Craig Wright “was the sole author of the Bitcoin whitepaper”: RAAF Wing Commander Donald Lynam

Of the many witnesses who were testified against Wright in Kleiman, Wing Commander Donald Lynam of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) is by far the most impressive.

Donald Joseph Lynam is the maternal uncle of Dr. Craig Wright. As a former wing commander of the RAAF, he was a high-ranking officer in the service: he is the seventh highest rank available in the RAAF and is more or less equivalent to a lieutenant colonel in the US Forces.

He had an excellent career – a career that he began in 1957 and which eventually earned him the prestigious honor of being inducted into the Order of Australia, the country’s highest recognition for achievement and merit.

Source: Queen’s Birthday Honors List – The Order of Australia, The Canberra Times, Monday June 10, 1985.

So when someone like Donald Lynam is talking, people tend to listen seriously.

That is, when the jury heard him say on Wednesday that Dr. Wright had sent him a pre-release version of the Bitcoin whitepaper months before it was published in 2008, it was a bombshell.

“I had no doubt that he was the only creative writer,” he vowed.

Retired Wing Commander Donald Lynam

Outside of the morning he was dropped off in April 2020, Donald Lynam doesn’t seem to care about Dr. Worrying about Wright’s litigation or the current status of Bitcoin. He said he had only a “superficial understanding” of Kleiman’s lawsuit, and although he felt that Dr. Wright viewed him as a role model, he said that their uncle and nephew relationship wasn’t much closer than one would expect.

In fact, Lynam doesn’t hesitate to be honest about his nephew.

Lynam described a former colleague: “He was a guy who looked a lot like Craig Wright … very little social skills, but he had a magical memory and an incredible brain.”

Although Donald Lynam was not particularly close, Donald Lynam’s status as a role model for Dr. Wright that Wright regularly shared work with his uncle.

“He sent me papers that he prepared and wrote, and he usually sent them in an early form and then in the finished form.

“I never really knew if he wanted me to work as a word smith for him and go through and correct his expression and layout, but I was always happy with that.”

In this context, Dr. Wright excitedly talked about a universal token system that he created for Casino Lasseters in 2007. This meant that an early version of the Satoshi Nakamoto whitepaper was presented to Lynam in 2008, which he believed was the natural flow-on of this project.

“I think the real name was pending when I received the white paper, but it was clearly supposed to be a digital money system.

“I don’t think the newspaper was headed ‘Bitcoin’, but I have no doubt that this was the forerunner because it had the same content as the newspaper – or very similar content.”

Even here, Lynam’s honesty extended to his retelling from the first time he was told by Dr. Wright heard about the Bitcoin project.

“Craig sent me a copy for my review, but it was way too technical and poorly written.”

But perhaps more revealing than saying he received the whitepaper from Wright before it was published is that Dr. Wright also discussed the intended pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in relative detail.

“He said that he felt that there was a monetary system that was important – and that he didn’t know exactly where it was going, but that it was important to protect his privacy and that of his family.

“But then he said, ‘Satoshi Nakamoto.’ That was a bit of a surprise, but it didn’t surprise me because he loves everything Japanese. “

Lynam says he asked Wright why the name was. The answer was that it was a reference to the Japanese philosopher Tominaga Nakamoto, whom Wright called the equivalent of Adam Smith, the Scottish economist who authored The Wealth of Nations, a book about power busy with incentives and rewards. As for the first name, satoshi means a variation of “intelligent learning” in Japanese.

Lynam finally saw the tidy version of the whitepaper when it was released later in the year, and when Bitcoin went live in 2009, Lynam said he ran one of the earliest nodes of Bitcoin for Wright on his home computer. Lynam’s statement here is very specific. After all, his computer at the time was particularly suitable for this, so Wright sent him detailed instructions on how to set it up in 2009. In 2011, he said he could see his machine was no longer contributing, and then he finished the knot.

Between his sporadic collisions with Wright’s work on Bitcoin, it is clear from his testimony that Don Lynam is a man who lives on. He does not pay attention to digital assets and the disputes associated with them. For him, his testimonies are only memories of his relationship with his brilliant nephew.

“I have no doubt that he was the only creative writer [of the Satsohi white paper]. That doesn’t mean that other people don’t contribute to the open source software … but he’s the only creative writer … and I still haven’t seen anything substantial that could shake my conviction. “

Dr. Wright’s grandfather worked with General McArthur

Don Lynam isn’t the only military hero in the family. Far from it.

Ronald Lynam was Donald’s father and the grandfather of Craig. As successful as Don is, Ronald could have been more impressive.

Source: Lisa N. Edwards Tumblr

According to Don and records secured by Wright’s sister, Ronald Lynam joined the Australian Army at the start of World War II. Though it meant leaving a successful radio repair company behind in rural Queensland, his sense of duty to his country was so great that he was forced to come forward.

Although Ronald Lynam would eventually reach the rank of major, he first joined the signals department (Donald says his father was, among other things, a cryptography expert), while Lynam Senior joined an allied intelligence group.

As one of the first senior radio and electrical engineers in Australia, Ronald Lynam developed the early warning radar, which was used on the Queensland coast during the war.

He was also part of the famous code breakers of Bletchley Park, the headquarters of the Allied code breakers in Great Britain most commonly associated with the great Alan Turing.

His cryptographic knowledge made him useful to the team led by the famous Allied war leader General McArthur who followed McArthur to the Philippines. A significant part of his work with McArthur in Asia was cracking Japanese communications – work that Donald said was instrumental in winning the decisive battle in the Coral Sea, the Allied forces’ first major victory in the fight against Japan.

During the war, the Allied intelligence team had become so good at cracking Japanese codes that they were able to intercept, decrypt, and translate your communications within hours of transmission.

In fact, their system was so reliable that they were able to disseminate information to allied bases in the Pacific and watch leaked information propagate through the Japanese military in almost real time.

The US armed forces were made aware of a planned invasion of Australian territory in and around New Guinea. Intercepted communications allowed the Allies to react quickly and intercept the invading force in what was seen by many as a turning point in the Pacific.

According to Don, Ronald Lynam was part of it. And as a cryptography expert with war stories compelling enough to hit the silver screen (with Don being quick to point out that it was decades before his father got to talk about his work) the late Ronald Lynam’s influence on Dr. Wright It’s obvious.

“He was almost a machine himself,” Don Lynam testified to his father. “With his brain going through with all his plans and the things he wanted to build and do and so on, but with Craig he could sit down and they would open up and talk to each other for hours.”

In a psychological evaluation by Dr. Wright said Dr. Ami Klin that Wright’s grandfather was “very bright, isolated, and absorbed in his close interests and projects, and with whom Dr. Wright spent a lot of time during his childhood and with whom was one of the most important relationships in Dr. Wright. “

Donald Lynam swore so in his testimony.

“I think my father, Craig’s grandfather, was a huge influence on him.”

It also appears that Ronald Lynam’s exploits overseas led to Dr. Wright was exposed to various Asian cultures during his childhood. Ronald brought Wright gifts from around the world – including Japanese currency from the occupation of the Philippines, which Donald Wright was obsessed with.

Does the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto make sense?

From code breaking in WWII to Satoshi Nakamoto

The Lynams are a highly skilled military family. The stories of Ronald Lynam and his son Donald are intriguing in their own right, touching on World War II code cracking, General MacArthur, and royal honors.

According to the affidavit of retired Wing Commander Donald Lynam, it is this background that spawned the Satoshi Nakamoto who was supposed to give birth to Bitcoin.

In fact, in many ways, his statement fills many of the gaps in Bitcoin history – many of which hadn’t even thought of filling them in. But the testimony explains a lot: the reason for Satoshi’s secrecy, the source of Satoshi’s obsession with cryptography, the reasoning behind the Satoshi pseudonym, and an explanation for the affinity for Asian cultures.

After all, this makes sense. For Donald Lynam there is no Satoshi Nakamoto – there is only his nephew, Dr. Craig Wright.

Check out all of the CoinGeek special reports on Kleiman’s Vs Wright YouTube playlist.

New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeek’s Bitcoin For Beginners section, the ultimate resource guide, to learn more about Bitcoin – as originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto – and blockchain.