111–120 of 154 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, then why can't he login to any of the accounts that Satoshi used originally in 2009? Mailing list accounts, email accounts, etc.
IIRC, his supposed reason is forgotten passwords. Not a great excuse, but also one that could plausibly happen.
I'm seriously curious about Craig Wright as a character and his mentality. At one point I did some digging and found his early pre-2015 blog. As you can see here, he described himself as a "GSE-Compliance and GSE-Malware" [0]. You can also see he was working on his PhD research project in a university, and also doing some system administration at the university's HPC center [1][2]. Scrolling through the blog, the pub…
Wright's been a low grade crook for a long time. He was sentenced to 30 days in prison in 2004 for contempt after he forged documents to try to escape some non-compete he violated.
The proximal cause of his Satoshi related cosplay is a massive tax fraud. AU has a refundable tax credit for qualifying R&D where they'll pay out around 30% of the money you spent on research.
Wright spun up a bunch of companies that did nothing but claim these credits-- with an intention of claiming around 65 million dollars worth. AU paid out the first round but the next year audited him. Their first question to cut through his obfuscation was "Where did the millions you claim to have spent on research come from?". Bitcoin had just become a big thing in the news and Wright started claiming to be an early miner, pointed to coins from a bitcoin rich list and said they were his, and claimed to have received loans secured by those coins to pay for the research. [There is also a whole separate branch of fraudulent sales tax rebates that he applied for when the R&D credits started souring on him-- but most of the docs on that haven't been made public yet]
Wright created a huge number of forgeries to support his claims and kept expanding the scope until he was claiming to be Satoshi, but the AU tax office wasn't fooled, ruled against him, and demanded he return the money he took.
He'd already spent much of the money, so he basically just took the faked documents that the tax office was too smart to fall for and sought out other suckers to fall for them. Effectively the classic Nigerian prince scam, offering people a share of his fortune if they could just help him overcome his short term cashflow problems.
There is some indication that he'd been engaging in this R&D credit fraud for up to a decade before the enormous applications that got him caught-- he's recently published R&D credit applications for fake projects (basically just applying for R&D funding for concepts he saw posted on tech mailing lists) going back to 2002-ish. So either these applications are recent forgeries or he's been funding himself through fraud for at least the last 20 years.
The relatively uncertainty about the earlier possible fraud there is that for the big 2013+ tax fraud much of the tax office documentation has been made public as a result of a civil lawsuit against Wright, so for that we can be pretty sure what happened... but for things other than that we just have Wright's statements to go on, and Wright is a fantasist and pathological liar that constantly makes stuff up even when its not to any advantage to him.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I feel like he could just rent some hashpower to force a confidence breaking change on the network but I guess he wants court approval. Even with 100% hashpower you can’t steal coins from an address without the key
With 51% hashpower, you can make illegal (by consensus) transactions on the longest chain. This will fork off the validating nodes, but most light clients won’t see an issue and will follow the malicious chain.
I say practice rather than theory because it's not just theory: There are many different forks of Bitcoin, including one created by Wright (BSV, "bitcoin satoshi vision" lol) which exist and are used and have lite clients.
For many users, the brief exposure to the wrong chain if their validator starts giving them the wrong one isn't an actual problem-- they will notice and switch eventually and only get robbed if someone pays them on the malicious chain before they notice. Though this is the reason why the Bitcoin whitepaper recommends that users that accept frequent payments should prefer to run their own node.
Bitcoin is open source cryptographic software developed by volunteers under the MIT license. Wright-- via a web of shady shell corporations-- has sued a dozen current and former Bitcoin contributors (including myself) demanding that they introduce a backdoor to allow him to bypass the authentication and take possession of coins without providing a digital signature, or-- if that fails to work-- pay him around $6 billion dollars in damages.
The assets he's seeking to obtain are very obviously not his (though he argues we lack standing to challenge his assertion), but that isn't the most important consideration: More critically, the remedy he seeks is simply not possible. The defendants have no more power than anyone else, including Wright, to publish an incompatible version of Bitcoin-- but any such incompatible version will just form a separate currency, and no one-- not any developer, not any court, not any human power-- can force other people to adopt this alternative version or consider it to be "bitcoin". Wright has already created one such alternative version "BSV", which essentially no one uses and it trades for less than 0.004% of bitcoin's value.
Wright is well aware that the remedy he seeks is an impossibility and that he has no real prospect of success. Given that he can't be successful, you may wonder what goals are (1) Profit: He's been selling these "inaccessible" coins at a deep discount to at least one mark, it doesn't matter that his case will be unsuccessful so long as he can find people who think it might be successful willing to buy a share in the winnings. (2) Wright is attempting to intimidate and disqualify the worlds foremost experts in Bitcoin technology from providing evidence another lawsuit about his fradulent claims of being Satoshi. (3) Wright intends to use the legal fees to financially ruin parties who have refused to aid his fraudulent schemes, particularly because the UK uses a loser-pays where the loser of each motion pays the other sides legal costs and Wright racks up astronomical costs. Wright has already bankrupted a journalist that discussed his fraudulent claims of being Satoshi with a defamation lawsuit, even though Wright hasn't won against him (the case is ongoing).
Wright effectively argues that anyone who has ever built software using bitcoin is a fiduciary which owes him a duty of care which extends even as far as compensating him at their own expenses for losses created as a result of his own negligence. His position is that this is even the case even though they offered the software under a license stipulating "IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.", even though their work was uncompensated, and even though they had no relationship with him or his entities.
He also contends that the liability continues forever and, in fact, I stopped working on Bitcoin completely several years ago long before his supposed loss occurred. (Several other defendants also stopped working on Bitcoin years ago)
Wright is attempting to improve his odds in the case by making a proxy entity which he created "Bitcoin Association for BSV" the primary defendant, already it's attempting to undermine our effort to challenge the jurisdiction of the UK courts by agreeing to the jurisdiction (normally one defendant agreeing is enough to settle the matter). Wright has used the trick of suing his sockpuppet to get a bespoke civil judgement in the past.
This lawsuit has implications far outside the realm of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency:
The case highlights apparent flaws in our legal system where a well funded party with no prospect of actually winning their case can submit flagrant lies and forgeries with near impunity and cause finical ruin for their targets with an obviously meritless case. This is particularly stark for volunteer free software developers, where even modest legal costs easily overwhelm the indirect gains of publishing free code and related pro-social activities.
Obviously free software more or less can't exist if the clear text of the license is ignored and volunteer developers are going to be hit with massive liability (or massive legal fees) for software they created without direct compensation.
The case also has substantial civil rights implications-- Wright asks governments to use their power over the defendants to compel both labor on his behalf and speech: He seeks to force us to develop backdoor code to bypass Bitcoin's transaction authentication and he seeks to force us to publish it (and presumably endorse it). He also seeks to suppress speech: he is asking the government force the defendants to remove and refrain from future publication of non-backdoored source code.
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.
He did not (he even said they've recovered 10,000+ private keys!). If a nonce is reused across different signatures or just known because randomness is bad, one can compromise the private key used in making the signature.
"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.
"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…
Many media publications really helped him by posting articles about how he "admits" to being Satoshi and has a "very similar email address".
The effect is that the reporting is becoming worse. Two years ago it was common for articles to mention that Wright's supposed proof was completely discredited. Today it's common for articles to say that Wright's claims haven't been "conclusively proved yet".
There is a big difference between saying that it isn't yet totally conclusive and saying that he tried to provide proof but it was proven to be a fraud!
Unfortunately, Wright has shown that he's willing to use SLAPP lawsuits against parties that criticizes him, including journalists. So you have to have deep pockets and a huge tolerance for nonsense to risk publishing something truly critical -- at least if you have enough visibility that he'll care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My own preferred theory as a layman is that Wright is Satoshi and has lost the keys.
Okay, then why can't he login to any of the accounts that Satoshi used originally in 2009? Mailing list accounts, email accounts, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
how does this con-man make money off his cons though?
He's a temporarily embarrassed billionaire, he just needs some funds to access his rightful fortune. You don't even have to believe him - you'd just have to believe (or see viable risk/reward) that he has a shot at a successful legal attack.
Wright claims to own around $50 billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency which he cannot access.
Let's say he manages to convince you that he has 1% chance of success at obtaining these funds-- something you could believe even if you know he's a fraud, you just have to have a low opinion of the courts and misunderstand how Bitcoin works (which many people do, see this discussion!).
If offers you a 10% stake in his victory, what would you pay for that? Well under the 1% assumption you might be willing to pay $25 million dollars (half the expected value).
The buyers error is just in flawed reasoning about the odds of success, but people are notoriously bad at reasoning about fringe events and a lot of people don't understand Bitcoin.
For Wright, the fact that his effort cannot be successful is actually a very good property: It means that he can safely sell more than 100% of his fictional fortune: He doesn't have to worry that he'll win and then have to pay out >100%. Instead, he'll lose and tell his investors "Sorry, gave it our best shot but you always knew this was a risky deal!". In that case his income from the scheme is only limited by how many suckers he can bring in... 100 people paying 25m for a '10%' stake would yield a 2.5 billion dollar windfall.
And if you don't think there are at least 100 suckers out there with 25 million to blow you haven't been paying attention to all the defi/ico/nft noise the last couple years.
Right now we know of one major self-claimed billionaire that Wright is exploiting, but there may be many others-- particularly in Asia where language barriers make it much easier for Wright to isolate victims from discrediting information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court" https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/06/craig_wright_satoshi_...