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Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

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Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#31

Post by wickoff »

clemensley wrote: post #16

I do not understand why everybody is hating the guy so much. Listen to what he sais. He does not want Bitcoin to be used for buying drugs and child pornography. He wants to use it to make companies more accountable towards their users and governments more accountable towards their constituents. What's so terrible about that? Then there is his claim to be Satoshi. At this point, nobody knows if that is true or not. Ye…

The controversy began with him using his wealth to sue random people on Twitter for claiming he was a fraud. Small accounts without much influence. He is not acting in good faith.

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#32

Post by bdcravens »

clemensley wrote: post #16

I do not understand why everybody is hating the guy so much. Listen to what he sais. He does not want Bitcoin to be used for buying drugs and child pornography. He wants to use it to make companies more accountable towards their users and governments more accountable towards their constituents. What's so terrible about that? Then there is his claim to be Satoshi. At this point, nobody knows if that is true or not. Ye…

> Yet everybody is acting as if they _knew_ he is a liar and a fraud

Most of his proof has been systematically proven to be forged or unverified.

> That seems to be the justification for hate.

You're confusing hate with lack of trust.

> What happened to innocent until proven guilty?

It's very much playing itself out in front of you. "Innocent" isn't the same thing as lack of accusation. In the court of public opinion: He's accused of making fraudulent claims. He defends himself. His arguments are shown to be invalid.

I'm sure Bernie Madoff had some good ideas and nice things to say.

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#33

Post by gwern »

striking wrote: post #8
samcday wrote: post #2

The whole story seems so bizarre. As far as I understand it, some kind of fraudster got caught up in a bunch of his own lies, of which being the inventor of Bitcoin happened to be one. We're only reading about it because "Bitcoin" happens to be a frothy buzzword that gets the clicks. Otherwise this would just be some local news case about a wacky person saying the darndest things. It's funny how we decide what's news…

He's not a wacky person who says the darndest things, he's suing other people over their saying he's not Satoshi. As the article states, this case might affect a number of cases he's raised. He's also made a new cryptocurrency (Bitcoin SV), and may be profiting off of a consultancy he helps run ( https://nchain.com/en/ ). I don't think he's just some random small fish.

Don't forget that Nchain is filing for hundreds of blockchain-related patents. That could be a serious problem.

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#34

Post by bdcravens »

wickoff wrote: post #31
clemensley wrote: post #16

I do not understand why everybody is hating the guy so much. Listen to what he sais. He does not want Bitcoin to be used for buying drugs and child pornography. He wants to use it to make companies more accountable towards their users and governments more accountable towards their constituents. What's so terrible about that? Then there is his claim to be Satoshi. At this point, nobody knows if that is true or not. Ye…

The controversy began with him using his wealth to sue random people on Twitter for claiming he was a fraud. Small accounts without much influence. He is not acting in good faith.

Not really his wealth. The wealth of his backer, Calvin Ayre (the guy who pled guilty for violating gambling laws)

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#35

Post by pdpi »

jnbiche wrote: post #18
Waterluvian wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a feature, not a bug. Healthy communities are comprised of people who are trusting and permissive by default. The cost is that on occasion these communities will be exploited. Personally I think it's a very low price to pay for all its benefits.

> This is a feature, not a bug....Healthy communities are comprised of people who are trusting and permissive by default. It's entirely possible to find a happy medium. You can be trusting without being totally naive about individuals with bad intentions.

Anywhere you fall on this naivety/acceptance continuum, I can both show you a fraudster you didn’t detect that you should have, and a serious speaker you blocked but shouldn’t.

In hindsight it’s always easy to say what the right outcome should have been, but, in Wright’s case, he has enough legitimate credentials that it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t at least hear him out.

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#36

Post by bdcravens »

BubRoss wrote: post #29
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's actually that you can't appreciate his genius level ideas.

Which genius level idea specifically? I would love for someone to get technical here. The guy who claims to be Satoshi copied and pasted a hello world tutorial off the internet to show his C++ knowledge.

Someone posted a lesson he taught on distributed computing a few years ago - turns out the slides were all quoting Intel's Fortran docs (without crediting Intel per their copyright - kind of ironic)

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#37

Post by keymone »

BubRoss wrote: post #9
jnbiche wrote: post #4

The amazing things is that this guy -- an obvious fraud and conman -- has been invited to numerous high-level Bitcoin/Blockchain conferences as a speaker. It always stuns me how relatively few people are able to spot frauds (although it explains a lot about our current political situation). I'm guessing 40-50% of the population is susceptible to this kind of trickery.

Part of it has been the tribalism of him going against the obvious weasels that ousted the original Bitcoin team to keep the blocksize low, the transaction fees high and get VC funding for their company that they would market by saying it was the 'people that were in charge of bitcoin' Some of the people who hated those weasels decided that Craig Wright must be great since he says he is against the same people. Inste…

lets see how much you can really back up

> him going against the obvious weasels

A weasel is a mammal of the genus Mustela of the family Mustelidae. Bitcoin Core team afaik consists of humans.

> ousted the original Bitcoin team

satoshi handed over maintenance to gavin, gavin handed over maintenance to wladimir, wladimir is a contributor since 2011 and still is the maintainer of the project. plenty of contributors from early days are still active or support bitcoin core team. very few agree with nonsense claimed by CSW. so who exactly do you mean when you say "original Bitcoin team"?

> to keep the blocksize low, the transaction fees high

you're claiming conspiracy with specific intention - do you have any proof or evidence of such conspiracy? what power over bitcoin network and specifically miners (who are free to mine on any bitcoin fork they consider "the real bitcoin") did they have?

> and get VC funding for their company that they would market by saying it was the 'people that were in charge of bitcoin'

you've decided to arbitrarily link two events for no good reason. this is something conspiracists often do. there were plenty of companies getting funded by VCs in cryptocurrency space during that time, why specifically that company matters more than others? what power over bitcoin do they have? few devs are contributors - so what? there are other companies that also have devs contributing to bitcoin core.

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#38

Post by keymone »

lanrh1836 wrote: post #10
samcday wrote: post #2

The whole story seems so bizarre. As far as I understand it, some kind of fraudster got caught up in a bunch of his own lies, of which being the inventor of Bitcoin happened to be one. We're only reading about it because "Bitcoin" happens to be a frothy buzzword that gets the clicks. Otherwise this would just be some local news case about a wacky person saying the darndest things. It's funny how we decide what's news…

You’re underestimating the story here. CSW is the creator of Bitcoin SV, which today has a market cap of $3.5 billion. A lot of people stand to lose or gain a lot of money depending on his claims.

market cap numbers actually aren't meaningful, especially in low liquidity assets like bsv.

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#39

Post by Deimorz »

Waterluvian wrote: post #14
jnbiche wrote: post #4

The amazing things is that this guy -- an obvious fraud and conman -- has been invited to numerous high-level Bitcoin/Blockchain conferences as a speaker. It always stuns me how relatively few people are able to spot frauds (although it explains a lot about our current political situation). I'm guessing 40-50% of the population is susceptible to this kind of trickery.

This is a feature, not a bug. Healthy communities are comprised of people who are trusting and permissive by default. The cost is that on occasion these communities will be exploited. Personally I think it's a very low price to pay for all its benefits.

This is a great interactive demonstration of this - "The Evolution of Trust": https://ncase.me/trust/

It takes about 20 minutes or so to go through, but I highly, highly recommend it for anyone that hasn't already seen it.

Re: Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court

#40

Post by keymone »

gwern wrote: post #33
striking wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not a wacky person who says the darndest things, he's suing other people over their saying he's not Satoshi. As the article states, this case might affect a number of cases he's raised. He's also made a new cryptocurrency (Bitcoin SV), and may be profiting off of a consultancy he helps run ( https://nchain.com/en/ ). I don't think he's just some random small fish.

Don't forget that Nchain is filing for hundreds of blockchain-related patents. That could be a serious problem.

i bet it's nothing but CSW's marketing trick. he's driving his diplomas in a cartwheel and bragging about publishing a thousand papers a year, but what is any of it worth? were they granted any of the patents they filed for? if i recall some filings were for things with obvious prior art like threshold signatures.
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