When he was 18, Wright joined the
air force. ‘They locked me in a bunker,’ he told me, ‘and I worked on a
bombing system. Smart bombs. We needed fast code, and I did that.’ When he was in his twenties a
melanoma appeared on his back and he had several skin grafts. ‘This was after he got out of the air force,’ his mother told me, ‘and when he recovered he was off to university, and it’s been degrees, degrees, degrees since then.’ He went to the
University of Queensland to study
computer systems engineering. And over the following 25 years he would finish, or not finish, or finish and not do the graduation paperwork for degrees in
digital forensics, nuclear physics, theology, management, network security, international commercial law and statistics. After our first full interview, he went home to work on an assignment for a new course he was taking at the University of London, a masters in quantitative finance.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair