Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed creator of the flagship cryptocurrency bitcoin, says he received the “bonded courier” with the keys to unlock “Satoshi’s” $9.6 billion bitcoin fortune.
According to court documents shared by CoinDesk, a mysterious third party has “provided the necessary information and key slice to unlock the encrypted file.” The documents refer to a third-party that was set to arrive on January 1 of this year with the information Wright needed to get access to 1.1 million BTC.
The attorneys of Ira Kleiman, brother of Wright’s deceased business partner Dave Kleiman, wrote in other documents that Wright provided a list of over 16,000 bitcoin addresses but no information regarding the bonded courier.
As CryptoGlobe reported, Wright has said that the bonded courtier could not actually bring in the private keys to give him access to the 1.1 million BTC, but instead give him control of an encrypted file, whose keys were distributed “using a version of Shamir’s Secret Sharing algorithm.” The file supposedly gives him control of the private keys.
The keys may see Wright produce a list of his full bitcoin holdings, which before the arrival of the courier was supposedly impossible because he didn’t have access to the encrypted file. Once he does have access to the BTC, Wright previously said, he won’t be dumping it on the market:
In a statement, he said:
I do not intend to dump my family’s BTC as some people suspect or want, as this would hurt many people in the industry.
The 1.1 million bitcoin are in the so-called Tulip Trust, which is at the center of a dispute between Wright and Kleiman’s estate, which sued the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto alleging he expropriated bitcoin and manipulated documents to defraud the late Dave Kleiman.
As previously reported, it’s possible the Tulip Trust does exist. While there are no blockchain records – that we know of – showing a trust with 1.1 million BTC in it was created, Wright’s proponents argue he could’ve used Bitcoin’s nLockTime function along with smart contract scripts to create it.
Bitcoin’s nLockTime functions makes it possible for a transaction to only be accepted in a block at a specific time, while still taking away access to the funds in a wallet until said time has passed. Essentially, it’s possible some of bitcoin’s dormant wallets have used the feature.
The price of BitcoinSV, a cryptocurrency Wright openly supports, surged yesterday as much as 90% after screenshots showing Wright acknowledged the bonded courier arrived started circulating on social media.
Featured image by Daryn Stumbaugh on Unsplash.
