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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

#91
post #39

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 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.

Very nice page. Although it seems to be wrong about the golden rule, the golden rule is "treat others how you want to be treated" not "treat others as they have treated you in the past".

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

#92

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…

You are stating a popular opinion, but it's one that I do not share.

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

If someone fails to prove A that does not mean that (not A) is true

> You're confusing hate with lack of trust.

You are right, hate is a very strong word that I should not have used in this context.

> 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 really not that interested in what the court of public opinion thinks, I'm more interested in the truth. The truth is that I don't know if he is Satoshi or not, neither do you or anybody else here. Yet everybody is assuming that without question. The word fraud occurs 21 times in this threat, in almost all cases without qualification. I would expect more from the HN community.

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

#93
post #21

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…

There are very few situations in which a person who claims to be a previously anonymous individual could prove their bona fides without a shadow of a doubt. And this is one of those situations. There are multiple ways that the real Satoshi could prove their identity, but somehow, Craig Wright has either lost of of them, or they're locked up in some strange escrow with a super-secret board of lawyers or some such nons…

>Also, Craig Wright doesn't have the technical understanding to have written the Bitcoin implementation. Listen to him speak. If you're honest with yourself, and if you code, you'll realize that he's likely never written much running code at all, much less a full implementation of a complex cryptographic and network protocol.

This is an important observation. Craig gives himself away every time he presents at a conference. His talks just throw up a bunch impressive technical jargon and graphics, but then completely fail to weave it all together into a coherent whole, leaving only a disjointed mess.

It fools people who aren't watching closely and thinking critically. But Satoshi Nakamoto being possibly one of the greatest connectors and integrators of disparate technical ideas in our time, Craig Wright he is not.

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

#94
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.

I would say that 100% of people are susceptible 40-50% of the time. Okay some more than others, but for no one the number is 0. It's easier to understand the phenomenon after we accept it affects us all to some degree.

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

#95
post #35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not just a continuum, because in addition to being more or less trusting you also always have the option to do just a little more work to be sure. Trust, but verify.

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

#96
I'm starting to wonder if Wright could actually be pathologically delusional and convinced to be Satoshi, despite the accumulated evidence against it. I'm no psychologist but it reminds me of how paranoid schizophrenia is typically presented.

At the beginning, it looked like an elaborate fraud but now, he barely makes any sense at all in his declarations.

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

#97
post #65

At the end of the day, all he needs to do is use the Satoshi key on a transaction on the bitcoin blockchain to prove everything. He hasn’t and can’t. Am I wrong?

We're going to see such things at some point, there are a few "bitcoin address collider", some of them are even distributed.

AFAIK, there are 160 bits of entropy in a bitcoin address. Let's say satoshi has ~1 million addresses with bitcoin in them (2^20). That means 2^140 attempts need to be made to steal any of satoshi's bitcoins. Cracking 128 bits of entropy is essentially impossible[1], cracking 140 bits is even harder. This collider tried 7 quadrillion addresses in 1 year[2]. That's 2^53, nowhere near 2^140.

[1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/1148

[2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nzpv8m/the-large-bitcoin-...

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

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are stating a popular opinion, but it's one that I do not share. > Most of his proof has been systematically proven to be forged or unverified. If someone fails to prove A that does not mean that (not A) is true > You're confusing hate with lack of trust. You are right, hate is a very strong word that I should not have used in this context. > It's very much playing itself out in front of you. "Innocent" isn't the…

Have you spent any amount of time reviewing the claims against his "proof"? We're talking about purchasing backdated companies(ie, the Tulip Trust), referencing products that didn't exist at the time they were allegedly used, sharing PDFs with obvious edits, etc.

Here's a good analysis of Craig's own testimony from last week and the inconsistencies:

https://blog.wizsec.jp/2019/07/kleiman-v-craig-wright-part-3...

> I'm more interested in the truth

The only way he is telling the truth is if an enormous number of claims is a massive conspiracy theory.

> The truth is that I don't know if he is Satoshi or not

You don't know I'm not Satoshi. I don't have to prove it:

> If someone fails to prove A that does not mean that (not A) is true

> I would expect more from the HN community.

True. We do have a habit of hero worship (ie Jobs, Musk, etc) so perhaps we should similarly believe Wright just because he said to.

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

#99
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How does that change anything? The point is CSW is relevant in the sense that if the #9 token by market cap collapsed it should be “news” in the crypto world. He isn’t just some crazy bystander whose supporters have nothing to lose.

It doesn't change anything - it just provides some color and context as to why that number doesn't mean as much as many think it does.

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

#100
post #9
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…

is this the purportedly decentralized group that refers to itself, with no sense of irony, as Bitcoin Core?
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