My Bitcoin Cash Journey: Chapter 4
[continued from chapter 3]
So who was she?
It turns out the girl I met that night was none other than Uyen Nguyen. If you're unfamiliar with the name, she's linked to both Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman and is supposedly the trustee of the infamous Tulip Trust. In publicly available documents, she is listed as an agent of the W&K Defense Research LLC, and as a director of CO1N LTD. Both companies are linked to Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman.
(source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hwf2q/who_is_uyen_t_nguyen/)
Furthermore, she's named in Andrew O'Hagan's article about Craig Wright that was published on June 30, 2016 in the London Review of Books. In that article (The Satoshi Affair), Uyen Nguyen is described as follows:
Around this time, an 18-year-old IT enthusiast called Uyen Nguyen began working with them. Very quickly, Kleiman made her a co-director of their company and she later became a powerful figure in the trust. It’s unclear how such a young and inexperienced person came to have so much influence. Wright told me she was ‘volatile, capricious and beyond control’ and added that Kleiman liked young women and that she was loyal and trusted – but that ‘she wants to help and this always leads to trouble.’ While I was preparing this story, Wright began to seem worried about Nguyen. I always felt he was in the middle of a very complicated lie when he talked about her. ‘My way of lying,’ he told me one day, ‘is to let you believe something. If you stop questioning and then you go off, and I don’t correct you – that’s my lie.’
I have also learned the gentleman with the hat was none other than Joseph Vaughn Perling. Here's a link to an interview he did with Aaron van Wirdum back in 2016:
In case anyone wants to accuse me of publicizing a private conversation, I specifically asked Ms. Nguyen for permission to write an article about our encounter. I even took out my phone in front of her to jot down notes so I wouldn't forget. To add one final twist to the story, remember the guy sitting between me and Ms. Nguyen? Coincidentally, we ended up running into each other a year later while making a trade using local.bitcoin.com. After making our trade, we chatted for a bit, and I reminded him of that night. I asked him if he remembered her giving me permission to write a story, and he did. So there's that. He's also the person who introduced me to read.cash and sent me an invite code so I could start writing on this platform.
In the grand scheme of things, I don't know exactly how this whole episode fits into my overall Bitcoin Cash journey. If I'd known who she was that night, I could have asked her about her relationship with Craig Wright and his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto. But I had no clue who I was talking to, and she probably wouldn't have answered me anyway.
What I do know is that after discovering who she was, it only caused me to fall deeper down the bitcoin rabbit hole.
As 2018 progressed, the price of all cryptocurrencies continued to fall. But instead of being discouraged, I remained a fervent supporter of peer to peer electronic cash. I have to believe that it was due, in part, to my run-in with such a mysterious character in the Bitcoin Cash world. It added a new dimension to my journey and sparked my imagination as to what role I could potentially play in all of this.
Then came the hash war, my bags got rekt, and I was no longer having any fun.
