Turing Machines on Bitcoin

Wright isn't particularly technically sophisticated and early on he made the error of claiming Bitcoin Script was turing complete on the basis of it having "multiple stacks". It transparently is not-- for it can only execute a number of operations fixed in advance, and lacks any looping, recursion, or similar and any script using the altstack can be turned into a slightly larger one that doesn't. Rather than retracting or recontextualizing the false claim, he's since just continued to double down on it, presumably because doing so helps further isolate the victims of his fraud from people who are technically competent.

To support these repeated false claims, Wright eventually published “A Proof of Turing Completeness in Bitcoin Script”, which turned out to be almost entirely plagiarized from a 1964 paper by Corrado Böhm, the discovery of which apparently result in Wright being kicked out of CNAM. https://samwill102244.medium.com/anatomy-of-a-fraud-a-deep-d...

Publications like the one here are intended to confuse the reader about the definition of turing completeness, and are instead just pointing out the same points that were made that turing completeness was unnecessary in the context of Bitcoin ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGE6jrVmt_I / https://cyber.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/russelloconno... )which had been pointed out by the community back even before Wright ever knew of Bitcoin.

The whole matter is doubly absurd because it would be completely trivial to make Bitcoin script actually turing complete and could be done without breaking compatibility with the existing network. But it is generally considered expressly undesirable to do so by technical experts, because it would remove the existing guarantee that the runtime of all scripts can be determined and limited statically and because it wouldn't actually increase the utility of the system.

Recent court documents have exposed that Wright's activities are being funded by an advanced fee fraud scheme where he promises wealthy investors large amounts of "satoshi's bitcoins" in exchange for loans. Based on their own reports it appears the the total amounts taken are in the hundreds of millions of dollars now, or even more. This would all mostly just be sad and amusing except for Wright's propensity to file lawsuits against people who point out his fraud (such as myself-- he's sued me demanding 6 billion dollars in damages!)

For more information on the BSV scam and Wright's fraudulent claims checkout https://www.reddit.com/r/bsvscam/ and https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/op-ed-how-many-wrongs-m...

I do agree with you that single contract transaction is not turing-complete. I also agree that turing-complete element happens outside.

My disagreement is with the following:

1. I disagree that "loop is just an implementation detail and is not part of any proof". In the GoL article there is a claim that (a)Game of Life board could simulate a turing machine and (b)article provides implementation of GoL board in sCrypt, therefore "Bitcoin in turing-complete". However, the board in article is limited (due to loop inlining) and cannot be made 1000s x 1000s (as required for the simulation of the turing machine) precisely because of the loop unrolling. I also note that author does not point out this limitation (in any of his articles, it seems) - the claims are always "we can simulate Game of Life, we can do Machine Learning, we can simulate Rule 110 automata" without any mention that these are toy examples that hardly do anything and can't scale even by an order of magnitude. So loop is indeed an implementation detail, but quite essential one, it seems.

2. More broadly, I am agruing against the claim that "Bitcoin is turing complete" made in this and other articles by the same author. But, again, it seems that on this point we are actually in agreement

While most of what you write is true (and I believe that the article was written in bad faith), as the article uses state changes in the Turing machine as Bitcoin transactions, it is trivial to statically check the runtime of a state change itself. Whether it's a useful addition to Bitcoin or not is another question though.

What's an r-puzzle again? Some fancy reversed math?! Mh mh ... Hahahahahah.

Interesting this account is 2 hours old and seems to have been created specifically to discredit this post. At the same time, another commenter here nullc is Greg Maxwell of Blockstream fame who has become notorious for this exact behavior. These fresh accounts with long winded explanations of the same opinion tend to appear when Greg is near.