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

theregister.com

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

#131

Post by nullc »

GBiT wrote: post #95
jcranmer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't violate the First Amendment, since the court isn't going to be a government actor for that purpose. A court absolutely could order someone to change their code to comport with the judgement--I mean, this happened to Apple in the not-too-distant past. What the court can't do is compel everybody to use the new hard fork, first for the simple reason that most of those people aren't being sued , but somewhat…

Miners investing hundred millions dollars into operation. If court will tell them, like for example 3 biggest miners from US to make that block, they will do it to protect investment, because other way they will get sanctions from gov. Other people on non-mining nodes can fork it, but noone with millions dollars at stake will be on forked chain and only miners make blocks. Court will not be stupid and believe, that s…

That isn't how Bitcoin works. Miners can't violate the protocol, since the protocol decides what is and isn't mining.

Wright wants a version of Bitcoin created with a backdoor to transaction authentication that lets him take coins without presenting the required credentials. If he created such a version and convinced some miners to run it, they'd simply stop producing blocks (at least from the perspective of anyone who didn't also adopt his backdoor).

So the situation you imagine would just result in hashrate going down-- which can be a bit of an an annoyance since it slows down transaction settlement temporarily, but isn't a dire issue (e.g. Bitcoin lost on the order of half its hash power for a while after china issued a ban).

In any case, if Wright shared your theory and was acting in good faith the target of his actions would be miners and not volunteer open source developers. He's stated outright in public that he expects the ruinous cost of his litigation to destroy the lives of his targets.

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

#132

Post by nullc »

chromatin wrote: post #36
toopok4k3 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the real Satoshi might be dead and took the keys with him to grave. I, to this day don't understand why it's not obvious why Satoshi has not done anything public for over 10 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Kleiman Craig knew Dave, knows the coins are so close to his reach but he will never get to them.

It makes sense that if one were CERTAIN that the real Satoshi could never claim otherwise (because you knew them to be dead), you would feel emboldened to make outrageous claims without fear of reprisal.

Wright is a conman, his analysis of risk is very different from yours. He has repeadily taken actions which were almost sure to get him caught, he got caught, and he just kept going. He would have no reason to know or care if Satoshi would rebuke him. If Satoshi did, Wright would just ignore it or claim it was a fraud.

In fact, in the Florida lawsuit Wright provided a list of thousands of addresses he claimed to control and mined bitcoin to. The document was accidentally published without redaction and shortly thereafter the owners of 145 addresses controlling over 7000 bitcoin stepped up and posted signatures saying the addresses weren't wright and that wright is a fraud.

Wright's reaction? When asked about this he claims that there were no signatures created and just moves on. When one interviewer pressed a bit he just blathered about you can't have signatures without identity and became irate and the interviewer changed subjects.

Or more specifically to this case: In a document to the ATO Wright claimed to own several high value addresses. Two of them were actually owned by known community members, one produced a signature calling Wright a fraud, the other was called as a witness against wright in Florida. ... Wright ignored that and is suing us over the ones from that same list that where the owners haven't spoken up (yet, in one case the owner appears to have robbed a bitcoin exchange so even if they're aware of the case they're not likely to speak up).

As far as Dave goes: The only material that has ever linked Dave to Bitcoin was material wright produced to support his tax fraud, most (all?) of which has been proved to be forgeries created after Dave's death. As far as anyone can tell Dave had no particular programming expertise-- he was more of a PC tech and windows IT security guy--, the only software he appears to have created was a simple visual basic windows registry checking tool.

Of course, it's not impossible that just about anyone created Bitcoin, but I would expect that more than 3/4 of the participants in any random thread on HN would be a better candidate than Dave.

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

#133

Post by democracy »

antihero wrote: post #61
ddtaylor wrote: 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.

But the blockchain is all about immutability and you can't change the fundamentals!

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

#134

Post by democracy »

me_me_me wrote: post #6
ddtaylor wrote: 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.

Because noone in the real world know or cares about him. In the land of clowns...

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

#135

Post by nullc »

uncletammy wrote: post #77
lbriner wrote: post #5

What are the theories about why the real Satoshi doesn't just move all the coin to another wallet himself to prove that Craig Wright is just a scammer?

The leading theory is that Satoshi is dead. Some think it was Hal Finney. Some think it was Dave Kleiman, the brother of the woman Craig just got out of a lawsuit with.

The only source for any claim connecting Dave to Bitcoin is Wright, it's not something Bitcoin experts believe because wrights docs connecting dave to bitcoin were proven to be forgeries made after Dave's death, and there is no evidence of Dave having computer programming expertise.

Wright actually exploits that misunderstanding, there are some people who've been taken in by Wright's scam who believe that Wright didn't create Bitcoin but dave did and that wright stole his Bitcoins. For them that's good enough.

Aside, The lawsuit you're referring to by Ira Kleiman, a man. :) And he won a hundred million dollar judgement against Wright. Wright has tried to spin this as a "win" because Ira was asking for as much as a trillion dollars (lol) on the basis of thats the correct amount if you believe all of Wright's nonsense. In reality, Wright himself has no wealth or source of income except what he's able to pull in with this fake-satoshi con, so probably the portion of any judgement beyond a few million dollars is all equally uncollectable.

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

#136

Post by nullc »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #105
uncletammy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Really old never before moved coins move from time to time, including ones from Wright's list of 1.1 million coins. It sometimes generates a little noise on twitter or a throwaway news article, sometimes it goes without being noticed in the public. Nothing much happens either way.

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

#137

Post by nullc »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #128
nullc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's analogous to suing someone who makes gold jewelry to try to force them to get everyone else to start referring to lead as "gold" and paying gold prices for it.

That would be if he was asking for Bitcoin silver to take over Bitcoin. This is like someone asking the bank to give him someone else's massive but abandoned account, if more than half of its clients agree.

> This is like someone asking the bank to give him someone else's massive but abandoned account, if more than half of its clients agree.

That isn't how Bitcoin works, however. The protocol is enforced autonomously by each participant all on their own. The only voting like property in Bitcoin is the consensus used to decide the order of transactions in order to reject double-spends. Wright doesn't want to change the order of transactions-- the coins he's attempting to steal haven't moved since 2011.

If someone creates a transactions that spends some coins without the required signantures it'll just be ignored by all participants. If some participants adopt backdoored software that allow bypassing the authentication they'll just be ignored by everyone else, it doesn't matter how many do-- all automatically. Even if everyone else adopts that backdoor your own computer will just ignore them and continue the Bitcoin network with other non-backdoored participants.

So inherently what he seeks is to replace Bitcoin with an incompatible alternative. The only way that's possible is if people choose to adopt the alternative, call it bitcoin, trade it for bitcoin-prices, etc.

He's attempted it already too, he created Bitcoin Satoshi Vision-- his fork that is distributed under a proprietary software license. His conspirators and their victims go around telling people that it's the real bitcoin and that Bitcoin is an imposter. This has been mostly unsuccessful.

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

#138

Post by nullc »

vmception wrote: post #25

Aside from the obvious, can someone at least tell me how these claims are rationalized because they make no sense: 1) If the hackers copied and deleted the private keys from his computer 2) Why does Bitcoin SV need to be modified in order for the funds to be accessed Do people on HN even know why those statements are not reconcilable? Does TheRegister, does the judge? I don't care what Craig Wright knows or thinks, h…

> Wait, is he saying that because he doesn't have the private keys, he wants the whole Bitcoin SV network modified to give him access to funds in a specific address? lol. okay.

Not just Bitcoin SV-- SV is pretty much only included because almost no one cares about it and he essentially controls it (the software for it has a proprietary license that gives him substantial control, at least when you factor in that he's threatened in public to sue anyone who makes a cleanroom version that doesn't accept his changes). He's also demanding the _bitcoin_ which is worth a lot more.

> 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.

Hashpower wouldn't help him: he and his sponsor already control essentially 100% of the BSV hashpower and have for a long time.

He doesn't want to change the order of transactions-- the coins in question haven't moved since 2011 (and weren't ever owned by him in any case, weren't previously owned by him even if you believe his story). What he wants is to bypass the authentication to let coins get spent without the required signatures. No amount of hashpower can do that.

So what he wants is for everyone to adopt an alternative version of the Bitcoin protocol that contains a backdoor to allow bypassing that authentication. As to why he's suing the particular people he's suing, his arguments aren't coherent. --- but he's been going on about ruining them for years, long before the supposed theft happens, so it doesn't seem that hard to figure out. :)

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

#139

Post by tombeak »

marcan_42 wrote: post #40
m348e912 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone find the other guys claim more interesting? That you can derive private keys after just one transaction.

He's saying you can derive the private key from a single signature made using a known nonce value (the "bad random"). You can also derive the private key from two signatures made using the same nonce value. In both cases the solution just requires trivial algebra. That's what we did to get the PS3 signing keys. Accidentally became a bit of a citation in the ECDSA world for that one too; who knew Sony would unwittingl…

Craig was Wright then, you can't derive the private key from a single transaction. Bitcoin would be broken if you could.

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

#140

Post by marcan_42 »

nullc wrote: post #106
marcan_42 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With "ECDSA" I meant the original NIST ECDSA standard. It is, objectively, a bad standard. ECDSA as originally specified required the use of random numbers in signature generation; the RFC6979 approach may interoperate just fine and be a better idea, but it is not FIPS 186-4 compliant. If you have to break standards compliance to avoid security pitfalls, the standard is bad.

It's not just about specifying more of the standard either. EdDSA is designed to be harder to screw up an implementation of, by construction.

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