On April 26, 2013, only four days remained before he had to transfer 323,000 bitcoins.

That day, Dave Kleiman was found dead in his home in Florida, USA. His body was already highly decomposed. There was a bullet hole in the mattress and a loaded handgun beside him, yet there were no gunshot wounds on the body and no bullet casings at the scene. Blood was mixed into the imprints of his wheelchair. Official conclusion: natural death.

To understand why this murder case matters, we first need to answer a question the world has been asking for fifteen years: Who exactly is Satoshi Nakamoto?

This article starts from a piece of buried history, then moves to the life-and-death route war inside Bitcoin today, and finally lands on an opportunity that I believe is currently being severely underestimated.

1. Satoshi Nakamoto Was Never One Person

In everyone’s fixed impression, Satoshi Nakamoto was a mysterious, low-profile cryptography expert. But in my version of the story, Satoshi was never one person — it was an organization. Two known individuals: one responsible for ideas and strategy, the other for code and operations.

Dave Kleiman, a computer forensics expert from Florida, former police officer, paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident and permanently in a wheelchair. He authored multiple books on digital forensics, had strong technical skills, and was extremely good at keeping secrets — a natural fit for “going dark.”

Craig Wright, an Australian with degrees in cryptography, law, accounting, and even theology, holder of over 4,000 patents (more than Edison). Paranoid, arrogant, classic strategist personality.

In 2007, the two co-authored a professional book on computer forensics.

In 2008, building on Wei Dai’s b-money, Hal Finney’s RPOW, and Adam Back’s Hashcash, they co-wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper that changed the world. Wright led the vision and strategy; Kleiman led the implementation. If you look back at “Satoshi’s” British spelling, restrained writing style, and day-sleep/night-active time zone, it looks more like a team-crafted persona than a single individual.

On January 3, 2009, the genesis block was born. In the very early days, almost only Satoshi was mining. According to this narrative, the two mined around 1.1 million BTC — the legendary “Satoshi coins” that have never moved to this day. These coins were placed into a structure called the Tulip Trust, held under the company W&K Info Defense Research (likely the initials of Wright and Kleiman).

The story took a sharp turn in the spring of 2013. On April 2, the two signed a share sale agreement: Dave sold his shares in W&K to Craig. The company was carrying about $40 million in debt. To secure this debt, Dave had to transfer 323,000 BTC from the trust to Craig, with a deadline of April 30.

On April 26, four days before the transfer, Dave died. The death certificate cited coronary artery disease combined with MRSA infection; toxicology found cocaine, benzodiazepines, and alcohol. But the scene looked extremely suspicious: a loaded gun, a bullet hole in the mattress, yet no gunshot wounds and no casings. His family still believes he was murdered.

2013 was also the year the FBI raided Silk Road and seized massive amounts of Bitcoin. It was a dangerous time when early large Bitcoin holdings, murder rumors, and black money settlements intertwined. Whoever held hundreds of thousands of coins was sitting on a volcano. (Note: The official police conclusion was natural death; “murder” remains only a suspicion with no conviction.)

This is the most critical part of the entire narrative. After Dave’s death, Craig immediately sensed the danger: Satoshi’s email and P2P Foundation forum accounts were hacked. He judged that he might be next. So he did something that later looked “self-destructive” but may have been for survival at the time: he destroyed almost all early keys and materials that could prove he was Satoshi, and moved his family to the UK. This is exactly why he could never later produce “ironclad evidence from before 2014.”

On December 8, 2015, Wired and Gizmodo simultaneously published articles based on leaked documents, identifying Wright (along with the deceased Kleiman) as highly likely to be Satoshi. Interestingly, on the same day, Australian federal police raided his Sydney home on tax-related grounds.

In May 2016, Wright publicly claimed to be Satoshi through BBC, The Economist, and GQ, and even demonstrated signing with Satoshi’s private key. Gavin Andresen and Jon Matonis from the Bitcoin Foundation publicly stated they believed him. But this verification, which should have been conclusive, quickly fell apart: the community discovered that the “signature” he posted was simply copied from an old on-chain transaction. He then left the line “I’m sorry, I don’t have the courage,” and withdrew further proof.

This is the part that confuses me the most and also makes him seem “least like a scammer.” A real scammer would have milked this once-in-a-lifetime global spotlight. Instead, he faltered at the critical moment and ran. Maybe he just wanted to become a public figure so he wouldn’t be silently erased like Dave, with no way to seek justice.

Over the next decade, the story moved into the courts — parts with verifiable public records:

• Kleiman v. Wright (USA, 2021): The jury ruled there was no “partnership to create Bitcoin,” so the coins were not awarded to the estate. However, it found Wright had misappropriated intellectual property from the joint company W&K and ordered him to pay about $100 million (around $143 million with interest).

• COPA v. Wright (UK, 2024): On March 14, Judge Mellor announced in court that Wright is not Satoshi and not the author of the whitepaper. On May 20, a 231-page written judgment ruled that he “deliberately forged documents” on an “astonishing scale,” used the court as a tool for fraud, and referred him for criminal prosecution.

I must be honest: from a purely legal standpoint, this is the most thorough and authoritative rejection of “Craig = Satoshi.” I won’t avoid it or try to sugarcoat it.

But there’s one angle that fascinates me more and more.

Batman hides as a playboy, Superman as a clumsy reporter, Zorro as a cowardly nobleman — they all choose a mask opposite to their true self.

Satoshi’s image was mysterious, low-key, and extremely concise. Craig Wright is almost the exact opposite: loud, arrogant, constantly trying to prove himself.

So perhaps the highest level of hiding is not silence, but stepping in front of everyone and shouting “I am Satoshi,” then letting the whole world — through cryptography, courts, documents, witnesses, and public opinion — prove that you are not. From then on, anyone could be Satoshi, except Craig Wright.

You don’t have to agree with me. I just think: for someone truly afraid of being killed, the first thing they would do is destroy everything proving “I hold over a million bitcoins.” So the fact that “he can’t produce ironclad proof” may actually be the most logical part of the story, not evidence against it.

The truth may forever be locked in those 1.1 million unmoved bitcoins. That string of addresses silent for fifteen years is the most silent yet most honest witness in the world. The day they move, we’ll know who is still alive and who still holds the keys.

And now, this long-forgotten story is being retold by Hollywood: a $70 million movie Bitcoin / Killing Satoshi has entered post-production. Directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Edge of Tomorrow), with Casey Affleck playing Craig Wright. The entire film was shot in a gray box in London with about 200 scenes, backgrounds, and lighting all generated by AI — the world’s first major AI big-screen movie. When the world is willing to re-examine a story, it often means it was never truly over.

2. The Exiled Chain: From Satoshi Dice to Ordinals

Craig has strongly promoted BSV under the banner of “restoring Satoshi’s original vision”: big blocks, on-chain scaling, turning Bitcoin back into cash and a global ledger. But BTC has taken a different path over the past decade. To understand this split, you must first see what the BTC community has consistently done: filtering demand.

This defensive instinct has deep roots. Early altcoins were mostly low-quality copies with tweaked parameters, pumped and dumped. The term “shitcoin” appeared as early as 2010. After being burned many times, the community grew a thick defensive shell: “Don’t touch scams, just hold Bitcoin.” This saved many wallets back then. In 2014, Vitalik popularized “Bitcoin maximalism” as a derogatory term. That same year, the sidechain whitepaper was released, leading maximalists to firmly believe innovation should happen within Bitcoin itself.

This belief has three cornerstones: perfect birth (no founder, no pre-mine, fair issuance, uncopyable), ethical money production (only Bitcoin is “moral money”), and minority rights (rules as protection). It sounds bulletproof, but it runs into a contradiction that someone named NIMBY (“Not In My Back Yard”). They shout “build on Bitcoin,” but curse anyone actually building NFTs, tokens, or apps on the chain. However, imposing subjective morality on a permissionless protocol was doomed from the start.

This wasn’t the first time. In 2013, the gambling app Satoshi Dice accounted for over 50% of Bitcoin’s transaction volume for a long time, proving that real usage would naturally explode block space demand. The result? OP_RETURN was strictly limited (almost single-handedly by Luke Dashjr). Bitcoin apps became unusable overnight and migrated to Ethereum. The earliest NFTs, stablecoins, and prediction markets were originally on Bitcoin.

In 2023, history repeated. Casey Rodarmor launched Ordinals, allowing every satoshi to be numbered and inscribed with arbitrary data. Then BRC-20 and $ORDI were instantly minted. Bitcoin was being used again. Luke Dashjr immediately called inscriptions bugs and spam, and the BIP-110 proposal aimed to filter this data at the consensus layer. The logic is the same: you’re using too much capacity, so you should be restricted.

The question is: If one day Starbucks accepts BTC for coffee and those transactions fill the blocks, should we also ban people from buying Starbucks with BTC? A system that prohibits usage the moment it sees heavy adoption — is it a global monetary network or just a museum exhibit behind glass?

So the real question was never “Should Bitcoin have applications?” but rather: When real demand appears, does Bitcoin filter it or carry it? BTC chose to filter. The chain that chose to carry it is called BSV.

3. BSV: The Chain That Chose to “Carry” — Technically Ready

There’s one nearly infallible rule: once capacity increases, it will be filled. Bigger hard drives fill with photos; cloud storage fills with videos; faster mobile networks fill with short videos. Now AI is filling data centers. Next will be model versions, training data proofs, inference records, agent identities, machine payments, content rights.

The question is never whether data will grow, but who can provide low-cost, verifiable, auditable, and settleable infrastructure for it.

This is exactly what BSV is betting on, and it’s already technically prepared. BTC’s throughput is about 7 transactions per second. BSV, through Teranode and Aerospike, has reached million-level TPS with fees as low as a fraction of a cent.

Data scale: BTC’s full chain is about 800 GB; BSV has exceeded 12 million GB (about 12 PB) — roughly 15,000 times larger.

But data scale alone doesn’t equal victory. The feasible way is layering: large files go to specialized storage, while datasets, models, content hashes, versions, authorizations, payments, timestamps, and audit records go on-chain. Anyone can verify whether data is real, unaltered, when it was created, and by whom.

This is the value of Merkle Trees and SPV in Section 8 of the whitepaper: it compresses massive data into cryptographically verifiable proofs.

Another widely misunderstood point: Bitcoin’s 10-minute block time doesn’t mean you wait ten minutes for a coffee. In reality, when you swipe Visa, the authorization happens instantly; settlement is separate. The merchant gives you the coffee once authorization passes. Bitcoin works the same: small payments need to be validated and double-spend detectable; only large transactions need full settlement.

The entire industry is taking detours: Ethereum with L2s, Solana with cross-chain, and now BTC with layers, sidechains, and bridges. The logic is always “the land is too small, so we build skyscrapers and basements.” But Satoshi’s original vision wasn’t that. As hardware, bandwidth, and storage improve, the land itself should expand. BSV still uses the original 1xxx addresses, with no SegWit, no Taproot, and no later-added layers. It follows the unwritten path.

4. Asymmetric Bet: When Everyone Thinks It’s Dead

A cold fact: If Bitcoin only has the “digital gold” narrative without real applications, it will struggle to truly surpass gold. Gold has thousands of years of consensus plus jewelry, industry, and central bank reserves. If BTC is only “buy, hold, wait for greater fools,” once new buyers dry up, the narrative will turn on price, price will turn on faith — a death spiral.

Another rarely mentioned fact: After the 2017/2018 split, there were two Bitcoins. Early Bitcoin holders were passively given BSV too — Satoshi had it, early miners had it, early OGs had it. But MicroStrategy and BlackRock didn’t, because they entered after 2020. They can sell BTC, but they have no BSV to sell. BTC took the name and crown; BSV kept the bloodline and the original covenant.

In the entire industry, only BSV dares to directly contest the throne of “who is the real Bitcoin.” It’s like a royal bastard — besieged, humiliated, and attempted to be killed for years: all-time low prices, miners losing money, ecosystem bleeding, faith liquidated. But blockchain isn’t the traditional world. PoW means a public chain isn’t so easily killed. You can suppress it, humiliate it, besiege it, but you can’t shut it down like a company. What doesn’t kill it only makes it stronger.

Today, the market prices BSV as if it’s already dead: historic lows, long decline, market cap only 1/10,000th of BTC. But is the probability of a narrative reversal really only 1/10,000? I don’t think so. It’s not an ignored air coin — quite the opposite, it has consistently high attention, even if mostly controversy, ridicule, and opposition. In markets, controversy itself is traffic. When traffic meets price reversal, it becomes narrative.

With the upcoming movie re-igniting the “Who is Satoshi?” debate, this fire may burn hotter than anyone expects.

Everyone asks: Should I buy BTC at $60k or wait for $50k? My answer is: You should have bought Bitcoin at $10. You always say you wouldn’t miss $10 BTC in 2012, but now the “real Bitcoin” is still around $10 and you still don’t dare buy. What you miss isn’t $10 Bitcoin — you miss the certainty after it reached $100k. Real opportunities never appear with certainty.

For BTC holders, allocating a small position in BSV is more like a defensive hedge than a faith investment. I prefer small bets on big reversals, because not betting is also a bet — betting you’ll miss it, betting you’ll lose. And I don’t like losing.

BTC’s path is to become the hardest, most restrained, most expensive settlement asset. BSV’s path is to become scalable infrastructure for payments, data, and the machine economy. One contracts its boundaries; the other leaves room for the future. Speculation won’t disappear, but when price narratives lose their magic, what remains will be the truly useful networks.

The whitepaper never described Digital Gold. It described a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. More accurately: Bitcoin is not a coin. Bitcoin is a system.

Those 1.1 million sleeping coins, that unresolved murder case, and the upcoming movie all point to the same unfinished story.

The time to build is now. (Not investment advice)