Members of the Bitcoin
community remain sceptical about Craig Wright's claim to be the
mysterious creator of the digital currency.
Mr Wright spoke to the BBC claiming he created the crypto-currency.
Gavin Andresen, chief scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, has confirmed the claim.
Noisy method
Mr Andresen said he travelled to London to meet Mr Wright who showed him proof that he and Satoshi Nakamoto - the pseudonym adopted by Bitcoin's creator - were one and the same.Each key is a unique digital code that is linked to specific bitcoins.
But even he added: "It is impossible to prove something like that 100%."
Scepticism about Mr Wright's claim has been fuelled by following the steps he put on his blog that, he said, show how to go about verifying cryptographic keys.
Some queried the complicated series of steps in this process and the information they called upon. Security expert Dan Kaminsky said the process was "maliciously resistant" to validation.
Mr Andresen said he could not explain why Mr Wright had chosen such a "funky" procedure as a proof.
Others at the Consensus conference were more openly sceptical. Vitalik Buterin, from the blockchain company Ethereum, said the very "noisy" way in which Mr Wright chose to make this announcement threw into question whether it was true.
"In general, signal theory says if you have a good way of proving something and a noisy way of proving something and you choose the noisy way chances are it's because you couldn't do the good way in the first place."
Eric Voorhees, founder of cryptocurrency trading app ShapeShift, also had his doubts.
"I generally trust Gavin [Anderseen]'s opinions so I want to believe this but I'm not convinced yet," he said.
Others were more willing to believe that the elusive Bitcoin creator had finally been revealed.
"I
think it would be good news if Satoshi Nakamoto is found," said Daniel
Lipshitz, from bitcoin infrastructure company Gap 600.
He said
while public proof from Mr Wright would be good, he trusted Mr Andresen
and was willing to believe that he had seen compelling evidence.
Moving on
The
digital currency industry is still developing. It has moved from the
shady criminal underworld it was first associated with. Bitcoin, and the
underlying blockchain technology it is based on, are now being invested
in by the finance industry looking for the next place for innovation.
"It's
not clear to me that if Craig Wright is Satoshi, or if it's someone
else, that this is relevant to Bitcoin these days," said Dr Garrick
Hileman, an economic historian at the London School of Economics, who
has studied the genesis of the digital currency.
"Some would argue
that we are now living in a post-Satoshi world," he said. "But I think
Satoshi does matter, we should not dismiss their contribution."
However,
he added, sessions at the Consensus conference and events in the wider
world showed how the focus on the technology had shifted. Many financial
firms were now looking at the blockchain that underlies bitcoin as a
way to solve and streamline some long-standing payment processing
problems.
"The industry has moved," he said. "The investment and interest is going into more and more non-currency uses."
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