Craig Wright's signature is worthless
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Wright has presented a bunch of bs, no definite proof, and has seemingly not wanted to sign recent or new messages with his PGP key. For all intents and purposes, he's got zero credibility.
Then Gavin comes along. A person who worked with Satoshi the longest, communicated with him the most, led the project in practice for years, is a computer scientist and well balanced guy overal. He's not perfect but he's got a lot of credibility in the community and for good reason. And he spoke personally with Wright, and is completely convinced, both by the things he heard on a personal level, as well as proofs, neither of which he disclosed.
To me that's just bizarre. It's like Trump saying he'd be a great president and Obama meeting with him and saying he's the real deal, it'd just wouldn't happen.
Gavin apparently knows stuff we don't, and apparently it's proof, and apparently at the same time Wright chose not to go with that but to show a lesser proof which turned out to be bs. What in the world is going on?
edit: possible explanation, although I find it unlikely: Gavin was hacked. It's not my concern, but the core devs removed his commit access as a precaution which I think is sensible, so they're concerned Gavin was hacked.
The reason I don't this it's likely Gavin was hacked is because there was no play here. i.e. we didn't see Wright e.g. say 'I'm Satoshi, and I'm going to sell all my coins', thereby causing panic that hundreds of millions of bitcoins flood the market and crash the price, allowing someone (him/hacker) to buy cheap coins, get uncovered, and sell when the price reaches normality again. They'd easily make millions. But that didn't happen. And it should have by now, because within 24 hours (or realistically, an hour) a hacked Gavin would phone up other core devs and spread the message he was hacked, wasting the window of opportunity of the scam. So the fact we're not seeing a play here means there was no reason to hack him (or squander a hack), unless it was all set up as a big joke which doesn't look sensible either.
https://twitter.com/petertoddbtc/status/727078284345917441
> FYI, @gavinandresen's commit access just got removed - Core team members are concerned that he may have been hacked. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609707
"@Alex_Amsel @petertoddbtc @gavinandresen Nobody thinks to just pick up the phone in this space."
Most often than not, if the story is too convulated then the simple alternative offers the truth. Gavin is on it. I wasn't sure of it but since they played "His computer was hacked" card instead of "Sorry I messed up" then yeah there is something fishy here.
Seriously, what's the primary source for thinking
1. Gavin was hacked, or
2. Gavin's access has been removed or modified?
Wright could very easily faked a demonstration on his own machine.
Last time, when Andy Greenberg (who ought to have known better, and in some ways looked like he did) bought the Wright story, I remember thinking maybe he did it for ideological reasons. I.e, he might know Wright isn't Satoshi, but be happy for attention thrown that way, because he thinks the real Satoshi deserves to be shielded.
As I see it, the strongest evidence by far is still for Nick Szabo, and I don't think I'm the only one who has come to that conclusion after looking into it.
Right, it's very easy to fool a specific person, especially a smart person who thinks they cannot be fooled.
The proof is complex enough for only the technical community to be able to catch / disprove, but not for much of the mainstream media, which will be forming a general opinion on who Wright is and what this means for Bitcoin.
This helps explain why Andresen is so certain, because he has seen the real proof and is going to "let him decide how much of that story he shares with the world" [0]
It would happen if Gavin was Satoshi. Gavin attempts to permanently deflect things on to a smooth talking conman with liquidity problems to maintain his privacy.
Hell, he could even give Wright some of the bitcoins as payment for the cover.
==
Craig signed a message that I chose ("Gavin's favorite number is eleven. CSW" if I recall correctly) using the private key from block number 1.
That signature was copied on to a clean usb stick I brought with me to London, and then validated on a brand-new laptop with a freshly downloaded copy of electrum.
I was not allowed to keep the message or laptop (fear it would leak before Official Announcement).
I don't have an explanation for the funky OpenSSL procedure in his blog post.
==
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4hfyyo/gavin_can_you_p...
The use of the "brand new laptop" and the fact it was quickly removed really sounds like a con man trick. It sounds like an Orbo demonstration.
But there should now be no reason this signed message can't be published.
When Bitcoin was publicly released, only the genesis block existed, so every block after that point could have been mined by anyone. Craig has already claimed he was an active miner in the early days, and there's a 5 day gap between the timestamps of block #0 and block #1.
My pet theories: If Wright is Satoshi and wants to hide the fact, a good way to do that is to come off as a fraud
If Wright is not Satoshi but knows who Satoshi is, and wants to protect him, why not just keep quiet? Was someone actually getting close to uncovering the identity and Wright is just trying to muddle the waters?
If Wright is not Satoshi and is actually trying to get people to believe that he is, what would he gain by it?
Learning the identity of someone with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin seems like the obvious one.
Pretending to wealth is a con probably as old as money itself. Just imagine: you convince a lot of people that you're a billionaire who's lost your wallet. What can you get out of those people just by the promise you're good for it?
Getting the officially stated opinion of the project's founder and rightful BDFL on controversial issues like blocksize.
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