A man suspected of creating Bitcoin has issued a denial he did so.
In 2011, New Yorker contributor Joshua Davis went on the hunt for Bitcoin's inventor.
He came up empty handed.
But he narrowed it down to several candidates whose interests and backgrounds made them pretty strong suspects.
One of them was an Irish computer science student named Michael Clear, who had been ...
...hired by Allied Irish Banks to improve its currency-trading software, and [who] co-authored an academic paper on peer-to-peer technology. The [first-ever Bitcoin academic] paper employed British spelling. Clear was well versed in economics, cryptography and peer-to-peer networks.
"I'm not Satoshi [Nakamoto, the likely pseudonymous author of the paper], but even if I was I wouldn't tell you," Clear said.
Last week, Clear updated his blog adamantly denying he created the crypto-currency.
Here's his post:
I feel bad adding more because I know it's such a trivial thing but it might lead to fewer emails.
I'm a humble research student with an interest in crypto; I am very far from being any kind of expert in anything. As mentioned earlier, I never worked in a bank, and I'm certainly not an economist (I've received emails to this effect :)). My interest in bitcoin stemmed from its design and its cryptographic properties etc. Josh originally contacted me at Crypto 2011 about a paper I was involved with related to p2p, and I met up with him out of curiosity as to why he would be interested. For about 20 minutes we talked about that. When bitcoin came up, I remember we had a brief casual chat; I was naturally startled when he thought I could be Satoshi, and there was some humor and regrettable mistakes on my part.
However, various misinterpretations and losses of context along with some misleading summaries in further reports unfortunately helped trigger the whole thing... There are minor things in the article that also give off a different impression e.g: brand of glasses (frames) (Incidentally, as much as its seems silly to admit it, I wasn't even aware of their brand until the article :) - they were a present etc.) Anyway, I could go on about other aspects, but it's such a trivial thing to focus on. Sorry to have bored you but hopefully this page helps to clear some things up.
Bitcoin is down approximately 50 percent in the past 24 hours.
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