He said he invented Bitcoin.
He was a complete fraud.
Faketoshi: Fraud, Lies and the Battle for Bitcoin’s Soul is the definitive account of Craig Wright’s stranger-than-fiction attempt to be recognised as Satoshi Nakamoto. Started as a podcast, now told in three volumes.
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In 2016, a man stepped forward claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Backed by some of the deepest pockets in tech, he spent the next eight years trying to prove it with fake wallets, PR stunts and lawsuits worth more than a trillion dollars.
But he wasn’t Satoshi. He was an Australian IT consultant called Craig Wright who tried to pull off one of the most audacious frauds in British legal history.
The Books
Volume I
Where the con began. How an Australian IT consultant tried to defraud the taxman out of tens of millions of dollars using sham contracts, fake Bitcoin deals and more.
In 2011, two years after the launch of Bitcoin, its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, quietly left the scene. Many thought Satoshi was gone for good. But in 2016 he returned with a shocking story…
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Far from leaving on his own terms, he said, developers had forced him out, and now he was back to reclaim what had been stolen from him. Financed by some of the deepest pockets in the tech world, this reborn Satoshi used every method at his disposal to cement his claim, from PR spectacles to trillion-dollar lawsuits, promising to destroy anyone who stood between him and his rightful throne.
Except this wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. This was an Australian IT security consultant called Craig Wright.
And he was a complete fraud.
Learn about Craig Wright’s ever-changing Bitcoin creation story and his battle with the Australian Taxation Office, which led him to don the Satoshi mask to escape financial ruin and a possible prison sentence. Along the way, Wright faked multi-million-dollar Bitcoin deals with his own companies, NASA, a Saudi banking giant and a porn baron; forged, then disowned, evidence of everything from Seychelles trusts to stolen assets; “lost” some of the most expensive supercomputers in the world; and much, much more.
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Volume II
The world stage. Wright’s announcement as Satoshi, the disastrous public proof and the $600 billion court case that exposed him.
In January 2015, Craig Wright was facing financial ruin. The Australian Taxation Office had uncovered a potentially criminal operation involving his raft of companies…
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Six months later, he was sitting pretty, having signed a bailout deal that settled his tax affairs and gave him a dream job in England. Somehow, Wright had turned it around.
In truth, Wright had accepted a ticking time bomb. The deal that saved him rested on one very important premise: that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin. Wright may have fooled his backers, but fooling the public would be far harder… especially as it was nothing but a high-stakes con.
In Volume II of Faketoshi: Fraud, Lies and the Battle for Bitcoin’s Soul, Mark Hunter and Arthur van Pelt continue their definitive account of Craig Wright’s fraudulent exploits. They cover his announcement on the world stage as Satoshi Nakamoto, the disastrous public proof session that followed, and the $600 billion court case that revealed for the first time the true extent of Wright’s mammoth swindle.
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Volume III
The final act. Wright takes his claim to the British courts, and the trial that follows exposes him as the most prolific evidence forger in UK history.
In February 2024, Craig Wright began the final act of his decade-long effort to be formally recognised as Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin…
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Success would let him crush his enemies, silence his critics and open the floodgates to billionairedom. Just as importantly, he would stand alone as Bitcoin’s inventor, winning the intellectual recognition he so fervently craved.
His attempts to prove his claim in public had ended in ridicule and in his dismissal as a fraud. So he hit on a new plan: weaponise the British legal system to secure a court ruling confirming his “identity”. If he succeeded, he would have more money than he could dream of, and his long-disputed Satoshi claim would be cemented in law.
The result was a flood of lawsuits whose combined value exceeded a trillion dollars. What followed, however, was a litany of spectacular missteps, lies and failures. It all ended with Wright’s name etched into the history books as the most prolific evidence forger in documented British legal history.
The third and final volume of Faketoshi: Fraud, Lies and the Battle for Bitcoin’s Soul.
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The complete story
The Faketoshi Trilogy Box Set
The complete Faketoshi story in one spectacular set: ten years of fraud, from the first lie to the last.
Includes Volumes I, II and III in paperback.
Ships from the UK. Orders outside the UK may take longer to arrive and may be charged import duties or taxes on delivery.
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The authors
Mark Hunter
Mark is an author and ghostwriter who has worked in the blockchain/crypto sector since 2017. He is also the author of Ultimate Catastrophe – How MtGox Lost Half a Billion Dollars and Nearly Killed Bitcoin, the first book to tell the full story of the rise and fall of Bitcoin exchange MtGox.
Arthur van Pelt
Arthur is a Bitcoin consultant who began mapping out the depth and breadth of Wright’s illegal operations in 2019, becoming renowned as the world’s foremost Craig Wright critic.