After Newsweek claimed to have unmasked the mysterious creator of Bitcoin as 64-year-old physicist Dorian Nakamoto, the Japanese-American saw it as an opportunity to claim a free lunch from a reporter.
But now Nakamoto, who denies any involvement in the digital currency, is set for an even bigger bonus after fans raised £16,800 to donate to him.
Andreas Antonopoulos, an executive at Blockchain.info, a Bitcoin business, has started a campaign on social network Reddit to donate Bitcoins to Nakamoto, who was caught up in a media storm last week.
So far the campaign has raised about 44 Bitcoins, worth £16,784 at today’s prices.
Antonopoulos wrote: “If this person is not Satoshi [Bitcoin’s founder], then these funds will serve as a ‘sorry for what happened to you’.”
Meanwhile scandal-hit Bitcoin exchange Mt Gox has been hit by a further hack that claims to have exposed customer data. A hacker posted what appeared to be details of account balances on the blog of Mt Gox’s founder Mark Karpeles.
