Dave Kleiman mined Bitcoin for Satoshi

“Faketoshi”, Craig Wright, claimed that Satoshi was three people; himself as the chief mover, his deceased friend Dave Kleiman and a mysterious third man. The Satoshi Enigma shows that Kleiman really did have a connection with Satoshi—he operated a mining operation for Satoshi from the end of 2009 through to 2012.

Why would Satoshi use anyone else to mine Bitcoin? He started mining using his customised “Patoshi” set-up, but this special software left its digital fingerprints all over his 1.1 million Bitcoins. To mine in a way that was untraceable, he began to use intermediaries, the one of whom was Kleiman.

Kleiman was certainly exposed to the idea of Bitcoin from the very beginning. He was active on the Cryptography mailing list at the same time that Satoshi was posting in Jan 2009. Dave’s brother Ira recalled a conversation that took place at Thanksgiving 2009, in which Dave told him he was making digital money with a rich foreign guy. Craig Wright persuaded Ira that this was himself, but the book shows how the description fits Le Roux much better than Wright.

Independent confirmation of Kleiman’s mining comes from Bitcoiner “BitcoinFX” who ran special software in early 2010 that to find out who else was mining. He recalls detecting an address which led to Dave Kleiman’s website. And although almost everything on Kleiman’s computers was encrypted, a forensic expert found an unencrypted note showing that Kleiman needed to find out whether a particular Bitcoin address belonged to Satoshi.

Craig Wright is a liar and a forger, but tends to base his forgeries on something real. He forged a series of emails that purport to show himself as Satoshi working with Kleiman. In these emails it is always Kleiman who does the mining and who moves Bitcoins. The emails reflect the real situation with Kleiman managing Satoshi’s Bitcoins, but with Wright in place of Satoshi—Le Roux.

This picture is supported by new evidence in the book which shows that a forged email from Wright regarding Bitcoins to be allocated to the mysterious third man uses five Bitcoin addresses that have been customised to Le Roux’s name using the same method as used by Satoshi. This shows that Wright had some real knowledge of Satoshi’s Bitcoin dealings.

And a total on the same email has not been taken from the Blockchain but must have come from the originator of a transaction in April 2011 which involved an allocation of Bitcoins to Satoshi. The person carrying out this transaction was almost certainly Kleiman.