There were a lot of people claiming to be Satoshi, but CSW was the only one who made it as far as convincing a person, who has gained the original Satoshi Nakamotos trust: Gavin Andresen. I would very much like to see the communication between him and CSW, that made Gavin book a flight to London.
I don't know if I'd go quite as far as trust, but you make a fair point.
We (the bitcoin devs) asked Gavin a number of questions in the immediate aftermath of his endorsement of Wright.
Gavin went unresponsive when we asked for details about when he started communicating with Wright. So good luck finding out anything there.
He said in media interviews that he was absolutely convinced before ever seeing any proof.
Certainly, in none of Wright's communication that I've ever seen has he
sounded at all like Satoshi for any span of more than a few words-- maybe a sentence at most... except where he was just quoting Satoshi.
And yet, as we are today Gavin has still never fully retracted his endorsement. He left it at an 'I'm not sure what happened, maybe I was fooled. It doesn't matter anyways'-- something which wright's promoters continues to use to promote wright's legitimacy.
Probably the most significant thing I can say on this subject is that *none* of the core-devs upon hearing Gavin endorsed the guy thought this was at all evidence of the claims-- even before seeing the publication of the obviously faked signature. The idea that Gavin was hacked, was being coerced, was being paid off, was a scammed idiot, or was attempting a desperate attempt at taking over Bitcoin after he was unable to convince people through the merit of his arguments were all considered serious possibilities. We discussed the possibility that wright got his hands on of an early block private key that was mined by someone other than satoshi, and was planning on exploiting the ambiguity about who mined what-- and that Gavin fell for that because of one of the might have fallen for it due to the aforementioned reasons. The only people that thought his endorsement was persuasive were people that hadn't worked with him on technical matters. The people who would know best how to weigh the evidence of that endorsement didn't find it remotely persuasive. And in the aftermath, when Wright's public signature turned out to be fake Gavin's response wasn't to adopt complete transparency and help take out and protect the Bitcoin community from the guy that had supposedly conned him. Take that for what you will.
I think in general the pattern we've seen from Wright is that he isn't particularly convincing or persuasive, but rather he exploits the fact that people are usually unprepared to deal with such an audacious liar. ... the sort of person who will go literally red faced screaming at you that NO, IN FACT THE SKY IS GREEN NOT BLUE THE SKY IS GREEN. When faced with behaviour like that some people just start wondering if maybe its legit because they'd personally never act that way unless they were telling the truth and were absolutely sure of it.