"Dave Kleiman was to become the most important person in Wright’s professional life, the man he says helped him do Satoshi’s work. They met online: they visited the same cryptography forums and had interacted since 2003. Both men were interested in cyber security, digital forensics and the future of money, but Kleiman was a boy’s boy, an army veteran who loved contact sports and fast living. Five foot ten and weighing 200 pounds, he lived in Riviera Beach, Florida, and from 1986 to 1990 he was an army helicopter technician. When I looked into Kleiman’s life, I discovered he had also done computer forensics work for Homeland Security and the army. After active service he became a deputy in the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office. A motorcycle crash in 1995, when he was 28, left him in a wheelchair. Kleiman was a drug user and one source told me he was heavily into online gambling and various illicit activities; there is evidence he was associated with Silk Road, the online marketplace for all things illegal. After the accident he devoted himself to computers, and set up a company called Computer Forensics LLC.

Until Napster (the brainchild of a teenager called Shawn Fanning) came along in 1999, enabling users to share music files across the internet without a central server, the phrase ‘peer-to-peer sharing’ was familiar only to the early internet’s true believers. 5 Napster, with its user-friendly interface, brought file-sharing to the masses. The old model of copyright and revenue generation became obsolete overnight: people stopped buying CDs; young people got music through the internet for free. The music industry had to reinvent itself or die. Wright told me that his earliest conversations with Kleiman were about file-sharing. In 2007 they wrote a study guide together on hacking. ‘I used to fire ideas off him,’ Wright said. ‘I’m pretty good at maths but I’m not very good at people.’ Kleiman, he said, could put up with his temper, which not everybody could. They began to speak of ways to use the Napster idea in other areas and solve some old problems in cryptography. Wright never, I have to say, made it fully clear how they had collaborated on building bitcoin. I kept returning to the subject, and my doubts would flare up when he failed to be explicit.

‘Give me a sense of how the idea of Satoshi formed,’ I said.

‘I guess,’ Wright replied, ‘the initial idea was having a pseudonymous head that wouldn’t be cut off.’

‘More your idea than his?’

‘Probably mine.’

‘And was there a point you realised you needed a figurehead?’ I asked.

‘We needed people to respond to us,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t really want people to respond to me. There are a couple of reasons for that. I don’t think I would really have sold the idea to anyone. If I’d come out originally as Satoshi without Dave, I don’t think it would have gone anywhere. I’ve had too many conversations with people who get annoyed because it’s me.’ The Satoshi Affair.
Andrew O’Hagan in the #LRB:
30 June 2016
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair