I'm leaning towards the idea that Gavin genuinely thought he was Satoshi and was fooled, as were a few other people. Which is depressing. I know people here hate him, but I don't think he was in on it. He's incompetent rather than evil.

I think Wright does have legitimate crypto and programming knowledge, studied Satoshi's writing a bit, and was able to both talk the talk and use the charm common to all conmen to get them to believe it.

And from there all he had to do was take his laptop out and stage verifying blocks 1 and 9 in front of them. That could be done in various ways while still making it look like he's running actual signature verification commands. Essentially, he would've replaced one or more of the commands with dummy versions. Just about anyone with basic programming knowledge could do it.

The Economist seemed to confirm that the verification was indeed only done from Wright's own computer and was not independently verified by them:

Mr Wright has also demonstrated this verification in person to The Economist—and not just for block 9, but block 1. Such demonstrations can be stage-managed; and information that allows us to go through the verification process independently was provided too late for us to do so fully. Still, as far as we can tell he indeed seems to be in possession of the keys, at least for block 9. This assessment is shared by two bitcoin insiders who have sat through the same demonstration: Jon Matonis, a bitcoin consultant and former director of the Bitcoin Foundation, and Gavin Andresen, Mr Nakamoto’s successor as the lead developer of the cryptocurrency’s software (he has since passed on the baton, but is still contributing to the code).

Maybe Gavin or Jon did independently verify it despite The Economist not doing so. But they never said they did. And I'm betting they didn't.

If this is true, the only question is why supposed experts would just accept that and not independently verify it from their own computers.

All they had to do was ask him to sign a message with something like "Craig Wright = Satoshi" using the genesis block's address's private key and/or Satoshi's GPG key, stick the message and signature on a USB drive (which could potentially have malware, but probably unlikely to be effective against Jon or Gavin's computers without a zero-day), and have them plug it in and check that it validates.

Though even then: if he was really Satoshi and really wanted to prove it, he would have posted the message and signature publicly.

edit:

Disregard this post for now, I guess. I should read more carefully. Gavin claims he did independently verify it on a clean computer.

Part of that time was spent on a careful cryptographic verification of messages signed with keys that only Satoshi should possess. But even before I witnessed the keys signed and then verified on a clean computer that could not have been tampered with, I was reasonably certain I was sitting next to the Father of Bitcoin.

I think that leaves only two very concerning possibilities:

• Craig Wright is Satoshi.
• Gavin is wittingly collaborating with him in this scam.