Craig Wright Doesn’t Have Keys To $8 Billion of Bitcoin

An anonymous reader shares a report: Craig Wright’s lawyer confirmed to Decrypt late last week that Wright does not possess — nor even claim to possess — the private keys that can be used to spend $8 billion of Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto mined in Bitcoin’s early days. Wright filed a statement in the Southern District of Florida late Tuesday asserting that he had received information to unlock an encrypted file of thousands of public Bitcoin addresses that he claims to own. Wright had previously said, under oath, that an “encrypted file” exists, containing both the list of public addresses and private keys. Many took that to mean that when a courier arrived Tuesday with a file, that at last Wright had received the private keys. But his lawyer said today that that was not the case. “The file that he’s received did not include private keys,” Andres Rivero, partner at Rivero Mestre law firm, told Decrypt. However, Wright still expects that he will receive the keys at a later date. Rivero said the keys may come either whole or split into parts, but declined to discuss further the particulars around who has the keys and when they might arrive.