He seems like somebody who is very concerned with taking credit for things. And not just in a "hey, I made that!" kind of way, but in a "I will sue people who say I didn't make it. " [0] kind of way.
This alone is enough for me dismiss his claims. Satoshi clearly intentionally wanted to remain unknown. It might be a real name, but it likely isn't. There was plenty of opportunity to reveal himself. Now that BTC is suddenly valuable and Blockchain has taken off, it is inevitable that there will be opportunists who want to personally gain from it. CSW is just one of many.
Not to mention that CSW has made other false claims, such as claiming to hold a PhD when he actually doesn't [1]. There is a lawsuit where his name is titled as "Dr.". Again, alarm bells should be going off for anybody that sees that.
And of course, there is a very simple way to prove he is Satoshi, which is to prove he holds the private key for a known Satoshi public key. But he can't do that, and almost certainly forged multiple keys he claims are Satoshi's [2].
A real Satoshi could have lost his key, like many people lost their Bitcoin wallets. A fake Satoshi could possess the keys, by stealing or by receiving them in gift etc.
Isn't this guy literally billions in the hole to the estate of someone he claims was his partner in creating BTC, and who is co-owner of the Satoshi hoard of coins which haven't moved (ever)? Did that court case ever finish or is he still using every trick in the book to draw it out?
(Kleiman v. Wright, that's what I'm thinking of)
(Looks like it got kicked back to June this year due to covid)
Yes, he failed to produce any keys, the courier with the keys never materialized, the judge has not thrown Craig Wright in jail for contempt of court nor has be been charged with perjury. The judge seems to be mildly entertained by this and views Craig Wright as mentally ill, but won't have him committed. It is all sad and strange. There are a lot of guardrails against using the system this way, but they aren't being used.
As for why the Bitcoin Core developers were so quick to do this, the whitepaper has been a thorn in their side for years as it runs counter to the argument of Bitcoin being "digital gold" and should just be a settlement layer.
The whitepaper is why I view bitcoin’s value proposition as a gold-like store of value. Can you say more about why you think the whitepaper discourages that view?
If Craig Wright was Satoshi, he would be able to sign a statement proving that with the keys from the genesis block. Otherwise, he's just an obvious fraud.
A while ago he (this Craig Wright fraud) actually sat with one of the first people behind bitcoin development Gavin Andresen. Gavin was the main developer in the beginning chatting with satoshi in the forum. There was a video of Gavin saying that Craig proved to him that he was satoshi. But later seemed to have been part of some kind of social engineering - wasn't totally clear how he proved he could sign the keys.
Regardless the guys's behavior doesn't at all match Satoshi's behavior from the initial days in the forum (before he disappeared that is).
That wouldn’t really mean anything. If he is Satoshi, he may have lost the keys. If he has the keys, that doesn’t mean he is Satoshi, it only proves that he has the keys.
Craig Wright has done enough to hurt Bitcoin over the years that I effectively think of him as a canary: the fact that he is still walking around is evidence that there are no darkweb assassination markets that are not just scams or honeypots.
"Yesterday both Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org received allegations of copyright infringement of the Bitcoin whitepaper by lawyers representing Craig Steven Wright. In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org. They also claim he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and the original owner of bitcoin.org. Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org were both asked to take down the whitepaper."
> In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org.
Isn't that basically asking for a lawsuit in the format of "Prove that you are Satoshi or be charged with perjury" ? Why is CSW still able to play these tricks?
>Furthermore, Satoshi Nakamoto has a known PGP public key, therefore it is cryptographically possible for someone to verify themselves to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't exist 50 years ago. They are a completely new discovery. The long term implications are not yet clear.
They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time. This is a great example of that.
In 1655 an astronomer discovered Saturn's moon Titan. He wasn't sure of his observation but wanted to preserve his priority. So he scrambled text of his discovery in an order only he knew (a private key) and published the resulting gibberish. In this way he made it possible to verify himself later as an author of the discovery. Maybe not a very strong encryption by today's standards, but good enough for the time.
> They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time.
The fundamental difference is the medium not the properties. People can sign papers with false signatures and be erroneously identified as the actual party. That is why there are notaries, to authenticate the identity of the signer, subject to trust in third party documentation.
For example, people steal houses by signing false quit-claim deeds. Signatures on paper do not have any positives properties over cryptographic signatures.
Huh? You can't claim authorship of anonymous publication. Neither the author, nor anybody else, it's the whole point, anonymous once anonymous forever.
That is not only false in this case, but also in general. As another refutation, consider A Warning, by Anonymous, subsequently revealed to be Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.
As they point out, the paper is not anonymous. It is pseudonymous. "Satoshi" is a person or persons whose communications are validated through a public key (Qanon folks take note). Anyone claiming to be Satoshi can simply sign something with the associated private key and prove they were involved with the identity.
For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years).
Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud:
- The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back.
- If Satoshi ever did want to reveal themselves, they would do it in a cryptographically undeniable way (moving coins from their wallet or signing a message with a known keypair of theirs). Also, given they dedicated at least a huge chunk of their life to giving birth to Bitcoin, which unified a bunch of cryptographic primitives and Austrian-economics type theories into a system that found the right balance of technology and economic incentives to be viable, they wouldn't be issuing frivolous lawsuits and trying to get their (anonymously distributed, freely released) whitepaper pulled from websites.
- The fact that Bitcoin Core would even consider taking the whitepaper down is lunacy.
Note: There's a (mostly) unrelated whole dramatic history of the great Bitcoin fork, where Bitcoin split into BTC and BCH. Supporters of BTC believe it's the one true bitcoin, and likewise for BCH. Personally, since I actually have used bitcoin as a currency, I'm team BCH because BCH is the fork that increased the blocksize limit, which was arbitrarily limiting the global transaction rate to a level so small that it led to fees in the $20-80 range at its worst (and the way BTC works is the fees are related to the bytes in the blockchain, not the amount of bitcoin itself transferred, so you'd pay an $80 fee on a $5 tx just as much as a $500 one). That transaction fee insanity was also necessary for Blockstream (a private company supporting the BTC side of the fork) to be able to profit off the delta between an idealized $0 tx fee and the actual $80+ fees, by creating systems like the lightning network which basically reinvents the whole credit card system in Bitcoin and moves transactions off chain, which as far as I'm concerned misses the point and destroys the value completely. I'm only mentioning all this because at least at one point, CSW threw his support behind BCH, which was unfortunate because now you have an actual fraud backing the coin which was actually the better coin, but made it appear like a total joke.
Lastly, it's worth mentioning that even though this guy is a charlatan and fraud, he has some ideas that aren't bunk. He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). I believe that paper was this one for the curious: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312
BCH eventually got forked into Craig Wright's and Calvin Ayre's "Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision (BSV)", which has a block size in the gigabytes, and which according to them carries the torch for Satoshi's original vision for Bitcoin.
Craig Wright is the chief scientist for BSV.
I personally think there's sufficient evidence to conclude Craig Wright isn't competent enough to have created BTC: https://craigwright.online/
The real Satoshi is probably dead. Who just disappears, without any warning, without saying goodbye, when their project is just beginning to take off? What sort of a person never gets involved again, even just to comment, when the project attracts the interest of heads of state? Death or severe incapacitation (stroke, coma, etc.) is the simplest explanation that fits all the things we know about this person. He probably used FDE and his family probably did not know his passphrase or what he was working on, so nobody even knew to announce what happened.
People die all the time -- car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, drug overdoses, etc. Usually you never hear about them. Satoshi was almost certainly not a well-known cryptographer or even someone with significant involvement in the cryptography research community or any related community (the whitepaper screams "enthusiast"), so his death would have likely gone unnoticed.
(Besides being a simple explanation of the evidence, this is also falsifiable -- all Satoshi has to do is spend some of his BTC or sign a message or otherwise unambiguously reappear and we will know I am wrong about this.)
> The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back.
This would be the Hollywood interpretation of his motivation to remain anonymous. Personally, I think it’s because he really wanted the work to speak for itself, and not have the entire project tied to one particular individual with thousands of newspapers trying to figure out what motivated him.
Remember The Social Network movie? When they tried to make it look like Facebook was created just so Zuckerberg could get back at his ex-girlfriend? It’s stuff like that he was trying to avoid.
The real satoshi is probably Paul Le Roux, and currently in federal prison.
> He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc).
Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’t pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play multiplayer excel.
https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth.link/ will always work to view the Bitcoin whitepaper from any browser. https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth/ is completely decentralized but you need an IPFS enabled web browser to view. (FYI you can add .link to any .eth website to view it through an IPFS gateway)
> This surrender will no doubt be weaponized to make new false claims, like that the Bitcoin Core developers “know” CSW to be Satoshi Nakamoto and this is why they acted in this way.
It's like "Bank of America paid 10 millions to the claimant - WITHOUT ADMITTING GUILT - ..." There is specific phrase for that, so - why not insist that the removal was "without admitting the guy is Satoshi"? And reinstall the paper?
Sure, just because you used a pseudonym you don't lose the rights associated with being the author. Getting people and the legal system to believe you that you are the author is your problem though.
no way to tell for sure, but the stock to flow model has been pretty accurate over the years and it projects around $90k+ by year end ... institutions like PayPal are buying directly from miners, others are applying with SEC to buy BTC for their funds ... price looks shaky, but the big players seem confident in the fundamentals
There is this constant thread of seediness to the point of absurdity running through Bitcoin that makes it look like a joke that everyone is in on except the suckers buying into it. Which makes it hilarious for an observer... though I guess I don't get to laugh all the way to the bank, which is a fitting punchline.
I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money laundering. Were there seriously billions of dollars worth of gullible people buying ICOs and every random alt coin a few years ago?
On Reddit, there are tons of spammers selling "copy trading" services. Are there actually customers for that?
I am the only one who thinks Craig Wright is the writer of the Bitcoin whitepaper and the original developer? I understand why it is controversial and doesn't fit the bitcoin myth. And I don't find him particular symphatic.
But he convinced Gavin Andresen and in general has the background of someone who could build this and do the writing that followed on various mailing lists and discussion forums.
And if you read the whitepaper it is pretty obvious that the author did not intent bitcoin to be a "digital gold" secondary settlement layer. And the low transaction fee "BSV" version is a lot closer to the original idea than the current "BTC" version.
Yes. There is strait up clear evidence of his fraud.
The tricks he used to convince Gavin were revealed later and shown to be fraud—he used slight of hand to reuse a historical block chain signature rather than produce one.
you're not alone. it's pretty obvious when you care enough to listen to him directly talking about bitcoin, economy, law, history... There's a lot of quality interdisciplinary information coming from him, that makes infinite more sense than anything anybody else says about bitcoin. you just have to understand his aspergers manierisms, but for me it's clear he's the real deal, despite all the vicious fud coming from interested parties.
It's a shame that even in HN people aren't immune to the shallow crypto propaganda...
Thorentis|5 years ago
This alone is enough for me dismiss his claims. Satoshi clearly intentionally wanted to remain unknown. It might be a real name, but it likely isn't. There was plenty of opportunity to reveal himself. Now that BTC is suddenly valuable and Blockchain has taken off, it is inevitable that there will be opportunists who want to personally gain from it. CSW is just one of many.
Not to mention that CSW has made other false claims, such as claiming to hold a PhD when he actually doesn't [1]. There is a lawsuit where his name is titled as "Dr.". Again, alarm bells should be going off for anybody that sees that.
And of course, there is a very simple way to prove he is Satoshi, which is to prove he holds the private key for a known Satoshi public key. But he can't do that, and almost certainly forged multiple keys he claims are Satoshi's [2].
[0] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bitcoin-craig-wright-...
[1] https://twitter.com/mashable/status/675193059408265216?s=20
[2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-are...
louloulou|5 years ago
https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/
Edit: Explanation/thoughts from Wladimir regarding the removal & future of Bitcoin Core - https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|5 years ago
chansiky|5 years ago
Given the evidence, I'm convinced he's one of them.
imaginenore|5 years ago
[deleted]
Nursie|5 years ago
(Kleiman v. Wright, that's what I'm thinking of) (Looks like it got kicked back to June this year due to covid)
vmception|5 years ago
hanniabu|5 years ago
phkahler|5 years ago
What type of math problem has to be cracked to claim that stash?
lawn|5 years ago
So they saw this as an excuse to remove it.
uncletammy|5 years ago
There are a lot of bad things you can call the BTC core devs but they sure as hell seize every opportunity to grab power.
Andrew_nenakhov|5 years ago
eecks|5 years ago
hanniabu|5 years ago
baby|5 years ago
mlthoughts2018|5 years ago
aftbit|5 years ago
sktrdie|5 years ago
Regardless the guys's behavior doesn't at all match Satoshi's behavior from the initial days in the forum (before he disappeared that is).
edit: video of Gavin saying Wright is satoshi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNZyRMG2CjA
arcticbull|5 years ago
skywhopper|5 years ago
GoblinSlayer|5 years ago
cwkoss|5 years ago
DonHopkins|5 years ago
sneak|5 years ago
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
That URL's been up since the beginning, and AFAIK isn't going anywhere.
I didn't even know bitcoincore.org was a thing until today.
MrStonedOne|5 years ago
https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/744
Reason number #420 why you should institute 24 hour rules on your repos (and not abuse lock functions.)
wildrice|5 years ago
gaius_baltar|5 years ago
Isn't that basically asking for a lawsuit in the format of "Prove that you are Satoshi or be charged with perjury" ? Why is CSW still able to play these tricks?
upofadown|5 years ago
I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't exist 50 years ago. They are a completely new discovery. The long term implications are not yet clear.
They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time. This is a great example of that.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK|5 years ago
IncRnd|5 years ago
The fundamental difference is the medium not the properties. People can sign papers with false signatures and be erroneously identified as the actual party. That is why there are notaries, to authenticate the identity of the signer, subject to trust in third party documentation.
For example, people steal houses by signing false quit-claim deeds. Signatures on paper do not have any positives properties over cryptographic signatures.
aaron695|5 years ago
Very new, I think you could even say almost all of computer science pre-dates them.
GoblinSlayer|5 years ago
FabHK|5 years ago
bidirectional|5 years ago
aeturnum|5 years ago
__blockcipher__|5 years ago
For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years).
Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud:
- The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back.
- If Satoshi ever did want to reveal themselves, they would do it in a cryptographically undeniable way (moving coins from their wallet or signing a message with a known keypair of theirs). Also, given they dedicated at least a huge chunk of their life to giving birth to Bitcoin, which unified a bunch of cryptographic primitives and Austrian-economics type theories into a system that found the right balance of technology and economic incentives to be viable, they wouldn't be issuing frivolous lawsuits and trying to get their (anonymously distributed, freely released) whitepaper pulled from websites.
- The fact that Bitcoin Core would even consider taking the whitepaper down is lunacy.
Note: There's a (mostly) unrelated whole dramatic history of the great Bitcoin fork, where Bitcoin split into BTC and BCH. Supporters of BTC believe it's the one true bitcoin, and likewise for BCH. Personally, since I actually have used bitcoin as a currency, I'm team BCH because BCH is the fork that increased the blocksize limit, which was arbitrarily limiting the global transaction rate to a level so small that it led to fees in the $20-80 range at its worst (and the way BTC works is the fees are related to the bytes in the blockchain, not the amount of bitcoin itself transferred, so you'd pay an $80 fee on a $5 tx just as much as a $500 one). That transaction fee insanity was also necessary for Blockstream (a private company supporting the BTC side of the fork) to be able to profit off the delta between an idealized $0 tx fee and the actual $80+ fees, by creating systems like the lightning network which basically reinvents the whole credit card system in Bitcoin and moves transactions off chain, which as far as I'm concerned misses the point and destroys the value completely. I'm only mentioning all this because at least at one point, CSW threw his support behind BCH, which was unfortunate because now you have an actual fraud backing the coin which was actually the better coin, but made it appear like a total joke.
Lastly, it's worth mentioning that even though this guy is a charlatan and fraud, he has some ideas that aren't bunk. He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). I believe that paper was this one for the curious: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312
ogogmad|5 years ago
Craig Wright is the chief scientist for BSV.
I personally think there's sufficient evidence to conclude Craig Wright isn't competent enough to have created BTC: https://craigwright.online/
betterunix2|5 years ago
People die all the time -- car accidents, heart attacks, strokes, drug overdoses, etc. Usually you never hear about them. Satoshi was almost certainly not a well-known cryptographer or even someone with significant involvement in the cryptography research community or any related community (the whitepaper screams "enthusiast"), so his death would have likely gone unnoticed.
(Besides being a simple explanation of the evidence, this is also falsifiable -- all Satoshi has to do is spend some of his BTC or sign a message or otherwise unambiguously reappear and we will know I am wrong about this.)
Capira|5 years ago
That is not entirely correct. Wright provided a forged cryptographic proof to Gavin Andresen and tricked him into accepting.
buzzert|5 years ago
This would be the Hollywood interpretation of his motivation to remain anonymous. Personally, I think it’s because he really wanted the work to speak for itself, and not have the entire project tied to one particular individual with thousands of newspapers trying to figure out what motivated him.
Remember The Social Network movie? When they tried to make it look like Facebook was created just so Zuckerberg could get back at his ex-girlfriend? It’s stuff like that he was trying to avoid.
jerry1979|5 years ago
Edit: Also, I don't think the Lightning Network behaves likes the credit card networks. What do you mean when you say that?
arcticbull|5 years ago
> He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc).
Well that’s obviously and trivially wrong so... I mean you can’t pretend away one Chile of electricity use to play multiplayer excel.
thedudeabides5|5 years ago
tehjoker|5 years ago
iso8859-1|5 years ago
It has only 8 references, less than papers published around the same time
It was self-published, not subject to peer review
It has no proofs
It has errors: https://gist.github.com/harding/dabea3d83c695e6b937bf090eddf...
csense|5 years ago
lawn|5 years ago
Here's how to decode it from the blockchain: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35959/how-is-the...
Sargos|5 years ago
https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth.link/ will always work to view the Bitcoin whitepaper from any browser. https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth/ is completely decentralized but you need an IPFS enabled web browser to view. (FYI you can add .link to any .eth website to view it through an IPFS gateway)
mathiasrw|5 years ago
https://bico.media/42d44c395904e6743f67011b4198d8bcc07de21c6...
ur-whale|5 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglmWKJBTec&feature=emb_logo
LockAndLol|5 years ago
avmich|5 years ago
It's like "Bank of America paid 10 millions to the claimant - WITHOUT ADMITTING GUILT - ..." There is specific phrase for that, so - why not insist that the removal was "without admitting the guy is Satoshi"? And reinstall the paper?
nightowl_games|5 years ago
smitj|5 years ago
fogof|5 years ago
haakon|5 years ago
Bellamy|5 years ago
superpanic|5 years ago
jonny_eh|5 years ago
detaro|5 years ago
SilasX|5 years ago
nolim1t|5 years ago
Surprised no-one has put a hit on him yet.
randomopining|5 years ago
whoisjohnkid|5 years ago
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
yawniek|5 years ago
unknown|5 years ago
[deleted]
UShouldBWorking|5 years ago
[deleted]
StreamBright|5 years ago
f430|5 years ago
mmcwilliams|5 years ago
scarmig|5 years ago
MattGaiser|5 years ago
On Reddit, there are tons of spammers selling "copy trading" services. Are there actually customers for that?
throwaway4good|5 years ago
But he convinced Gavin Andresen and in general has the background of someone who could build this and do the writing that followed on various mailing lists and discussion forums.
throwaway4good|5 years ago
garmaine|5 years ago
The tricks he used to convince Gavin were revealed later and shown to be fraud—he used slight of hand to reuse a historical block chain signature rather than produce one.
chabes|5 years ago
And why would the opinion of a single person (Gavin, or anyone) be relevant to wether or not Craig’s claim is factual?
joseluis|5 years ago
It's a shame that even in HN people aren't immune to the shallow crypto propaganda...