Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright has publicly identified himself as bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
Ending years of speculation, Wright stepped into the spotlight following a joint investigation by the BBC, The Economist, and GQ.
The news comes six months after Wired and Gizmodo identified Wright as the creator of bitcoin. They amassed a trove of leaked emails and documents, financial records, and since-deleted blog posts painting a far more complete picture than 2014's Newsweek report, which identified California engineer Satoshi "Dorian" Nakamoto as the founder of bitcoin.
Nakamoto denied the report and threatened to sue, but Wright is now taking ownership of the virtual currency. "I was the main part of it, but other people helped me," Wright said, pointing to cryptographer Hal Finney, one of the engineers who helped turn Wright's idea into the bitcoin protocol, BBC said.
"Since those early days, after distancing myself from the public persona that was Satoshi, I have poured every measure of myself into research. I have been silent, but I have not been absent," Wright wrote in his own blog post. "Satoshi is dead. But this is only the beginning."
The true identity of bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto has long been one of the tech world's biggest secrets. The name first appeared in a 2008 white paper introducing the crypto currency, but many believed it was just an alias for some Tokyo-based computer genius, or even a group of hackers set on challenging traditional currencies.
"I believe Craig Wright is the person who invented bitcoin," Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, wrote in a Monday blog post.
"It would be better if Satoshi Nakamoto was the codename for an NSA project, or an artificial intelligence sent from the future to advance our primitive money," Andresen continued. "He is not, he is an imperfect human being just like the rest of us."
After reviewing Wright's data on cryptographic, social, and technical levels, economist Jon Matonis, one of the founding directors of the Bitcoin Foundation, agreed. "It is my firm belief that Craig Wright satisfies all three categories," Matonis told the BBC.