright is Faketoshi — a liar who tampered with evidence and witnesses to deceive the public regarding his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Shortly after resigning, he began leaking a series of screenshots and documents, including the claim that Calvin Ayre had an agreement to earn up to 50% of Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin that Craig Wright professes to own.

Ager-Hanssen alerted nChain’s board of directors about an attempt, as he sees it, by a major shareholder to defraud other stakeholders. He also expressed concerns about a party he described as the “ultimate beneficiary shareholder” and the DW Discovery fund, which is registered in the Cayman Islands.

Ager-Hanssen alleges that Wright manipulated documents to make them appear to support his claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. At least one US magistrate judge agrees with that claim, writing, “Craig Wright has produced forged documents in this litigation.”

Ager-Hanssen says Wright has been using forged documents to deceive various courts in which he is currently fighting lawsuits. In some cases, Wright’s arguments depend upon proving that he is the true creator of Bitcoin.

Ager-Hanssen says the nChain board failed to take his recommendations, including a recommendation to fire Wright from his position as chief scientist.

You can’t fire me, I quit!

Ager-Hanssen has been aggressively tweeting various claims against Ayre and Wright over the past week. Many of his tweets contain grammatical and spelling errors and appear to be written by a non-native English speaker. For the record, Ager-Hanssen is Norwegian.

For its part, nChain is fighting back against the barrage. Its board of directors claims that it fired Ager-Hanssen. In its version of the events, on September 27, “Mr. Ager Hanssen conducted himself in a serious and inappropriate manner which prompted the decision to dismiss Mr. Ager-Hanssen with immediate effect. This was communicated to Mr. Ager-Hanssen the same day.”

Indeed, a shakeup has recently occurred in nChain leadership. Nearly half of the previous board of directors quit or were fired amid allegations of ‘shadow directors’ who were steering things behind the scenes — events that were echoed by Ager-Hanssen.

The departures came with a fair amount of turmoil that included an alleged failure to make a payment to TradeWindow. Specifically, nChain had agreed to pay $6.59 million for a 19.99% stake in TradeWindow. However, TradeWindow alleges that nChain failed to make its first payment and is currently pursuing legal action.

Read more: Why Satoshi Nakamoto’s gigantic Bitcoin stash is probably lost forever

New claims by Ager-Hanssen by the hour

Ex-nChain Group CEO Christen Ager-Hanssen has moved beyond being disgruntled into rage. Indeed, he’s tweeting new, vitriolic claims about Wright multiple times per day.

• For example, Ager-Hanssen promised to cut straight into Wright’s personal life and publish an email from Ayre discussing a deal with Wright’s ex-wife Lynn.
• As another example, Ager-Hanssen says Ayre has been tampering with witnesses involved in Wright’s cases.
• Yet another example: Ager-Hanssen claims that Wright controls and manipulates the X (formerly Twitter) handle @satoshi.
• Ager-Hanssen believes that Wright is likely to lose in court. Historically, Ayre has made the opposite prediction and supported Wright financially. Yet Ager-Hanssen has a claim about that, too: he claims that Ayre is going to stop paying for Wright’s legal fees.

Craig Wright has many critics and believers that he is Faketoshi outnumber those who are convinced that he’s satoshi.

Ager-Hanssen is just the latest person to flip from Ayre’s side.

Onlookers now get to consider new evidence — and many extraordinary claims — from Wright’s newest fan-turned-critic.

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The post Former nChain CEO claims Craig Wright is lying about Satoshi appeared first on Protos.