It would be so easy. If CSW signed a message with Satoshi's private key, it would be enough to prove that he is Satoshi (or at least had access to Satoshi in a way nobody else had).
But no, he's going the legal route for some strange reasons and it doesn't seem he's convincing the judge.
I have no clue what he intends to do. Maybe he got so into his role that he really believes now to be Satoshi?
He did demonstrate signing a message with Satoshi's private key. Except it was an elaborate trick involving an old signature lifted from a Bitcoin block mined in 2009[1].
So is the backdated blog posts edited after the fact (thank you internet archive for proving that). So was the fake PGP key, again backdated and created with a version that didn't even exist back when it was dated. Craig Wright is an incredibly transparent fraudster. No one with even an ounce of intelligence believes his claims are legitimate unless it suits their goals.
he also modified his blog post from 2008 to insert a reference to some cryptocurrency paper he's working on, compare content of last paragraph in "Tonight" post here (captured jun 2nd 2014):
"I have a bottle of wine (a bottle of well aged Penfolds Cabernet Sauvignon (1995 vintage). How to put it, Plum red. with a nose of tobacco leaf, cedar and capsicum. A light vanilla with a slight aftertaste. The tannins are mild and it is drinking well now. I do not see much more time for this wine. It is at to just past its peak and needs to be drunk now).
I have a mixed vegetable lassangne with a rich capisum sauce and nutmeg bechmel."
The fact that he needs to use capsicum (he even misspells it) instead of the colloquial word, pepper, shows what an insufferable twat this dude is.
Fraud? It's bitcoin man. There's no concept of fraud. Or are you implying that there should be some sort of regulating body that would enforce generally accepted fraudulent behavior?
In the same way that cryptography and distributed ledgers create a way to validate property ownership without a central authority, signed messages provide a way to validate identity without the need for courts. There is definitely a framework for identifying truth versus fraud using solely cryptography. I don't understand your point.
His point is that cryptocurrency is the wild west. Claiming to be someone you're not is, unless you're actually executing identity theft by e.g. taking out loans on someone else's name, is not illegal AFAIK.
I'm not sure what he's trying to achieve, in any case. It's not like the title "you are Satoshi" will do much. You become a key player in the crypto industry by merit, not so much by name.
My cynical guess is that he doesn’t have the private key, but wants to use legal methods (court cases, registering copyrights for documents, etc) as a means of establishing himself as Satoshi.
Once established he’ll launch a court case requiring a hard fork of the blockchain to “recover” Satoshi’s coins, because they are after all his, and profit ... assuming he doesn’t crack the truecrypt password first.
Except he probably won't be able to create a hard fork; if my understanding of crypto / bitcoin is correct, he needs a majority of miners to go with it, and given that the Bitcoin is international that's going to be very difficult.
You don't need a majority of miners to create a hard fork, you just need any amount. What you need a majority for is to get the chain to adopt your version of history without hard-forking.
> But no, he's going the legal route for some strange reasons and it doesn't seem he's convincing the judge.
While most of the HN crowd, and fortunately also the judge, won’t be fooled I am sure that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t understand enough about cryptography, who are willing to buy the idea that this guy invented Bitcoin.
one interesting theory i've heard recently is that he and gavin (the guy satoshi handed over the project maintenance to before disappearing) know that satoshi is dead and use that fact (that nobody will ever be able to sign anything or transfer any funds from satoshi's wallets) to their advantage.
not sure what is gavin getting out of it but csw appears to behave as professional conman.
i reckon it is too coincidental that there was a satoshi nakamoto a few blocks away from hal finney. and satoshi was that guy's middle name. i think they both agreed to keep the secret til the end.
Imagine how easy it would be to prove his claim of being Satoshi: a signed message using the private key from the genesis block or any of the first few dozen blocks.
After all, he did say he would provide cryptographic proof. Instead what he produced was technobabble designed to mislead the ill-informed.
So instead, this performance artist goes around suing people for pointing out the obvious truth.
For the technically minded, here's one summary of one of Wright's signature frauds:
Addition: goes around suing people for pointing out the obvious truth.. in the UK. Where the defendants have to prove he is not Satoshi, as opposed to the US where he would have to prove he is.
"Man says he invented Bitcoin and is suing those who doubt him" is a perfectly 'traditional' headline.
I don't see a strong argument that changing "man" to "he" transforms this into a clickbait headline. More modern style of headline yes, but clickbait I don't see.
I think it's semantically incorrect. Pronouns like "he" are placeholders, simplifying the reference to a known object and avoiding cumbersome repetition. But without having any antecedent, the pronoun is left without any meaning at all.
The result is, as you say, a statement that serves only as an advertisement of sorts to click into the story, without carrying actual information.
Have you looked at old newspapers? Clickbait headlines are the opposite of what they did. They're designed so you can get a pretty damn good idea of what's going on by skimming the headlines and maybe first couple lines of each story.
Depends on the newspaper. Long before there were clicks, editors (driven by their publishers) strove to get more readers by coming up with headlines and stories and other elements (such as cartoons) that they couldn't find elsewhere.
In the United States sensationalistic headlines were part of the "Yellow Journalism" trend in the late 1800s - this is how Pulitzer and Hearst got their starts. Britain perfected the art of the tabloid headline, so much so that it exported some of its best writers to Australia and the United States, which is how Rupert Murdoch was able to expand.
Advertisers used similar techniques, leveraging current events and sensationalism to grab eyeballs and customers. A few years ago I found this example (https://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2016/11/a-history-of-cli..., scroll to the bottom) in a regional newspaper in western NY while doing genealogical research. It was from 1904.
The UK press has been doing clickbait headlines for a very long time, occaisionally raising it to the standard of an art form. I particularly like the Liverpool Echo's genius headline from the 1970's - "Super Cally Goes Ballistic, QPR Atrocious."
I'm somewhat surprised that story wasn't investigated as securities fraud. I'm sure a lot of people stood to make a lot of money shorting supermicro. Anyone who knows more about this than me know why it is ok for Bloomberg to do that?
I'm confused why somebody would claim to possess an immense fortune (Satoshi's blocks are currently worth ~$10B) without being able to verify and/or access that fortune.
Congrats. Now you have a huge target on your back. Watch your step and sleep with one eye open for the rest of your life.
But go try to borrow money, and the bank will ask, "Why don't you just... use some of your fortune."
Media keeps complimenting this guy as subtext - he's considered a super villain, or a brilliant scam artist. Which part of his playbook is impressive in any way?
Wasn't there some artical on hn earlier about how Paul le roux might have been the inventor? And this Craig guy having worked with him before?I think it got taken down, was that not legit?
From all that I've read about the founding of Bitcoin, my guess would be that it was the guy in the wheelchair who died before bitcoin got really big. I forget his name, but he was involved early on in crypto, he was a white guy, not Japanese.
Everything points towards the guy being dead.
>it was the guy in the wheelchair who died before bitcoin got really big.
The problem with that guess is that the guy (Hal Finney) designed, implemented and deployed an alternative to Bitcoin, called Reusable Proof of Work. The alternative never gained traction, but was actively deployed for quite a few years (starting if I remember correctly before the start of Bitcoin and ending after Bitcoin had been deployed for a while).
"actively deployed": the design entailed at least one server with constant connectivity to the public internet, which of course entails at least some cost in hosting fees and some effort at monitoring things. The server ran a few thousand lines of C code written by Finney.
My money is on Paul Le Roux. He is a pragmatic programmer who wrote encryption software for Windows in the 90s and in the 2000s he had a real need to move money around outside the traditional systems. Bitcoin was scrappy windows software as well like E4M. A lot of academics, open source activists and hacker purists would never write their software for Windows. Le Roux's writing style is similar, his attitude, streak for innovation, and timeline all kind of fit for a possible Satoshi candidate. He also had a real motive to be anonymous and release the software anonymously unlike many other candidates.
I think so. If you look at the total amount of code, his total emails and forum posts - there really isn't much. I wouldn't put it past him as a side project given his past. Also most of the code was done by the beginning of 2009 and he stopped posting at the end of 2010. It wasn't until 2012 he was arrested. Given that he was already wealthy and didn't need the attention - he had good reason to stay anonymous.
https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1153096538
That guy was a real forward thinker-- just the other day there was a HN post addressing just that. Seems that even the original team knew BTC wasn't perfect...
The counter argument there is that if he had access to Satoshi's wallet in the last year of his life, why wouldn't he have cashed at least some of it out to provide for his family (and donate the rest to the ALS foundation which he spent a lot of energy raising money for)?
His family was getting attacked by a group of ransom seeking criminals the last years of his life who believed he had a substantial coin stash, so he kept a low profile and may have donated without telling anybody. He did write once he gave to his family as inheritance 'a lot of coins' without saying how much it was. It's unlikely he was Satoshi, the early code was full of security problems.
IIRC, English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defence, who once accused must prove they didn't defame, so many conmen throughout history have tried to use it to their advantage such as David Irving vs Penguin Books.
But no, he's going the legal route for some strange reasons and it doesn't seem he's convincing the judge.
I have no clue what he intends to do. Maybe he got so into his role that he really believes now to be Satoshi?