The mysterious braggadocio, and ultimately debunked, ‘Bitcoin creator’ Craig Wright may not be Satoshi Nakamoto, but he is ambitious enough to be a Blockchain technology king.
It appears that Wright has been working on building a patent-based Bitcoin Blockchain empire. With the banking industry becoming so enamored with Blockchain technology of late, Wright may have found a backdoor to the ego-stroking success he seeks.
Will it pay off for Wright?
According to information obtained by Reuters, since February Wright has filed more than 50 patent applications in Britain through Antigua-registered EITC Holdings Ltd. This has been confirmed with unnamed sources who are said to be close to Wright, who has stopped doing interviews and media stunts since his bid to be seen as ‘Bitcoin’s creator’ failed to come to fruition.
"It looks like he is trying to patent the fundamental building blocks of any Blockchain, cryptocurrency, or distributed ledger system," said Antony Lewis, a Bitcoin consultant used by Reuters to review the filing documentation.
The time-consuming process of obtaining a patent can take several years, but could pay off for Wright in the long run, given the banking industry’s appetite for all things Blockchain-related.
What are those 400 patents Wright is filing?
Over $1 billion is being spent this year on Blockchain capital investment. There are many efficiencies not currently present within the current banking system that this new technology could provide, and it is obvious that Wright is looking to capitalize on them, if not actually invent them. Through EITC Holdings, Wright is rumored to be in the process of filing as many as four hundred patents related to Blockchain technology.
Andrew O’Hagan, who seems to have bought-in on chronicling Wright as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto,’ says that Wright may make more patent filings than that, and may be in line for a return of in excess of $1 billion USD.
Patents that Wright has applied for range from a mechanism for paying securely for online content to an operating system for running an ‘internet of things’ on the Blockchain.
Bitcoin billionaire wannabe
Craig Wright spent the first quarter of 2016 trying to convince the Bitcoin community that he was the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. As we covered, he stated that he would provide further proof that he was Satoshi Nakamoto by moving one of the earliest Bitcoins known to belong to Nakamoto.
After putting all his eggs in that basket, and being discredited on forums and blogs everywhere for even attempting that avenue of cryptographic proof, Wright’s website published a ‘goodbye’ apology, as he tried to back out of his hoax with some dignity intact. It looks like his ‘goodbye’ only came in the form of his aspiration to be the accepted creator of Bitcoin. His ambitions to be a Bitcoin billionaire, attempting to patent technology he may or may not have created, seem to have only just begun.