Attempting (Failed) Verification of the Wright Signature | Hacker News Reader

Attempting (Failed) Verification of the Wright Signature

github.com

118 pointsjoeyspn26 comments

The non-experts did not ask to see things which would be hard for non-Satoshi to provide -- they were at the mercy of the charlatan (paging James Randi, James Randi to the courtesy phone please).

I'm mystified as to how this got past Andresen, though.

I think Randi would be the first to tell us that the skills required to detect a good conman are quite different from skills in technical fields.

http://www.livescience.com/9066-magician-scientists-assume-i...

I bet Andresen simply got tricked, and I think he should not feel to ashamed about it (although he will) -- most of us would have fallen for it.

Nope. There is no way I would've bought into that "you can't keep the evidence" bullshit, I don't care if you're the Pope.

I think Gavin maybe got a little starry eyed thinking he was talking to the bitcoin god himself and let his guard down. What a shame.

I read it as a successful social engineering by Wright. If you have been convinced by Wright before the "proof" took place(by whatever seemingly convincing arguments or trick), it is easier to be taken off guard.

Indeed

If there's one thing you can fault Gavin for, it's maybe being too kind and trusting of others in a particularly hostile, dog-eat-dog tech space (Bitcoin).

I agree, but look at what Andresen said:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4hfyyo/gavin_can_you_p...

>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).

It's quite suspect he wouldn't be allowed to keep the message, and that no public message and signature has been produced. But assuming he's not lying, this doesn't really seem like a scenario where he could be easily tricked.

My best guess is that Gavin has been duped by a sleight of hand (like a magician would use) by Craig.

My best guess, based on what I've read so far, is this:

- Gavin supplied his own text for the message.

- Craig faked running "sha256sum" on this message on his own laptop. The real "sha256sum" program could have been overwritten with a fake program that always output the same "hash". This is the "magic trick": the "hash" is attacker-controlled, and doesn't actually correspond to Gavin's message. Rather, the hash corresponds to an old message on the block chain - see, e.g., https://gist.github.com/ryancdotorg/893815f426f181d838c1b44a...

- Then from there, presto. The signature validates (and can be validated on Gavin's clean laptop) - because it's a real Satoshi signature, from the public blockchain years ago. But what it validates against is a "fake" hash - that Gavin thinks corresponds to his own message, but actually doesn't.

Easy to see how that would be a very, very convincing demonstration, after some social engineering. But all sleight of hand.

This is (I believe) why Craig has all this blurb up on https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/02/validating-satoshi-or-not... - it's to hide the trick, which is that he doesn't give us the file "Spartre". He supplies only a (presumably faked) screenshot of sha256sum against this file. Making you type in the hash by hand is misdirection, so you don't realise that you don't have the original file.

Thank you. The part I couldn't understand is how Gavin could verify the signature without retaining the message. But your explanation (with the hash) makes perfect sense.

Wright supplied all the inputs. Amazing.

If my hunch is right, I feel quite sorry for Gavin for having being duped. It would have been very convincing. We're not all James Randi!

Definitely plausible. Gavin will have to elaborate more on the exact process to confirm or deny, though.

I am enjoying the spectacle and irony of the crypto-currency media being "hacked" by someone who barely understands the basics of the very thing that underpins the system itself.

One of the very few things that Bitcoin meaningfully has accomplished as an ecosystem is a world-readable repository of reasonably-well-attested-to-keys.

Yeah no shit.

I don't think anyone in the 'crypto-currency media' believes that this guy is Satoshi. The mainstream media that covers bitcoin seems to have been conned, though.

These variations on a "we found Satoshi for reals this time" story seems to be on a ~6 month cycle. It happens, it gets debunked, it fades, it happens again.

It's striking that they got burned by the same guy again though. Craig Wright came through as a fake Satoshi a bit over a year ago: http://hackingdistributed.com/2015/12/10/how-to-spot-satoshi...

lol +1 on the irony.

ecosystem-wise I think it's a bit too harsh :) Bitcoin's p2p network does work (not without hiccups of course) - if I wanted to I could send btc to someone in say Brazil or Malaysia and it WILL work after all. And in some respects it will work smoother than trying to send fiat there.

You can use western union to send money all around the world without anyone having any accounts on a blockchain or any accounts in an exchange necessary to turn bitcoin into fiat that can actually use in the destination country.

I would say it is cheaper to send bitcoin, and maybe smoother for two regular users of bitcoin (and who shop online at bitcoin accepting businesses). However, that description applying to any two people is extraordinarily rare.

It is still definitely smoother, but more expensive, to send fiat. The infrastructure is already in place.

I'm not saying bitcoins ecosystem is more evolved than fiat, merely pointing out that it does exist beyond the 'key database' factor as it does allow transfer of value between counterparties around the world.

Whether the actual experience of that transfer is 'better' than fiat (WU, Swift, etc) is a different story and yes that would depend on the parties involved.

> I would say it is cheaper to send bitcoin, and maybe smoother for two regular users of bitcoin (and who shop online at bitcoin accepting businesses).

In many places it's easier to sign up for a Bitcoin exchange from your couch than to drive to Western Union. I can personally vouch for the US, Canada, and Thailand, where I've had experience with it.

This is hard to believe but Craig Wright might actually have posted the hack in his blog announcement...

From one of the reply to Gavinandressen:

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4hfyyo/gavin_can_you_p...

Why would you be so obvious as to misspell "signature", rather than replace one of the letters with an identical-looking high-Unicode alternative?

If this is a honest mistake, at the very least, it shows some lack of professionalism or proof reading. And it should not be the code that have been used, because it should not work. Kinda weird when you are supposed to give step by step instructions.

Because you didn't know such things existed?

I'm inclined to think this whole thing is a con, but I'm unsure if bash variable is a part of it, or just a mistake. But if it is a con, then we can't assume the person perpetrating it has the same level of technical mastery as we do.

Given how easy it would be to prove that it's not a con, I'm surprised how anyone is buying any of this, really.

All Wright has to do is sign today's headlines with the genesis key and publish the signature, and that's it. No other speculation or "convincing of a core developer" needed.

>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.

http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi

Probably a bit of confirmation bias there.

From TFA:

You'll have to visually compare this against Wright's screenshots, but it matches. If this sounds fishy to you, well, you're right. Also fishy: making people hand-edit hex values to verify trivial parts of this evidence chain.

To say that this is "fishy" is an understatement. To me it's proof enough that the man is a total fraud.

I really don't understand how these media outlets were fooled for so long when it took Redditors familiar with the subject ~6 hours to see right through it.

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