Australian Police Raid Sydney Home Of Reported Bitcoin Creator

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Yesterday this guy was outed by Wired as the possible creator of bitcoin. Today his property is being raided by authorities.

More than a dozen federal police officers entered a house registered on the electoral roll to Craig Steven Wright, whom Wired outed as the likely real identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous figure that first released bitcoin's code in 2009. Locksmiths broke open the door of the property, in a suburb on Sydney's north shore. When asked what they were doing, one officer told a Reuters reporter they were "clearing the house".
 
SO all I have to do is post a news story that STEVE is the creator of Bitcoin to get his house raided?

What kinds of laws do they have in Australia?

Axe
 
File said:
Was creating bitcoin illegal or something?
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The Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a statement that the officers' "presence at Mr. Wright's property is not associated with the media reporting overnight about bitcoins".

The AFP referred all inquiries about the raids to the Australian Tax Office, which said it could not comment on "any individual's or entity's tax affairs" due to legal confidentiality.

Emails to various addresses listed for Wright did not receive a reply.
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Not sure it was because he invented bitcoin.
 
The article somehow failed to mention WHY he was raided. Is he somehow not paying taxes? Regardless, his ownership of over one million bitcoin was well known before the article outing him so something else may be in play here.
 
I imagine they were investigating him for a while and with the publishing of wired's article, they probably decided to raid his house before he got nervous and destroyed evidence.

If he were truly the creator of bitcoin, and he bankrolled a lot of the coins from early on, then he could have made a very tidy profit which he might not reported to the tax authority.

Still a !@#$%@# thing to do though.
 
Right, taxes, bullshit. The day after Wired's article Australian officials were already planning on raiding his house.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with all the Bitcoins homeboy might have in his possession...

Just seems fishy to me is all I'm saying.
 
America's policy on nabbing Al Capone:

"If we can't nab him on something legit, we'll nab him for tax evasion"

It's been the MO of any Attorney General since then.
 
I wonder why they actually raided his home they don't give a reason. In hind site, I mined one bitcoin and spent it online on stupid crap. It was fun while it lasted.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
America's policy on nabbing Al Capone:

"If we can't nab him on something legit, we'll nab him for tax evasion"

It's been the MO of any Attorney General since then.
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Seems like a stretch.
Capone was a criminal. He was good at it, but he was a criminal. Nothing published indicates this guy is a criminal. Even Tax evasion is a stretch, since BItcoin is an Asset subject to capital gains and I assume that like the U.S., you're not subject to that tax until you convert the asset to cash (i.e. sell the coins)

Presumably there's something else that we don't know about and/or understand.
 
satoshi's coins haven't moved, so there is no capital gains to report.
 
aardvark sandwich said:
satoshi's coins haven't moved, so there is no capital gains to report.
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Seems right to me.

I'm okay with the identity of the creator being secret. If you had something value (e.g. a shit ton of bit coins), you wouldn't want everyone to know that you did. They could steal your shit and you'd have no way to prove the bitcoins were yours to begin with. Pretty common sense.
 
And it's not like they're going to open a closet and find a million bitcoins in a trunk.
 
aardvark sandwich said:
satoshi's coins haven't moved, so there is no capital gains to report.
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This.
Unless he sold the bit coins and didn't declare them as income, they shouldn't have a case.

More than likely they want to make an example of him, since Bitcoins allowed others to avoid taxes and engage in illegal transactions.
 
The timing is suspect, but I sincerely doubt they got everything together in 1 day to raid his house.

This man has probably been investigated for a while for something else.
 
I'm going to guess the Australian government is going to seize all the bitcoins they find and come up with some excuse not to return them.
 
CaptNumbNutz said:
The timing is suspect, but I sincerely doubt they got everything together in 1 day to raid his house.

This man has probably been investigated for a while for something else.
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A tactical team could be at any house and hold it within a matter of minutes until the feds arrive. I'm sure it's the same in Aussi.

But you are right, I'm sure he was under investigation for a while.

It likely went down like this:

Aussi gov't: Shit our suspects cover is blown thanks to Wired. We better grab what evidence while we can!
 
As far as leverage to stop Bitcoin, they'd have to arrest all persons with commit access, and even in that event, the project could simply be forked :)
 
DigitalGriffin said:
A tactical team could be at any house and hold it within a matter of minutes until the feds arrive. I'm sure it's the same in Aussi.

But you are right, I'm sure he was under investigation for a while.

It likely went down like this:

Aussi gov't: Shit our suspects cover is blown thanks to Wired. We better grab what evidence while we can!
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Ya, I figured a tactical team can be scrambled in minutes. Its the investigation behind why they are going there to begin with that would take days, weeks, months. I think you are spot on with your guess as to how it went down.
 
If this guy is as smart as it sounds, and obsessed with cryptography... In any hard drive be anything else than 2048 triple encrypted? Eh maybe not.
 
Uvaman said:
If this guy is as smart as it sounds, and obsessed with cryptography... In any hard drive be anything else than 2048 triple encrypted? Eh maybe not.
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Yeah, I don't think he'd make it easy for someone to see that he has a million Bitcoins and it doesn't sound like he needs to access them, so he could have the key in a Swiss safety deposit box.
 
nilepez said:
Yeah, I don't think he'd make it easy for someone to see that he has a million Bitcoins and it doesn't sound like he needs to access them, so he could have the key in a Swiss safety deposit box.
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I don't know the details of bitcoins, but it seems that since the coin difficulty scales and he knows everything about the protocols, he could just regenerate the first million relatively easily if he had to.
 
DocSavage said:
I don't know the details of bitcoins, but it seems that since the coin difficulty scales and he knows everything about the protocols, he could just regenerate the first million relatively easily if he had to.
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I know very little, but I assuming a few things:
1. the algorithm doesn't allow for you to just create coins (not sure if that's what you meant or not)
2. the difficultly to legitimately generate new coins gets harder as time goes by.
3. if the police manged to take ownership, he couldn't just take them back.

All guesses, but if I'm wrong, then Bitcoin is worthless.
 
it is not possible to 'regenerate' coins.

it would involve altering original/early blocks in the blockchain.

changing something as small as a period in a block triggers a rejection.

each block is cryptographically secure, so going that far back is like trying to break encryption inside of encryption inside of encryption...and so on. The amount of computer power to do that is beyond any nation state, let alone some guy in a house.

assuming they were regenerated, no miners would honor his version of the ledger and he would be kicked off the network.

not possible.
 
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