People are skeptical because this isn't the first time he claimed to be Satoshi [1], and that time he did it by back-dating posts. This time he did it with a demonstrably fake signing of Sartre text.
Why would the real Satoshi go to great lengths to create fake evidence?
Maybe.
It was lengthy, time-consuming, very clearly fabricated evidence.
He claimed he had private keys tied to Satoshi, but refused to sign anything with it (which would have taken 30 seconds).
The fact that Gavin Andersen (and others?) met him and talked to him and then said that he is "the father of Bitcoin"... means that either Wright is a very good con artist, good enough to convince the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, or he is the real deal.
I've also watched the interview... if he is a con artist then he is also a very good actor too.. to me Wright looked like a person in deep emotional turmoil.
Compatible with what one would experience if he were holding the private key to billions of $ worth of bitcoin, while the public were pushing him to use it.
> if he is a con artist then he is also a very good actor too..
these two things very typically go hand-in-hand.
>Compatible with what one would experience if he were holding the private key to billions of $ worth of bitcoin,
the only thing he would need to do is sign a message using the private key from an early block. This is extremely straightforward, widely known and expected, and he instead provided an bizarre and discredited method of proof. This also comes months after he tried to use easily discredited methods to take credit, like backdated blog entries. He's a scam artist.
He doesn't seem "an average geek." He is very smooth-talking and glad-handing. He also looks much more like the sales people than the technical people at all my places of employment.
He also managed to "sweet talk" and convince Gavin Andersen and others that he's for real...
I don't know. I cannot base my conclusion on opinions on what the Internet is saying. The noise level and the emotions are too high to make sense of it.
I've watched his interview, I've listened to what he said.
The man looks like he's serious and angry about everything... he also said that he will refuse any kind of award for it.
Being the inventor of Bitcoin is also a huge burden and risk so it's not easy what this man is going through..
At least in theory, that man can be Satoshi and my intuition tells me that he probably is, there's nothing more to it.
People were expecting the next Jesus Christ and now everyone's so disappointed that "Satoshi" is just an average geek with human weaknesses - not the messiah everyone expected.
Had he started a Unicorn startup, nobody would have even thought to question it, but now that the myth of Satoshi has been blown to astronomic proportions, people refuse to believe that their guru is just a "simple" guy who makes mistakes and is clumsy at PR.
Look at the source code of bitcoin-0.1 and you'll notice that Satoshi was an average C++ programmer who wrote sloppy code - yes it was a prototype - but it wouldn't have stood a chance if other people hadn't gotten involved to develop it into what Bitcoin is today.
Besides, if you look at the code, he wasn't even sure he was creating a currency - it looked like he was trying to create a marketplace, complete with products and chat.
Interestingly, a lot of people treat him like a fake prophet - and are proverbially crucifying him for not being able to perform the "miracle" of making a transaction from block 9.
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He's not Jesus and he's not Buddha, he's just a programmer who had a brilliant idea and now tries to claim his invention.
But then again, maybe I'm wrong and Craig Wright is just an idiot compromising his reputation and career for a "moonshot" and a minute of glory. That would be totally stupid for a guy who has a family and a company and who's a cryptographer - to make a fool out of himself like this. Unless, what he claims is true..
Who knows, in the end it doesn't really matter that much.