The Many Lives of Craig Wright: From Satoshi Nakamoto to Calvin Ayre's Patsy

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 gambling magnate Calvin Ayre, ex-crime boss Paul LeRoux, and one of the Bitcoin community's earliest participants, Craig Wright.

An HBO documentary released last week named Peter Todd as the creator of Bitcoin, sparking fresh speculation about the whereabouts of Satoshi’s private keys and breathing new life into an old theory.

The theory, which was first reported by the Daily Mail in 2018, involves gambling magnate Calvin Ayre, ex-crime boss Paul LeRoux, and one of the Bitcoin community’s earliest participants, Craig Wright.

It casts doubt on the conventional understanding of the relationship between Ayre — who has been trying to get his hands on Satoshi’s private keys for some time — and Wright, who is now best known for lying about being the pseudonymous Bitcoin mastermind.

Most people assume that Wright simply fooled Ayre into believing he was Satoshi and the rightful owner of billions of dollars worth of bitcoin.

Indeed, mainstream narratives cast Ayre as a sort of victim, duped out of business and legal expenses by a brilliant computer scientist dangling Satoshi’s pot of bitcoin riches at the end of their rainbow.

This particular theory, however, recasts Ayre as a far more cunning fortune seeker. Specifically, it asks whether or not he has known all along that Wright was not Satoshi.

As the theory goes, Wright supposedly took computer files containing Satoshi’s private keys from LeRoux, could not decrypt them himself, and so enlisted Ayre’s help. Ever since, Ayre has allegedly been directing warehouses of computational power at decrypting those hard drives while using Wright as a media fall guy.

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 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 helped secure Satoshi’s private keys using his self-coded encryption technology, known as 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.

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 Le Roux’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 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 enlisted the help of a long-time friend and self-proclaimed billionaire: Ayre.

Armed with a fortune from online gambling and other dubious businesses, Ayre agreed to unleash brute-force computational power on decrypting Satoshi’s keys.

And 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 valued at $74 billion.

As part of their partnership, Ayre would focus on computer mining while Wright would claim to be Satoshi himself. This arrangement would prepare them for the moment when Ayre might finally brute-force Satoshi’s keys and Wright — posing as Satoshi — could legally sell billions of dollars worth of those coins.

As a convenient fall guy, Wright would also conduct various publicity stunts, such as private signing ceremonies and litigating his copyright claims regarding Bitcoin’s whitepaper in courts around the world.

The outcome of the lawsuits might not have been as important as its media impact. Incredibly, the conspiracy theorists allege that most of Wright’s antics are simply a mask to cloak Ayre’s treasure-hunting operation.

For his part, Ayre has played along, intermittently claiming to believe and disbelieve Wright’s claim to be Satoshi. A bit of plausible deniability on Ayre’s part could never hurt – depending, of course, on the ultimate timing of his mining discovery and how Satoshi’s coins could be safely liquidated.