As others have said, I lost a little confidence in Gwern, who was a co-author of the the Wired piece and who I, until now, viewed as more skeptical. Especially given his history at LessWrong.
Losing some confidence is appropriate if one was overconfident to begin with. But rather than restricting this update to future proclamations from Gwern, possibly I should reconsider my reliance on expert opinion itself, even my own.
> Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.
That's a total cop-out, and may represent the last sentence I ever read from Wired (used to love it). Anyone with a modicum of technical ability could have done all the "brilliant" hoaxing Wright has done, such as back-dating GPG keys and spoofing email. He even screwed up those (e.g., not realizing that he used GPG preferred hash algorithms that didn't even exist until 2009 when back-dating a key to 2008).
In addition, Wright totally, completely ruined his scam with his ridiculous bragging about his half dozen of (non-existent) degrees, which set many people's Spidey senses tingling. Satoshi was a pretty low-key guy. A competent hoaxer would have made a bigger effort to match the personality and character of the person he was trying to emulate.
This isn't Kaiser Soze level scheming here. This is a fairly uneducated, boastful man with a bit of technical knowledge and a load of dishonest intentions. It's horribly disappointing that so many people in both the journalist and Bitcoin communities were so quick to fall for it, especially after what happened with Dorian Nakamoto.
I, too, am surprised he believes this, but I'm not about to write him off. He could still be right and if he's wrong so what.