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Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

theregister.com

101–110 of 154 posts

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#101
post #2

"Faketoshi" as he's known in the community always finds a new way to NOT be able to prove he has access to the early mined coins. It's honestly comical at this point the different bullshit he comes up with. My favorite so far was finding an existing signature on the blockchain from Satoshi, modifying the data, then publishing the signature with different data in an attempt to claim to be the creator of Bitcoin. Every…

My favorite was him posting the fake signing and then when he was called out on it he posted a "Goodbye to the world" style message on his blog after taking it down.

May 2nd, 2016:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160502071722/http://www.drcrai...

May 7th, 2016:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160507165900/http://www.drcrai...

If he really were Satoshi, he could literally prove it in 4 seconds beyond any shadow of a doubt. Instead he obfuscates with things like Tulip Trusts that can't be touched until January 1, 2020 and then that date comes and goes (over 2 years ago now!) and nothing happens.

https://coingeek.com/what-is-the-tulip-trust/

Accused of forgery and perjury by at least one Judge:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/judge-slams-craig-wright-for-...

And then in 2017 he got the bright idea to start filing patent after patent on anything to do with Blockchain. Why did he wait 8 years after he "invented" it?

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/craig-steven-wright

There are like a hundred patents there from 2017 and after!

And he has two doctorate degrees (one in Theology!) with two more on the way and a dozen other degrees and certifications. The man is a wonder!

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#102
post #6
post #2

"Faketoshi" as he's known in the community always finds a new way to NOT be able to prove he has access to the early mined coins. It's honestly comical at this point the different bullshit he comes up with. My favorite so far was finding an existing signature on the blockchain from Satoshi, modifying the data, then publishing the signature with different data in an attempt to claim to be the creator of Bitcoin. Every…

I AM THE KING! Why does everyone keep ignoring me and my orders? What is sad is that anyone is even talking about this guy. From the beginning people pointed out he is lying and yet he is still somehow able to be talk about. Most obvious con-man that is still able to stay in public spotlight.

Strong "Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico" vibes.

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#103
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think it would be quite funny if he wins and developers have to rewrite part of the protocol to give a specific guy money. Would really highlight who's really in control.

I don't really have a dog in this fight. I highly doubt the miners would move to that chain/protocol. There would be a hard fork of the source code and chain, possibly by people outside the reach of whatever jurisdiction this guy is in. It's just completely impossible for this to actually happen AND actually mean anything. Anyone can get access to any coins by changing the source code/protocol and hard forking the ch…

I think he's pinning his hopes on the assumption that if courts say his fork is Bitcoin, his chain is the one that exchanges regulated in Western countries will trade as Bitcoin, and therefore his fork is the one that dumb money that's heard Bitcoin is going to the moon and hasn't heard of Craig Wright or forks will buy. If actual cryptoenthusiasts are too disgusted to even sell off their tokens on his fork, that just helps his token sales

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#104
post #94
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first three sentences are pretty fucked up, when read together.

You're not wrong, but it's hard not to laugh when someone is the victim of their own hubris this often.

He must figure that his creditors will help him grab those 1.1 million coins, at which point he could lose 90% of them and still be wealthy... if he manages to sell them before its perceived value crashes.

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#105

Hasn't he already been ordered to pay $100M in damages? https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/06/craig-wright-fou... Why is this guy still scamming? Did he not learn his lesson?

It's not his own money he's spending on these lawsuits. He is being bankrolled by a criminal billionaire gambling mogul. It's an investment being made in order to get access to all of Satoshi's coins on all the bitcoin chains. Those coins are valued very conservatively at no less than 32 billion usd.

The moment someone touches them their value will tank. Part of the bitcoin speculation is that massive wallets like this one are frozen and out of the market. When people "invest" by buying hundredths of bitcoin, someone reintroducing 1.1 million will make them wary.

These wallets might as well be considered trip wired, some people monitor them constantly.

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can recover a private key from two signatures if they reuse the same nonce. The nonce should be random and only used once as the name suggests

And this is one of the reasons why ECDSA is a poor standard: it's too easy to accidentally screw it up, and it results in the worst possible kind of compromise (private key). There is a better way: make the nonce a hash of the message signature and the private key. That way you don't need any randomness, and the entire algorithm is deterministic. It is guaranteed (assuming the hash is good, but you need a good hash a…

"ECDSA" isn't a concrete scheme that you can use in any case. To implement ECDSA one must pick a group where the discrete log is hard, choose a message hashing function, and choose a way to serialize the values. One can optionally choose a derandomized method for generating the nonces, e.g. RFC6979 which is the approach taken by most implementations created in the last 5 years or so.

One could just as well implement something EdDSA compatible with insecure nonce generation and people have done so (for years the thing you got when you goggled for eddsa python was just such an implementation).

It's good that the eddsa paper specifies more of the system, as people have made bad choices and ruined the security-- but even it fails to completely specify the system: the exact input handling isn't specified, which has resulted in security problems.

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#107
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(edit: ignore me) Yeah that sounds like he mis-spoke. You can't get the private key from a signature, or the protocol is broken. Edit: I see. It's confusingly worded but that makes sense.

You can recover a private key from two signatures if they reuse the same nonce. The nonce should be random and only used once as the name suggests

> You can recover a private key from two signatures if they reuse the same nonce.

You can, but you can also do a lot more than that. Thinking that this is the only attack is a common error, and precisely the one Wright was making in that recording.

Two signatures with different messages and the same key and message is just a special case of the fact that if you write out the signing equation as a linear system with privkey and nonce being unknown, and the message and signatures being the knows if the resulting matrix is exactly determined or over-determined, then you can solve for the unknown values.

It would also be the case that if you had two signatures with the same key and the nonces being any known multiple of each other that it's just as solvable.

There are other attack approaches, for example if you have a set of signatures where you know the leading bits of the nonce you can also recover the keys by solving a hidden number problem. (If you only know the single leading bit it'll take a few hundred signatures).

Cryptosystems are inherently fragile. The security assumptions of these schemes demand a uniformly random nonce. Deviation from the required property easily destroys security in practically exploitable ways.

The person Wright was arguing with was pointing out that if Wright had the private keys in question -- turns out he didn't-- it wouldn't be impossible that he obtained them after observing a single insecurely generated signature. Wright drove the discussion down a tangent with an argument that one couldn't recover a key with a single signature-- a false claim, but even if it were true it wouldn't really have supported his case.

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#108
post #2

"Faketoshi" as he's known in the community always finds a new way to NOT be able to prove he has access to the early mined coins. It's honestly comical at this point the different bullshit he comes up with. My favorite so far was finding an existing signature on the blockchain from Satoshi, modifying the data, then publishing the signature with different data in an attempt to claim to be the creator of Bitcoin. Every…

Honestly I think it would be quite funny if he wins and developers have to rewrite part of the protocol to give a specific guy money. Would really highlight who's really in control.

That just isn't how the system works.

Ironically, some of the funds that Wright is trying to demand a backdoor to access are ones that were indirectly stolen from the developers he's suing!

If we could have just wave a magic wand and magic those coins back into our possession, we would have!

Anyone at any time-- including you or wright or anyone else-- can go and make a modified version of Bitcoin with its own consensus rules that do whatever you want, print yourself a trillion coins from nothing. Wright even did this already a few years ago.

But your modified version doesn't do anything to anyone else, the only people it has an effect on are the people who choose to run it. Your version would form a separate currency (just as Wright's has) and you can compete in the market for adoption. If your version is distinguished by stealing a bunch of coins, I'd bet that it doesn't get much adoption particularly since the whole premise of Bitcoin advanced in it's initial announcement was giving people power against being overridden by that kind of capricious change.

https://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sou...

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#109
post #2

"Faketoshi" as he's known in the community always finds a new way to NOT be able to prove he has access to the early mined coins. It's honestly comical at this point the different bullshit he comes up with. My favorite so far was finding an existing signature on the blockchain from Satoshi, modifying the data, then publishing the signature with different data in an attempt to claim to be the creator of Bitcoin. Every…

My own preferred theory as a layman is that Wright is Satoshi and has lost the keys.

Then you haven't been paying attention. Wright is continually spouting literal gibberish and technobabble, he's technical inept to the point of hilarity. For example, when asked to explain some C code he claimed that the line declaring a double-type variable were doubling the values.

Beyond his ineptitude, Wright has repeatedly claimed he would provide proof, but then when his 'proof' is exposed to expert analysis it turns out to be a provable forgery. Not just once, but over and over again. Forged emails, forged pgp keys, forged digital signatures, forged invoices, forged whitepaper drafts. Not merely falsifiable but actually falsified.

It's certantly possible that Satoshi lost whatever keys he had-- but if so he isn't saying anything about it. The idea that Satoshi would lose keys and then make a clown out of himself is just not parsimonious.

What is parsimonious is that we know for a fact that Wright has been selling his "fortune" to suckers for a number of years now-- the setup of a classic Nigerian scam: I am a prince in exile but with a small advance from you I can access a vast fortune which I will gladly share with you. At first his excuse was that he couldn't touch the coins without risking the AU government seizing them (due to stealing millions from AU with fraudulent rebates), then his excuse was that the coins were secured by a "bonded courier" (think of the end of Back to the Future 2) and wouldn't be delivered until Jan 2020, and most recently he claims that in Feb 2020 hackers entered his home and hid a 'wifi pineapple' to penetrate his network and steal his coins (of course, the coins haven't moved on the blockchain)...

Re: Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins

#110
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wouldn't even need the court's blessing for it though, as they already control the hash power and the reference client (which is no longer under an open license).

A court effectively ruling that he was Satoshi and a fork made to award him coins was the "original" Bitcoin and possibly even ruling other forks violate his "IP" would make it much easier for him to dump those coins on speculators though. (I don't think the court will grant him any of those things, but it's not too difficult to imagine him hoping the court can provide him with more than just some coins on a PoC fork…

Sure, it will give him some extra propaganda ammo. And with the state of the crypto scene... As you say it will probably help him dump it.
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