High-profile cryptocurrency founder writes blog posts about sex with preteen girls, and says condemning pedophilia is ‘nonsense’

Gavin Wood, the cofounder of the cryptocurrency project Ethereum, wrote a first-person blog post in 2013 graphically describing a sexual encounter with a 10-year-old girl dying of AIDS. The blog post has since been deleted, but its contents were reposted on Reddit and cached to an Internet archive. Wood authored several other blog posts in which he defended pedophilia, arguing that "it's nonsense to pretend that all relationships between children and adults are morally wrong."

On December 18, 2013, Wood published a first-person story about a sexual relationship with a preteen girl called Elizabeth

In the story, they first met when he was 10 years old and she was 2. When Elizabeth was 6 years old, doctors discovered that she was HIV-positive and in the late stages of AIDS. Wood wrote that they remained close even throughout his teens — and it was "during this period that I began to notice just how beautiful she was."

In the blog post, Wood wrote that he returned home from university for Christmas when he was 18 years old. At this time, Elizabeth would have only been around 10 years old. According to Wood, Elizabeth told him that she was rapidly dying of AIDS and that she wanted him to take her virginity. Wood writes:

"And so, that evening, in a bedroom full of the childhood memories of my grandmother’s house, we slowly undressed each other and went to bed. We cuddled for hours, before she manoeuvred herself on to me and mischievous smile intact, began to push her tender sex onto me. It hurt her, of course, but it was almost as though she craved the pain – as though she expected it and accepted it gladly for what it meant. Again and again it continued through to dawn, with the barest of rests in between; one night of passion to make up for a lost lifetime. By the next morning, she was tired and sore, but more content than she had ever known."

Wood now states the post is fiction, but many of its details align with his real life

According to BuzzFeed News, Wood confirmed that he authored the blog post. However, he says the story was "made-up" and "meant to spark debate and conversation."

"My blog posts at the time were meant to provoke intellectual debate and discussion around generally taboo subjects like the nature of consent," he said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. "Nothing about it should be taken as indicative of my personal position. My only position here is that rigorous, rational and unrestricted discussion on all topics is generally a requirement to make informed decisions as a society."

However, BuzzFeed News found that several key details in his story align with Wood's personal life. For example, Wood's LinkedIn profile says that he attended the University of York from 1998 to 2002 and attended a private school in Lancaster, the city where his grandmother lived. Similarly, in the blog post, Wood describes living in his grandmother's house as a teenager and starting university in 1998.

BuzzFeed News also observed that Wood, now 38 years old, has been seen wearing a woven bracelet in photographs and at public events. In the blog post, Wood wrote that Elizabeth gave him a woven bracelet from Guatemala.

But that wasn’t Wood's only blog post about sexual relationships between children and adults

Though his blog is now defunct, many archived blog posts can still be accessed online. In a blog post entitled "Lolital Justice" posted on June 21, 2013, Wood defended a teacher who had a relationship with his under-age student.

"Judging from the recent news coverage, one might expect that a morally-aware citizen should join the chorus in denouncing Forest, a teacher who fell in love with an under-age student, and who, at her instigation travelled with her to France to start a new life," Wood wrote.

However, Wood was skeptical of the outrage against the pedophilic teacher. In particular, he harshly criticized statutory rape laws that impose an age of consent. "Why does it have to be this way?" Wood wrote. "Clearly it's a fanciful nonsense that there's a point in one's life (16 years after birth, here) at which one suddenly becomes capable of making decisions regarding whether they want to abscond to France or have sex." Wood went on to criticize the idea that pedophilia is inherently wrong. "It's nonsense to pretend that all relationships between children and adults are morally wrong," he argued.

As the founder of Ethereum, whose cryptocurrency is the second most valuable in the world after Bitcoin, Wood is an eminent member of the cryptocurrency community and he commands an international platform. His blog archive remains accessible to the public.

@nian_hu