Martin Shkreli, the notorious biotech entrepreneur, claims in a new Substack article that Paul Le Roux, a former programmer and former criminal cartel head, is the true Satoshi Nakamoto.
The “pharma bro” seems to have decoded the very first Bitcoin transfer delivered to the late Hal Finney. Le Roux was apprehended in 2012 when the Drug Enforcement Administration led him into a trap. A hired informant covertly videotaped the mobster during a sting operation coordinated by the DEA. In June 2020, the drug lord and weapons trafficker was sentenced to 25 years in jail. Le Roux might have spent the rest of his life in prison, but his sentence was reduced owing to his considerable help to the DEA.
For quite some time, the coder-turned-kingpin has been considered one of the leading Satoshi Nakamoto contenders. According to a Wired article released in 2019, there is strong proof that Bitcoin was invented by a criminal genius. Shkreli’s most recent announcement was met with skepticism from the Bitcoin community. According to Peter Wuille, a prominent Bitcoin Core engineer, his blog post simply demonstrates that someone with access to Finney’s private key signed the purported message.
Another renowned developer, Greg Maxwell, contested Shkreli’s assertions, claiming that the signature type employed by the supposed Satoshi didn’t exist until after Finney’s went out of service. As a result, this simply demonstrates that someone has access to the late software developer’s private key. If Shkreli is right, it implies that Le Roux most likely designed Bitcoin as a money-laundering tool to maintain his criminal business, confirming many cryptocurrency skeptics’ concerns.
