Craig Steven Wright claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto
economist.com
economist.com
When the link to Wright was first reported in Wired[0] and Gizmodo[1], after letting the news sink in for a day it was apparent that the evidence trail was an elaborate ruse. I don't know if Wright leaked the hack to the media (I think it was more likely to be a disgruntled former employee who bought into the story), but there were many journalists who turned down that story while it was being shopped widely because it didn't smell right (this is no slight on gwern, Andy Greenburg and Sam Biddle who could bring to the story more than what most ordinary journalists could, and mention that it could be a hoax)
Consider that Wright faked old blog posts, allowed them to be found, and then deleted them. Consider that he added a new Satoshi Nakomoto PGP key to keyservers with an email he controlled (which was different, obviously) in 2013, three years after the real Satoshi disappeared. Consider that Wright claimed to have a super computer and produced a reference letter from SGI, but that SGI claimed no knowledge of the computer or letter and it turned out to be fake (in some parts of the world - this is known as fraud)[2]. Consider his LinkedIn said he earned a Phd. from Bathurst University but the University knew nothing about it[3]. Consider the only people Wright revealed he was Satoshi to were a few select employees and people he was trying to raise money from (he said he was a billionaire but the funds were locked up - it is a modern digital version of a 419 scam).
Consider, also, that he says he "tried to keep his head down" but shows up at a Bitcoin panel as an unknown and suggestively describes himself vaguely - with a smirk and a wink. Consider that he says he doesn't want the fame or attention, but shopped an exclusive deal around the media for a month and went with the BBC, The Economist and GQ - and is currently on every TV channel. Consider that Wright, despite being quasi-published, has never produced anything approaching the complexity, clarity, succinctness and humble nature of the Bitcoin paper, but is the complete opposite of all of these characteristics (rambles and talks down to people, explaining detail not so that the reader learns it - but so that you know that he knows this shit).
From what I know about him, it seems Wright is experienced with barely getting along with big pie-in-the-sky ideas that convince a lot of people around him, but that definitely are in the grey area between legitimate and fraud. He is able to drown people in quasi-technical talk and on big ideas and is very personable (we also have a word for people who take fraudulent action via their charms).
He avoids people who are actual experts in the areas he himself professes to be an expert in, and when he is in relevant forums or other online communities he downplays his achievements.
Some examples: He claimed to be published in infosec, but rather than writing for the usual outlets he wrote for political blogs on infosec topics[4] (often poorly). He added his two supercomputers to the top 500 index (which is self reported) but never participated in the online communities, but he did brag about it in investment material. He didn't interact with professors or students at universities, but did teach a remote webinar course on supercomputing at a pay-for school[4] and finally, with Bitcoin - in investment material and to employees he was a domain expert and the founder but he was never a regular in online communities or conferences (although it seems he got to a point of even convincing Bitcoin experts that he knew what he was talking about)
He is currently being pursued in Australia by tax authorities not because, as was commonly reported, not paying taxes on the Satoshi coins (you don't pay tax in Australia until gains are realized) but because he was one of the largest claimants of R&D tax concessions in Australia (larger than Google and Atlassian) and this is a common area of fraud (create a fake company, say you employe 50 people, claim that 'R&D spend' back - similar to sales tax fraud).
One more point of doubt - but I leave it because it is a bit ad hominem - it turns out that you can't work for long in Sydney without knowing someone who worked for Wright in one of his schemes or knowing someone who knew someone. Turns out I had 2 friends who worked with him at various points. Both offered characterizations of Wright as being crazy and deceiving. He is very convincing in the short term, but things start to unwind over time. One is still, despite being mildly burnt by him, partly convinced he may have had something to do with Bitcoin because "he is just that crazy, you learn not to be surprised by stuff" - but then snapped out of it.
Is this really Satoshi? It isn't - i'm going to start from the perspective that Wright has pulled off (another) impressive fraud. I'm more interested in figuring out how the hell he did this.
edit: that didn't take long. It appears there is evidence in this thread, on reddit and on Twitter that the 'verification' falls short and is just an old bitcoin transaction[6]
edit: I just got this from another former employee of Wright's - "best conman i've ever met"
[0] https://www.wired.com/2015/12/bitcoins-creator-satoshi-nakam...
[1] http://gizmodo.com/this-australian-says-he-and-his-dead-frie...
[2] https://www.wired.com/2015/12/new-clues-suggest-satoshi-susp...
[3] http://gizmodo.com/the-mystery-of-craig-wright-and-bitcoin-i...
[4] https://theconversation.com/lulzsec-anonymous-freedom-fighte...
[5] https://www.itmasters.edu.au/free-short-course-programming-s...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hf4s2/craig_wrigh...
For once Nik, I tend to agree with you. The above line is a line from the Economist that points to deception. Is that Doctorate a technical PhD? [1] What matters most is a demonstration of the ideas in code and then discussions with bitcoin peers. You don't need a doctorate on your CV to show this.
[0] http://www.economist.com/news/briefings/21698061-craig-steve...
[1] "His doctorate in theology, however, remains a mystery and Mr Wright does not want to talk about it" ~ http://www.drcraigwright.net/about/
"He has a Doctorate in Theology and has submitted his completed thesis for his second Doctorate in Computer Science."
It can be interpreted "second Doctorate in CS" and "second Doctorate, but this time in CS," and based on the rest of the claims, it's the second. The original phrasing on the site is exactly how a good conman would phrase it. Which doesn't prove anything but adds to the other red flags.
And last year he claimed he has "a couple of Doctorates."
OMG the narcissistic self-biography of an egomaniac. Doesn't this guy live in a rental property?
But it could be that his account is compromised.
"I was not allowed to keep the message or laptop (fear it would leak before Official Announcement)."
But also from reddit: "Evidence that Craig Wright is not Satoshi: he doesn't understand selfish mining"
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hfyoo/evidence_th...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/180.216....
I don't know how to go any deeper than that, and I wouldn't call it a smoking gun, but I just think it's humorous to think of such a person frantically editing Wikipedia to try to temporarily change what the world accepts as truth. Wright is listed as a PhD student at Charles Stuart University here:
But wait, how do you get your location, that is, how does it actually point to Wright? I get that it's a range taken by vividwireless Pty Ltd, and different locations.
Except for confirming "it's in Australia" I can't get anything more exact. Which doesn't mean I can't imagine Wright doing exactly that, modifying Wikipedia about Nakamoto this way.
Craig Wright seems to be wanting the fame, in a narcissistic way... That is the only reason I can imagine including GQ. Any other reasons for including such a media outlet?
Because a lot of others turned him down? As the FT article says, he was trying to get participants for a while but was going through a PR firm and insisting on NDAs up front and that sort of thing. Given that everyone thinks he's a conman, who wants to sign up for that? Apparently only the BBC, GQ, and the Economist had the balls.
Taking for granted that Wright is not Satoshi.. How could a respected, crypto-savvy computer scientist become duped by an old sign(i/a)ture?
The obvious answer is that the con-man is a very good con-man, and i'm not writing off that possibility. But what other reasons could there be for his support?
The next possibility is that he benefits from having the media move on. For instance, It would help him to continue hiding the real identity of Satoshi. Perhaps he is even the cryptographer himself. Since he has other "experts" with him for the ride, he can claim ignorance and not suffer professionally if it goes south.
There could also be less direct political motivations for feigning belief. Bitcoin gains stability by moving the huge sums of early coins into a more accountable state than "these coins could crash the market any day now."
The most obvious reason is simpler: Wright and those who accept his claims are "big-blockians":
https://cp4space.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/is-craig-wright/
"Matonis, Andresen and Wright are all big-blockians. Having the esteemed creator Satoshi on their side would help their argument, and it is entirely plausible that there are several large organisations who would benefit from having more control over the regulation of Bitcoin."
The same fact is also alluded to in the OP Economist article:
"It pays, too, to bear in mind that Mr Wright’s outing will most likely be of benefit to those in the current bitcoin civil war who want to expand the block size quickly, whose number include Mr Matonis and Mr Andresen. Mr Wright says that if he could reinvent bitcoin, he would program in a steady increase of the block size."
Add to that that there's this conference in NY today where Andresen repeats his claims:
http://www.drcraigwright.net/extraordinary-claims-require-ex...
The signature Wright posted is a signature from a transaction on the blockchain (and therefore cannot be a signature of a Nobel prize refusal speech or whatever other message he claims): https://blockchain.info/tx/828ef3b079f9c23829c56fe86e85b4a69...
The above tx's scriptSig: 3045022100c12a7d54972f26d14cb311339b5122f8c187417dde1e8efb6841f55c34220ae0022066632c5cd4161efa3a2837764eee9eb84975dd54c2de2865e9752585c53e7cce01
The signature Wright posted:
$ echo 'MEUCIQDBKn1Uly8m0UyzETObUSL4wYdBfd4ejvtoQfVcNCIK4AIgZmMsXNQWHvo6KDd2Tu6euEl13VTC3ihl6XUlhcU+fM4=' | base64 -d | xxd -p
3045022100c12a7d54972f26d14cb311339b5122f8c187417dde1e8efb68
41f55c34220ae0022066632c5cd4161efa3a2837764eee9eb84975dd54c2
de2865e9752585c53e7cceThe signature in Wright's post is just pulled straight from a transaction on the blockchain. Convert the base64 signature from his post (MEUCIQDBKn1Uly8m0UyzETObUSL4wYdBfd4ejvtoQfVcNCIK4AIgZmMsXNQWHvo6KDd2Tu6euEl13VTC3ihl6XUlhcU+fM4=) to hex (3045022100c12a7d54972f26d14cb311339b5122f8c187417dde1e8efb6841f55c34220ae0022066632c5cd4161efa3a2837764eee9eb84975dd54c2de2865e9752585c53e7cce), and you get the signature found in this transaction input: https://blockchain.info/tx/828ef3b079f9c23829c56fe86e85b4a69...
Note that the base64 string at the top of his post isn't a signature, just a cleartext message: " Wright, it is not the same as if I sign Craig Wright, Satoshi.\n\n".
Now the only question is how he fooled Gavin. I would imagine this story will still get spread around some naive channels for a while, just like the last time Wright tried something like this.
Credit goes to jouke in #bitcoin for figuring it out.
-----------------
EDIT: Current opinion: still skeptical. Here is the public cryptographic "proof": http://www.drcraigwright.net/jean-paul-sartre-signing-signif...
Something still seems off to me, why does he go into such specific detail in verifying the signature? I would have assumed he would just let people figure out the verification themselves. But maybe I'm just skeptical because Satoshi having a public identity takes some of the magic away.
As pointed out by maaku, he never revealed what message the signature is supposed to be signing.
-----------------
My Original Post:
Everyone in this thread is already taking this as the truth. But remember that Wright has not publicly released any cryptographic proof, there is only a claim from BBC that he showed the signature to them and a few magazines.
This strikes me as a little strange since originally Satoshi pretty much only interacted with the community via the bitcoin mailing list. Why did he "reveal" the proof by sending it to some magazines rather than emailing the mailing list?
It really seems like the person who created Bitcoin, a trustless system based on cryptographic proof, wouldn't make everyone take his word on his identity when it could be trivially solved with one email.
Still looking at the page you posted in the edit, but not yet convinced.
edit: Sarah Jeong of Motherboard summed up the objections last time: https://motherboard.vice.com/read/satoshis-pgp-keys-are-prob...
Wright goes into a long post explaining public key crypto - to me it looks intended to bedazzle more than inform - but as far as I can see he does not produce a signature from any of the genuine keys associated with Satoshi.
Really? That just looks like a much too long (targeted to journalists) description of ECDSA signing. Where's the _actual_ signature?
> IFdyaWdodCwgaXQgaXMgbm90IHRoZSBzYW1lIGFzIGlmIEkgc2lnbiBDcmFpZyBXcmlnaHQsIFNh dG9zaGkuCgo=
It's just a base64 encoded string.
" Wright, it is not the same as if I sign Craig Wright, Satoshi.\n\n"Edit: No it's not.
but since getting a single piece of whitespace wrong would throw the hash off completely, that isn't terribly useful. Though it seems that it should be possible to brute force every reasonable permutation of formatting for the article and find one whose hash matches the one he provided, if it's the real source. The search space of "documents within a string edit distance of N" is probably not too large.
He needs to sign a message provided to him right now - or otherwise show ownership of coins in early blocks by moving them around.
Edit: He apparently haven't even provided a valid message/sig, so the whole thing stinks.
EDIT: Or maybe the latest bitcoin block.
Um, what? Signing a new message is a minuscule jump through a very large hoop, not something difficult or cumbersome or time consuming.
This fact alone is indefensible, smells of fake and should be enough to dismiss the claim.
Just sign a message attesting that YOUR NAME is satoshi. No more work. Done once.
...On the other hand, the screenshots are from Windows. Windows! Are we really to believe Satoshi uses Windows?
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2016/03/31/2158024/craig-wrights-...
Yes. This is the one part of the whole story that doesn't smell. The first version of Bitcoin was windows-only.
I imagine the signature must also be somehow related to his private/public key pair otherwise his blog is just junk cryptography and would have been easily debunked anyway?
Granted, the likelihood that he inadvertently collided with a public transaction is astronomically small.
The question is: why creating this hoax in the first place? If anything, the price of bitcoin has been negatively impacted by this.
http://www.coindesk.com/price/
What would it be one's motivation behind this?
Deliberately impacting the price of a good negatively is a great way to get it cheap and then sell it for more later.
Perhaps the oldest con ever. Hence the detailed previous story from him of placing all of Satoshi's stash in a trust.
>https://youtu.be/dZNtbAFnr-0?t=3m21s
Who says something like this?
It's a non-topic really, compensation for winning an award, it's bizarre he plays it up like this.
The sentence doesn't make sense and he sounds like David Brent from "The Office".
If there is an official narrative establishing a fake satoshi, the real satoshi would be over-joyed because this would basically ensure any further inquiry into his identity would be in the realm of conspiracy theory... leaving media unwilling to touch it.
Unless he is extremely stupid, he would never risk claiming to be the most wanted man in the world, if he was not sure that no one could discredit him.
We don't need more signature here guys. We just need to decide who will play him in the upcoming Hollywood movie, cause he defies the stereotype of nerdy looking geek :-)
A little off-topic, but suppressing right-clicks (and trying to suppress Ctrl/Alt/Shift?) is a really obnoxious thing for a website to do.
document.onmousedown=disableclick;
status="Sorry, not sharing images!";
function disableclick(event)
{
if(event.button==2)
{
alert(status);
return false;
}
}
function detectspecialkeys(e){
var evtobj=window.event? event : e
if (evtobj.altKey || evtobj.ctrlKey || evtobj.shiftKey)
alert("The key is not available.");
}
document.onkeypress=detectspecialkeysAs for your aside, not to mention it is completely and utterly futile. Hurts the normal user experience and accomplishes nothing for anyone who wants to steal the images.
Imagine your Satoshi and you need cash for some reason. Reveal your identity and immediately get a bunch of offers for book deals and speaking engagements. You run into career problems, reveal who you are and you can probably snag a position as a Google fellow.
More concerned about your legacy or some crypto-anarachist vision? Revealing yourself could help you influence both the public policy debate on encryption and bitcoin's future (speaking engagements offer more influence than some signed messages on a mailing list).
Finally, what about credit for your contribution. Being known to your friends and family.
Sure, he may still want to remain anonymous but to suggest there isn't the temptation to go public is silly
Relevant Reddit Comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hf4s2/craig_wrigh...
Is it?
> Is it?
Apparently, not weird. From the Economist article:
"It pays, too, to bear in mind that Mr Wright’s outing will most likely be of benefit to those in the current bitcoin civil war who want to expand the block size quickly, whose number include Mr Matonis and Mr Andresen. Mr Wright says that if he could reinvent bitcoin, he would program in a steady increase of the block size. He also intends to publish mathematical proof that there is no trade-off between the mass adoption of the cryptocurrency and its remaining decentralised."
To have Satoshi & Bitcoin's chief scientist would be impressive for a start-up.
Too good in fact.
I think Wright is just a smooth-talking conman with some crypto experience. I'm betting he met Gavin and other (unfortunately, merely "supposed" at this point...) experts in person, talked shop for a while, then took out his laptop and staged verifying the signature of blocks 1 and 9 with dummy commands. (Edit: Gavin actually claimed it was a clean computer, not one that Wright brought. Disregard that.)
The Economist actually states this directly:
>Mr Wright has also demonstrated this verification in person to The Economist—and not just for block 9, but block 1. Such demonstrations can be stage-managed; and information that allows us to go through the verification process independently was provided too late for us to do so fully. Still, as far as we can tell he indeed seems to be in possession of the keys, at least for block 9. This assessment is shared by two bitcoin insiders who have sat through the same demonstration: Jon Matonis, a bitcoin consultant and former director of the Bitcoin Foundation, and Gavin Andresen, Mr Nakamoto’s successor as the lead developer of the cryptocurrency’s software (he has since passed on the baton, but is still contributing to the code).
Relevant bit:
>Such demonstrations can be stage-managed; and information that allows us to go through the verification process independently was provided too late for us to do so fully.
For Gavin's demonstration, he claims Wright validated the signatures on a "clean" computer, with the implication that it could not be staged.
>Part of that time was spent on a careful cryptographic verification of messages signed with keys that only Satoshi should possess. But even before I witnessed the keys signed and then verified on a clean computer that could not have been tampered with, I was reasonably certain I was sitting next to the Father of Bitcoin.
So, either the clean computer wasn't really clean, or Gavin's complicit in the scam, or Wright does have Satoshi's private keys and may be Satoshi.
Either way, why would Satoshi want to prove it yet only demonstrate proof to a few people in private rather than putting a message and signature online for anyone to verify?
I don't believe that anybody with the most basic understanding of cryptography would fall for that. I don't think there is a slightest chance that Gavin would. So the most interesting part of the story to me is why did he publish his blog post.. Something made him do that, but it's beyond doubt to me that he did not take part in planning of this operation.
I'm very interested to see how this story develops.
I wonder if he was hacked, or if they think he's gone rogue. Or if they're just doing it as a precaution.
When Bitcoin was publicly released, only the genesis block existed, so every block after that point could have been mined by anyone.
Block #1 has a timestamp of 2009-01-09 02:54:25
So, does this mean there were 6 days separating the first block in the chain and the first block to be mined?
https://blockchain.info/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e...
https://blockchain.info/block/00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f41...
Since the genesis block is hardcoded in the software, what likely happened is Satoshi generated it in advance, added it to the code, and then did a few more days of final testing prior to release. Block #1 on the other hand was mined after the initial announcement on the cryptography mailing list: http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/... (about seven or eight hours after if I got my timezone conversions correct)
>becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout
>the world. Then the
>total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all
>the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household
>wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With
>20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.
>So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute
>time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million
>to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim,
>are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...
First ever reply to Satoshi. Finney was a smart guy.
Andresen says an administrative assistant working with Wright left to buy a computer from a nearby store, and returned with what Andresen describes as a Windows laptop in a “factory-sealed” box.
I still have enough respect for Gavin not to leave comment about that..
Neither Jon Matonis nor Ian Grigg have said they actually did real validations themselves, just that they talked with the guy. If he is a conman (which is what seems to be the case) I wouldn't fault them too much for falling for him.
"Too late" ? They are in charge of their publication schedule, I believe.
The economist is a very weak publication. Anyone taking a lead from them on economics should think about how poor the above statement is and wonder about their rigor in other areas.
1. They all have lives, and likely work regular hours.
2. They cannot control what other news outlets release and when. A skeptical story from The Economist in the presence of lots of credulous releases from other outlets is better than silence.
3. They are a print publication. They can't hold up an entire release for one story.
Actually, out of all the major outlets, I'm most impressed by The Economist's coverage. The BBC and CNN fell for it hook, line, and sinker.
The Economist did not "fall" for Wright, and does not believe the claims made.
1. Contradicts himself, privacy vs brokering a deal with major media outlets for a story.
2. Faking LinkedIn experience & degrees.
3. Associates believe he is 'crazy' and a 'conman'
4. Failed the writing syntax test comparing his multiple published works to the original posts and bitcoin paper and eventually...
5. ...Shifting blame or holes in his story towards the DEAD known people who've worked on Bitcoin or who had contact with Satoshi in the past.
6. SGI does not acknowledge him or his claimed statements regarding his relationship with SGI.
7. And I'm not going to go any further... the point is, he has too many 'excuses' for every little thing.
I understand he wants to be infallible and unchallenged in his claim, but just the number of alibis and excuses he dishes out, sans his questionable private-key proof, leaves a gut feeling that he's not Satoshi and smells of con.
Read his post: http://www.drcraigwright.net/jean-paul-sartre-signing-signif... he goes into all sorts of details but then glosses over the fact that the arbitrary Sartre quote could have been signed by anyone at any point in the past.
a) He can't sign it.
b) He is really that petulant and petty that he "won't keep jumping through hoops", even when those hoops represent completely reasonable and trivially fulfillable requests. Which itself doesn't really seem to match the temperament I would have expected Satoshi to have, though i'm certainly no expert on the man.
Something is wrong here. I'm not unconvinced, but i'm suspiciously reserving judgment until he signs a second, unpredictable message.
Suppose he does have the private key, but, because it is literally worth millions of dollars, he has it somewhere secure. It's not sitting on his laptop, waiting for someone to steal it (physically or electronically).
Signing a message before the announcement was lower risk than signing messages now, after the announcement. Accessing it a second time, with greedy little eyes all over him, is risking millions of dollars to convince people who probably wouldn't be convinced anyway.
Sounds extremely dubious. Especially when he's presented fake proof before.
However, in Hal Finney's "Bitcoin and Me" post, Hal says he mined the first block in 2008, then turned the miner off, and then heard about Bitcoin again in 2010 and transferred his coins to a cold wallet. But he doesn't say anything about working on the protocol. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=155054.msg1643833#ms...
Interesting story there. Either way – RIP, Hal.
I have more confidence Hal Finney will be back in some form, than that Craig Wright is Satoshi.
I agree they could do far better. I think they are doing the best they think they can do. I think the entire field got poisoned by defining itself in some kind of struggle in the 60s/70s against anti-cryo people, which is stupid.
IVF, organ banking, etc. are progressing nicely. The Russians are doing a great job on human cryo. My hope is that the Alcor preservations are still good enough today that recovery is possible, although it's likely a better preservation technique, causing less damage, might lead to a recoverable person at an earlier date (i.e. Alcor 2016 person is recoverable in 2100; RU-Cryo person cryopreserved with better technology and technique in 2020 is recoverable in 2070.)
I still think Alcor is better odds than box in the ground or being incinerated. For ~$1k/yr (membership + insurance), it's worth it to me, even if only to fund/etc. research.
Anyways, I don't recommend clicking, but here's the part where Alcor's competence is put into questoin.
>Within minutes of taking custody of the body, the bumbling Alcor team began experiencing a series of equipment failures. A temperature monitor didn’t work because, as it turned out, the batteries were dead. Shortly thereafter, their expensive mechanical chest-compression device stopped functioning. Then, having moved Suozzi’s body into a tub of ice, the Alcor team realized they’d forgotten to bring along a key piece of cooling equipment. Alcor’s after-action report, compiled from the haphazard “free-form” observations of an unnamed but “experienced” observer, determined that such mistakes could in the future be remedied by “the use of a checklist.”
> “Unfortunately,” the Cryonics report notes, “there was some confusion and disagreement regarding the ideal temperature at which to perform surgery.”
(https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-...)
I'm happy to see that The Economist, at least, has a healthy sense of skepticism.
Working through it now -- lets say I am rapidly heading towards "Not a hoax" territory.
[Edit: Or, possibly, totally quackadoodle -- but very convinced-in-himself quackadoodle. I've gotten as far as proving "OK, he knows how to reverse a Bitcoin address into a public key, and picked a good address for the purpose."]
He's making all this up. Unless the message signed contains Craig Wright's name it's not proof of anything.
I consider the posts by others of this thread of a Bitcoin transaction with the same signature to be dispositive that he was not signing any variant of the Sartre message.
Conclusion: a) The linked blog post is pure hokum. b) I'm very clear on how he got this past generalist media but unsure of how he got it past Gavin.
Yeah, but I can do that. Can it be my turn to be Satoshi now? It's specialized knowledge only insofar as you need to have read how to do it and understand enough to write some commensurate code. This is widely-published stuff. It doesn't take a Satoshi or even an expert.
Remember, it's easy to prove you're Satoshi by either
* Signing a message with his PGP key http://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/satoshinakamoto.asc
* Signing a message with one of his early Bitcoin address keys
Edit: apparently he did the latter, quote article
> Mr Wright said he planned to release information that would allow others to cryptographically verify that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Wonder why it takes so much planning.
Edit2: apparently he signed something
http://www.drcraigwright.net/jean-paul-sartre-signing-signif...
Gavin Adresen also is convinced: http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi
The signature he has could come from one of the signatures the real Satoshi has created.
Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609707
The signature came from a blockchain tx.
I'm not sure I believe his comments fully in his latest video though. It seems he's been conflicted for a long time on whether to reveal himself but for all the times he says he wants to be left alone, he easily could have but yet here he is.
https://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-Satoshi-Nakamoto/an...
The owner of the profile of the person who answered your question (whoever he is) seems to have changed his username from "Craig S Wright" to Frank Blu on Dec 12th 2015. He also seems to have deleted, on that same day, every post he made on Quora after Dec 11 2014.
The titles of the questions on which he posted revolved a lot around cryptocurrencies, cryptography and supercomputers, as well as finance and economics. Some example of questions to which he contributed are:
"How large will the Bitcoin blockchain be in November 2015?" "How would I estimate the cost of setting up a 100 Tera-Flop server at my..." "Why is gold considered so precious and why does it have such high prices..." "Are there better uses of stimulus funds than others?"
His earliest activity on the site is the creation of a topic called CSCSS, on Jul 30th 2012.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/10/dorian-nakamoto-f...
I have read several articles this morning which tout this event as total fact (BBC, Venturebeat, NPR and more), and it just saddens me. If this is a hoax, I have lost even more respect for these outlets. If this is a hoax, I have also lost respect for Gavin Andersen, unless he has an ulterior motive for backing Wright in the first place, or was hacked as some have speculated.
Whenever this kind of "unveiling" happens, I get disheartened. It makes a serious technical community and set of ides I care very much about look like little more than a soap-opera or disorganized group of gossip-hounds, as protrayed in major media outlets, overshadowing everything else.
Total bummer (until further proof and/or notice).
This translates as "the actual inventor of the virtual Bitcoin currency IS Craig Wright", conditionals or precautions be damned; and it's printed as is all over the French press this morning.
Instead of saying it was a 'claim', or preferably not writing anything about this scam, they wrote 'Wright admits he's Satoshi' in the title.
This 'admitting' implies everyone thought he was Satoshi, and he confirmed it. When in reality, everyone thinks he's definitely not it, and he claimed it without proof.
Then in the article they make completely false claims about him signing messages he didn't etc. It's really sad, there wasn't a hint of skepticism that was present in the Economist which I thought was poor itself already.
In the posted image of EcDSA.verify.sh, he base64 decodes $signiture, but this is uninitialised. The path is stored in $signature.
http://www.drcraigwright.net/jean-paul-sartre-signing-signif...
Block 9 contains no transactions other than the mining reward.
https://blockchain.info/block-index/14858/000000008d9dc510f2...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdvQTwjVmrE&feature=youtu.be...
Not sure how effective this is, but if this is true then Satoshi has been awarded most of the bitcoins.
- Big media spreads bs claims (check)
- BTC price drop (check)
- Community CSI debunks story (check)
- New core devs drama chapter (check)
- Back to "normal" __
I mean, to each his own- especially when talking about dev tools- so why not I guess?
X: Set your hostname to be wintermute, that should remove all doubt people might have.
I'm not saying the real Satoshi has to be an academic computer scientist, but if someone with a significant academic publication record in cryptography stepped forward, I would take it much more seriously.
Of course, this is secondary to the fact that Wright has not signed a new message with the original Satoshi key.
Only Craig Steven Wright for sure, and possibly the real Satoshi, knows the truth. Whomever it is, he can cash out to the tune of $450 million!
Fun being on the sidelines here, but I do have a heavy intellectual, emotional investment in the idea of Bitcoin, and I hope it carries on.
BBC says it's also confirmed through GQ but I don't see anything related yet.
(My view below)
The way he is communicating in the interview sounds like the government was putting pressure on him. Whomever is 'forcing him' to come out as Nakamoto, I don't think this will end well for Wright nor his companies.
Quote from OA. Would this not short circuit any form of privacy? Or would various agencies and individuals still have to show that the various 'napkin accounts' that make up one's daily transaction count belonged to the same person?
I'm less concerned with the identity of Nakamoto and more concerned with the shape of the future!
As far as I can tell, Wright wants to extend the blockchain considerably, adding opcodes to get Turing-complete functionality. Among other things, he's hinted at using ring signatures for tracking things, which would give one both secure control and anonymity. (I think Monero and its descendants may have stolen that thunder, though.)
There is something in human brains that makes us really want to know about social network around us. Despite the strange URL this article tries to expain it [1]
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/out-the-ooze/201503/why...
And even if the claim would require a long explanation, for instance if Satoshi lost or destroyed the keys for the first few blocks, or the passwords to his accounts on several forums where he used to write, there would be no need for him to do this explanation himself. The burden of the proof his on him, but not the explanation of the proof.
Here's one example post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11610111
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11610101
Edit: oddly, going directly to that comment looks better than going to the main thread. It's still smaller than normal on mobile, but nowhere near as bad as the main thread.
Here's what things look like for me in Safari on iOS:
Anyone know what this was worth at its peak?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Bitcoin#cite_note-6... (would appreciate a correction with a better source)
I remember there was speculation that Bitcoin could go up to tens of thousands of dollars. Which would probably make Wright the richest man alive
It's not that far off from real world USD (if you limit it to the US, and extrapolate for number of users) where 16,000 families making up the richest 0.01% control 11.2% of total wealth
In contrast, Satoshi's coins are currently outside the system, and adding them to the system would cause a whole bunch of instability.
The closest real world analogy I can think of would be that if all the unaccounted for physical US currency that is floating around outside the US all of a sudden returned 'home'.
You could, however, control prices if you controlled 5% of Bitcoin, which you could cash out in USD or EUR.
There is no alternative to USD or EUR - at least not one that is widely accepted.
There IS an alternative to Bitcoin
Funny story. Although the UK has one currency, Northern Ireland and Scotland have different designs for banknotes compared to England & Wales (and too each other).
In December 2004, approximately 10% of the cash (~£26mil) in circulation in Northern Ireland was stolen. In response the bank recalled and reissued all the notes, to prevent the theives being able to use them.
Not full story. Just snippet.
Full story (HN Sub): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609708
Direct: http://www.economist.com/news/briefings/21698061-craig-steve...
Mind you, the card to find someone using six degrees of separation is also called Satoshi!
You don't go to The Economist when you want hard hitting investigative journalism - you go The Economist when you need investor money.
Well, the trust could create a new address, and send btc to itself. This above all makes me not believe him.
When he talks to tech, he uses legalbabble bamboozle.
Even if he didn't want to transfer any original BTC pre-news-release, they could have coordinated for him to transfer 1 BTC from an early block to some charity at the time of reveal.
If he were to sell the coins now, he might incur a capital gains tax, depending on where he lives.
He seems to be owning up to it in order to protect others but I think he has no idea what he is getting into. They mention that his house was raided a couple of years ago but I guess that didn't phase him.