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Is Craig Wright?

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Re: Is Craig Wright?

#2
Nice writeup. I know people say not to focus on Wright's writing style, but he sure doesn't sound like someone extremely knowledgeable about bitcoin or cryptography. He sounds like he's writing an undergraduate paper. Given enough time, anyone can cobble together enough references to describe something accurately. But that doesn't read anything like https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

It fails the sniff test for me.

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#3
post #2

Nice writeup. I know people say not to focus on Wright's writing style, but he sure doesn't sound like someone extremely knowledgeable about bitcoin or cryptography. He sounds like he's writing an undergraduate paper. Given enough time, anyone can cobble together enough references to describe something accurately. But that doesn't read anything like https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf It fails the sniff test for me.

What's interesting is that, given enough practice, one could convincingly mimic Satoshi's writing style as some ancillary (unimpeachable tech proof aside) evidence of validity. It seems Wright hasn't even gone that far.

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#5
post #4

More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11612673

That's a link to "Judge Grants Search Warrant Forcing Woman to Unlock iPhone with Touch ID (macrumors.com)"

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#6
Nice write-up explaining the problems, but the killer for me is a hint as to how others may have been fooled:

  Note that the antepenultimate line says ‘signiture’ instead 
  of ‘signature’, so the script doesn’t do what is claimed. In 
  particular, it reads the signature from the environment 
  variable ‘signiture’ rather than from the command-line 
  argument. Hence, if you populate the environment variable 
  with your own public-key, rather than Satoshi’s, you can 
  cause the test to pass!
Subtle and clever, if that is indeed what has happened.

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#7
Since everyone is getting called out on nits today, I'm going to point out that he calls "Combinatorial Problems and Exercises" a paper, which means that he's (a) not into combinatorics, because it's an important _book_ in the field; and (b) he can't be bothered to google the thing even though he's going to rip on Wright for referencing it.

I have no idea (or care really) about who is right but there's clearly epic trolling going on here.

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#8
post #2

Nice writeup. I know people say not to focus on Wright's writing style, but he sure doesn't sound like someone extremely knowledgeable about bitcoin or cryptography. He sounds like he's writing an undergraduate paper. Given enough time, anyone can cobble together enough references to describe something accurately. But that doesn't read anything like https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf It fails the sniff test for me.

If you look past the glow of history and the greatness of the underlying idea, the Bitcoin whitepaper itself reads like an undergraduate paper. The original abstract had flagrant spelling errors, and the discussion and C implementation of the Poisson distribution will raise eyebrows among any statisticians or data scientists, who would either not bother to give any proof as trivial or would provide a one-liner in R.

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#9

Nice write-up explaining the problems, but the killer for me is a hint as to how others may have been fooled: Note that the antepenultimate line says ‘signiture’ instead of ‘signature’, so the script doesn’t do what is claimed. In particular, it reads the signature from the environment variable ‘signiture’ rather than from the command-line argument. Hence, if you populate the environment variable with your own public…

It was not. Gavin's discussion makes zero mention of anything to do with OpenSSL. In the account he gave to Wired, it was Electrum all the way.

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#10

Nice write-up explaining the problems, but the killer for me is a hint as to how others may have been fooled: Note that the antepenultimate line says ‘signiture’ instead of ‘signature’, so the script doesn’t do what is claimed. In particular, it reads the signature from the environment variable ‘signiture’ rather than from the command-line argument. Hence, if you populate the environment variable with your own public…

Without getting into Sicilian poison cup arguments around "I knew they'd think that," I find it hard to believe that someone would go to all this trouble, then innocently publish their magic trick to the world in a screenshot like that.

Edit: to be clear, I'm inclined to believe Kaminsky et al that this is a ruse. I just don't think it's that ruse.

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