Being Satoshi: Inside Craig Wright’s decade-long fight to be the inventor of bitcoin

Andrew Burke and Max Mason

It didn’t look like the redoubt of one of the most sought-after people on the planet. Overlooking the Macquarie Park cemetery in Sydney’s suburban North Ryde, the five-storey office building is typical of any low-rise business park. High concrete walls are punctuated with small windows, a wide lime stripe hinting half-heartedly at the modern.

But that’s where Australian Tax Office officers went on March 26, 2015. They were there to meet Dr Craig Wright, a computer scientist who was running several businesses from the address. Among them was CO1N, which claimed to use one of the world’s fastest supercomputers for research related to bitcoin.

Over a number of years, Wright had claimed millions in research and development tax rebates for his work. But the Tax Office had its doubts.

Specifically, the ATO was at C01N’s offices to verify the existence of a supercomputer, which Wright claimed the business had spent nearly $5 million on.

In documents tendered in a US court and seen by AFR Weekend, the Tax Office is revealed as having grave doubts that Wright had access to a supercomputer, or that the $5 million transaction even happened. It wanted to see the supercomputer being used to confirm it actually existed, but the demonstration underwhelmed.

“This demonstration and material appears to have been manipulated and displays numerous errors and anomalies,” the ATO wrote. “We conclude that the material shown to the ATO officers was created or altered in an attempt to deceive the ATO officers into accepting that the taxpayer had access to the purported C01N supercomputer for its activities.”

Wright, via a PR spokeswoman, “emphatically denied” the allegations in the ATO documents.

This engagement with the ATO sheds light on one of the most enduring mysteries of the internet age, and hints at the difficulties Wright faces in a blockbuster High Court case that began in London on Monday.

Those ATO investigations would lead, a few months later, to an Australian Federal Police raid on Wright’s North Ryde offices and his home in leafy Gordon, on Sydney’s upper North Shore. Ordinarily, raids on a businessman most people had never heard of would garner little attention. But on this December day, vision of officers wearing black and grey polo shirts, some embroidered with “Computer Forensics”, were flashed around the world.