Mysterious currency creator found?
The internet currency known as the bitcoin is a mystery to most folks.
Also a mystery is the person who came up with this virtual money.
Reporters chased Satoshi Nakamoto outside his California home.
It was just hours after Newsweek reported the 64-year-old retired engineer is the man who created Bitcoin in 2009.
The magazine is standing by a report that it tracked him down in California.
Nakamoto denies it.
"The main reason I'm here is to clear my name, that I have nothing to do with bitcoin. Nothing to do with developing. I was just an engineer doing something else," Nakamoto said.
Bitcoin is digital money. You buy it with real currency on unregulated exchanges and then store it online in a so-called "digital wallet."
There's now nearly eight billion worth of bitcoin in circulation.
Lindsey Turrentine from the technology website CNET believes that many people are interested in seeing new experimental currencies like Bitcoin succeed.
"Bitcoin is very experimental. It's absolutely a new thing, and if you look at the bitcoin website you'll see that the bitcoin organization itself says this is new and you shouldn't expect it to be stable," said Turrentine.
Last week the currency's largest exchange filed for bankruptcy after more than half a billion bitcoins were stolen by hackers. That was followed by the apparent suicide of an American CEO of a bitcoin exchange in Singapore.
Nick Spanos and his fellow Bitcoin users in New York want to open the first regulated Bitcoin exchange in the United States.
Retail shops in some U.S. cities now accept bitcoins as payment and there are even bitcoin ATMs.
Bitcoin is also attracting unwanted attention from the Treasury Department and the Security and Exchange Commission.
After shutting down an online black market that used Bitcoin, the FBI is now one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world.
