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Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court
- samcday 7y agoThe 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.
- seibelj 7y agoThere is a multi-billion dollar asset known as Bitcoin SV that is valued highly on the belief Craig Wright invented bitcoin. He is not just a local crank.
- ericb 7y ago> He is not just a local crank. Agreed, he's gone global.
- smcl 7y agoThen it’s valued highly by a lot of extremely gullible people. The first time I heard about Craig Wright was that debacle where he was desperate to prove he was Satoshi, hand-waved his way through a very staged proof and then when called on it he subsequently refused to do an extremely simple proof that would’ve beyond doubt proven what he claimed (lamenting that no one would be happy with it). Everything I’ve read since then has confirmed he’s just a grifter, this article is no different.
- tryptophan 7y ago>multi-billion dollar asset [number of coins] * [ price of coin] =/= value. I hate this ridiculous trend of "valuing" currencies by the above formula. I sold myself 1 HackerNewsCoin™ for 1$(featuring decentralized freedom© and proof of steak®). Since there are 1e13 coins, I am now the world's first trillionaire! I own a currency valued at 1$ * 1e13! It makes much more sense to compare currencies by their transaction volume, or possibly even better by the volume * days destroyed metric. Bitcoin SV probably has very little real "float" and so it appears far more valuable than it actually is.
- striking 7y agoHe'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/ https://nchain.com/en/). I don't think he's just some random small fish.
- gwern 7y agoDon't forget that Nchain is filing for hundreds of blockchain-related patents. That could be a serious problem.
- keymone 7y agoi 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.
- gwern 7y agoIf you trust the patent system to not grant any bogus patents, then you are far more optimistic than I am. And a bogus patent is just as useful a weapon.
- lanrh1836 7y agoYou’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.
- keymone 7y agomarket cap numbers actually aren't meaningful, especially in low liquidity assets like bsv.
- lanrh1836 7y agoHow 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.
- bitxbitxbitcoin 7y agoIt 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.
- keymone 7y agoyou argument that bitcoin sv is relevant stands on that market cap number.
- keymone 7y agono matter how skeptical you are of cryptocurrencies, they are no small thing and bitcoin is by far the largest. CSW is being sued for billions of dollars^, so that's also not a small thing. i don't understand, why be dismissive of things in a way that completely rejects the objective reality? ^ of course CSW is a fraud and doesn't actually have access to satoshi's stash. it's quite comical how if he proves he isn't a fraud he will owe somebody billions of dollars, assuming klein wins the case.
- anm89 7y agoThere is also a pretty substantial amount of money wrapped up in this case. Billions of dollars. I would say that's somewhat newsworthy for a lawsuit involving individual people.
- csomar 7y agoThe funnier thing is that he potentially embezzled investors out of many millions of dollars for his bogus claims. It's a wonderful world we are living in.
- dunkelheit 7y agoSeems newsworthy enough to me. First, the sum in question is north of $10B and even if nobody involved probably has access to it, it is still entertaining to watch. And though the guy is most likely a conman, nobody has put the final nail in the coffin yet so the scam lives on, fueled by large sums of money from his "business partner". It is interesting to watch how long will they be able to carry it on.
- xorcist 7y agoThe Craig Wright story is interesting because Gavin Andresen, who probably interacted more with Satoshi than anybody else, was dead set on Wright being Satoshi. He referred to evidence shown in private that he was unable to share the details of. Later after Wright couldn't (or didn't want to) prove the Satoshi connection in public Andresen later expressed regrets going public with these statements, but never really took them back. It's hard to know, really. Andresen was release manager of the reference implementation for several years and widely regarded as trustworthy. Other people made business investments based on these statements. Well known investor Roger Ver now seems to regard Wright a fraud, but not before headlining conferences with him and releasing a cryptocurrency together. So Wright has been quite influential, at least with some select people, and is absolutely newsworthy.
- jnbiche 7y agoThe 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.
- revscat 7y agoIt amazes me that a percentage of your percentage does so because to call out liars would be impolite and lead to discomfort.
- nullc 7y agoCalling out fraudsters also gets you attacked and harassed and there is essentially nothing you can do to stop it.
- BubRoss 7y agoGenerally you only get attacked by those fraudsters.
- astronautjones 7y agoor their entire personality cult/political party
- dboreham 7y agoHmm...go back and look at how the Theranos debacle played out.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoBe careful. The people who called out Enron, Theranos, the NSA before Snowden or the rationale for the Iraq invasion often paid a big price.
- gerikson 7y ago
- clemensley 7y agoI 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. Yet everybody is acting as if they _knew_ he is a liar and a fraud. That seems to be the justification for hate. What happened to innocent until proven guilty? My take is: I do not know if he is Satoshi or not. I also do not care. I listen to want he thinks about Bitcoin and I like what I hear.
- BubRoss 7y agoInnocent until proven guilty is when the state is going to imprison you and dictate every moment of your life. If I said I invented cold fusion, would you ask me to prove it first, or give me 300 million in venture capital?
- jnbiche 7y agoThere 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 nonsense. Occam's Razor. If ever there was a good application of the principle, it's here. 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. But these are the kinds of guys who unfortunately make it past interviews on the strength of their "dazzle'em with bullshit" approach to interviewing, and that have caused the current situation where most of us have to spend months reviewing our DS and algorithms notes before new interviews.
- Lucadg 7y agoHe's Satoshi but he lost the private key:)
- trollied 7y agoAt 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?
- iso-8859-1 7y agoSee the court records, he claims he can't do it because he distributed the key parts or something. Since it is hard to prove that someone cannot do something, yes, technically you are wrong.
- akerro 7y agoWe're going to see such things at some point, there are a few "bitcoin address collider", some of them are even distributed.
- Thorrez 7y agoAFAIK, 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 https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/1148 [2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nzpv8m/the-large-bitcoin-collider-is-generating-trillions-of-keys-and-breaking-into-wallets https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nzpv8m/the-large-bitcoin-...
- naveen99 7y agoLong read, hopefully movie comes out at some point: https://www.docdroid.net/5LZMLHb/06-28-19-ber-kleiman.pdf https://www.docdroid.net/5LZMLHb/06-28-19-ber-kleiman.pdf So keys to satoshi’s Bitcoins are possibly going to be available in 2020 according to Wright.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vintermann 7y agoPretending to be vastly richer than you really are happens to be the first step in a large number of confidence games. In case anyone wonders why someone would want to pretend they're Satoshi.
- pavlov 7y agoThis is also the fundamental reason why Donald Trump is using the Justice Department to prevent any disclosure of his tax returns.
- adventured 7y agoNo it's not. The most likely reason for that is Trump probably gave money to Planned Parenthood or a similar organization that would harm the pitch to his base. We have his legally required financial disclosure forms that show a range on his income. Some of the best wealth trackers on earth - those at both Forbes and Bloomberg - have also put together sound estimates on his wealth (closer to $3 billion, not $10 billion). Factually Trump presides over a sizable, serious business that is generating a large amount of cash. Prominent assets: $765m Vornado partnership, $525m golf course & resorts, $445m 725 Fifth Ave, $480m 40 Wall St, $420 Niketown building, $330m other properties, $295m liquid, $140m 502 Park Ave, $95m DC hotel "President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure report shows he had at least $434 million in revenue last year, but saw a drop in money coming from his Florida luxury resort Mar-a-Lago. The report, released Thursday, is required to be filed annually with the Government Ethics Office. It covers the president’s finances for 2018, his second year in office." https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/read-president-donald-trumps-financial-disclosure-report.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/read-president-donald-trumps... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-12/trump-s-net-worth-rises-to-3-billion-despite-business-setbacks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-12/trump-s-n...
- curyous 7y agoThe article presupposes that Craig is not Satoshi. If Craig is Satoshi, then the article and these comments on it, read very differently.
- bredren 7y agoIf a guy who behaves like this was satoshi or one of them, it would be an embarrassing revelation.
- eof 7y agoCan someone explain the public address thing? The courts seem to demand he list the public addresses where all Thai early mines bitcoin lies. He says he cannot produce it because of this splintered trust. But, the addresses are available for all to see on the blockchain itself, it is the private keys which are hidden away. How is this basic fact just ignored in all these proceedings?
- plondon514 7y agoI think he cannot produce proof that he is owner of these address. The list is well known. He could spend, or even sign a message, with any of the private keys from an early address. That would prove he is satoshi. He has not done this. Therefore he is not satoshi.
- LowLevelHacker 7y agoProblem is people like Greg Maxwell who continued to offer support to him.
- carlosdp 7y ago> And a font copyrighted in 2015 appeared on an another email supposedly dispatched in 2011. This keeps happening in court, mostly with Microsoft Word Calibri. It's kinda funny how effective such a simple oversight is at proving document forgery.
- chx 7y agoRoux being Satoshi is the only plausible explanation I heard in a long time. This clown is not.
- tim333 7y agoThe case seems a bit nuts in that Wright isn't Satoshi so his business partners estate won't achieve much by suing him for coins he can't have stolen from the business partner because he doesn't have them.
- AJ007 7y agoBut, they could get a judgement on whatever other assets he actually does have.
- lgeorget 7y agoI'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.
- CamperBob2 7y agoIf I were a fraudster and I knew I'd gotten in over my head, I could easily see myself mounting a mental-incapacity defense. It's almost unassailable. That aside, I was pretty sure Donald Trump was going to develop a sudden case of Alzheimer's at some point, but so far I've been wrong about that. If the fraudster believes strongly enough in his own fraud, all bets are (literally) off.
- dnprock 7y agoBitcoin is evil in some aspects. Its enigmatic origin triggers religiosity. Bitcoin consumes those who learn about it. It's like a spell. When price goes down, you'd come into its defense. When price goes up, it occupies your brain. Bitcoin can be a source of good. But it comes with a lot of evil. Craig Wright fell for its evil.