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Is Craig Wright?

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Re: Is Craig Wright?

#13
Is it possible to transfer bitcoin from and to the same wallet? If so, why not do that for one satoshi worth from one of the earliest blocks and include metadata proving the claim? Unless the private key for the earliest mined blocks are irretrievably lost (or deliberately destroyed), what's with all the weak hand-waving proofs?

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#14

    The little-blockians want the block sizes of Bitcoin to remain
    small, and thus for it to be a pure decentralised currency that
    can be used by anyone with a computer. This would maintain it as a
    peer-to-peer currency, but would limit its growth.

    By comparison, the big-blockians believe Bitcoin should grow into
    a universal currency, expanding the block size to accommodate
    absolutely every transaction. The downside is that this is beyond
    the computational limits of domestic machines, thereby meaning
    that Bitcoin could only be regulated by banks, governments, and
    other large organisations: thereby moving it away from a
    libertarian idyll into something more akin to a regular currency.
Oh my god, I finally understand the block size debate. I've been hearing about it forever but never understood why the size mattered to so many people so much or why there was a debate at all.

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#16
What's interesting to me is how blatantly wrong Wright's post is. It seems like he went out of his way to make it wrong (typos in the actual code). If he was a scammer wanting to prove something, wouldn't he go out of his to way to make sure there were at least no typos?

So what is his motive other than completely fucking up his reputation?

One freaky, and completely unfounded, hypothesis is that Wright is Satoshi, and was pressured by government to have experts prove he was satoshi (for tax reasons), but is willingly playing stupid publicly and releasing a blatantly foolish post to keep his anonymity and let the world think he's not Satoshi.

Yes I know, I have a very creative mind :)

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#18
post #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.

Good to know. I'm willing to accept that Satoshi was not a statistician or a great writer (or even a great programmer) and yet he was still able to succinctly describe a problem few people in the world even knew existed at the time.

Wright, on the other hand, spends 5 paragraphs giving a repetitive and incorrect summary of hash functions, specifically SHA-256.

I don't know how anyone in the world can look at that and think these are the same person or even colleagues.

Re: Is Craig Wright?

#20
post #14

The little-blockians want the block sizes of Bitcoin to remain small, and thus for it to be a pure decentralised currency that can be used by anyone with a computer. This would maintain it as a peer-to-peer currency, but would limit its growth. By comparison, the big-blockians believe Bitcoin should grow into a universal currency, expanding the block size to accommodate absolutely every transaction. The downside is t…

That's only one of many aspects of the whole block size debate.

And I'm not sure there's a lot of merit to this specific aspect. From what I can tell[0], the "computational limit" is primarily in increased bandwidth and storage requirements in running a full node (2.8 GB per day for a block size of 20 MB).

While that's not trivial, it hardly limits adoption to institutions like banks. 2.8 GB is about 45 minutes of 1080p video, which people seem to manage even on domestic connections. At the same time, even with the current block size, very few people (less than 1%?) currently run a full node; so maybe it's not the "computational limits" stopping people?

[0] A better, if outdated, list of pros and cons: http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/36085/what-are-th...

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