Satoshi: That's not how any of this works

In this WIRED article, Gaven Andresen says why he believes Craig Wright's claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto:

“It’s certainly possible I was bamboozled,” Andresen says. “I could spin stories of how they hacked the hotel Wi-fi so that the insecure connection gave us a bad version of the software. But that just seems incredibly unlikely. It seems the simpler explanation is that this person is Satoshi.”

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

The entire point of Bitcoin is that it's decentralized. We don't need to take Andresen's word for it. We don't need to take anybody's word for it. Nobody needs to fly to London and check it out on a private computer. Instead, you can just send somebody the signature, and they can verify it themselves. That the story was embargoed means nothing -- either way, Andresen was constrained by an NDA. Since they didn't do it the correct way, and were doing it the roundabout way, the simpler explanation is that he was being bamboozled.

Below is an example of this, using the Electrum Bitcoin wallet software:

This proves that the owner of the Bitcoin Address has signed the Message, producing the Signature. I typed the first two fields, hit the "Sign" button. The wallet looked up the address in my wallet (which can have many addresses), found the matching private key that only I posess, then signed the message by filling in the bottom window.

If you had reason to believe that this address belonged to Satoshi Nakamoto, such as if it had been the first blocks, then I would have just proven to you that I am indeed Satoshi. You wouldn't need to take anybody's word for it. You'd simply type in the fields (or copy/paste), hit "verify", and verify for yourself.

So you can verify me, here are the strings you can copy/paste:

Robert Graham is Satoshi Nakamoto

15fszyyM95UANiEeVa4H5L6va7Z7UFZCYP 

GyMgaHVszLSej/VuCdeXnMmiB/d6rBrghQ3qR6XvabZtBrzF8vOA1IW4MnhNfcLny1N15pSZw16JlmQWss7y3zM=

You should get either a "Signature verified" or "Wrong signature" message when you click the "Verify" button.

There may be a little strangeness since my original message is ASCII, but if you copy out of this webpage, it'll go in as Unicode, but it appears that this formatting information is ignored in the verification process, so it'll still work.

Summary

Occam's Razor is that Andresen was tricked. There was no reason to fly him to London otherwise. They could've just sent him an email with a message, a signature, and an address, and Andresen could've verified it himself.