Validating Satoshi (Or Not)
dankaminsky.com
dankaminsky.com
1. Craig Wright is telling the truth, but has released a bad proof to misdirect everyone into believing he is not Satoshi. Maybe he's just having a laugh.
2. Craig Wright is lying.
Even if he's not Satoshi, he seems smart enough to know he wouldn't get away with releasing shoddy proofs. Perhaps he thought the mainstream media would say "Craig Wright invented Bitcoin" and anyone that disagreed would be called a conspiracy nut.
Perhaps this was a kind of pump-and-dump where he expected the price to change significantly and make a killing out of doing it. He doesn't care what people think of him if he's just made $20 million. Could it have anything to do with his ongoing legal troubles with the tax authorities in Australia?
At this stage, I'm seeing plenty of people saying "Here's why Craig Wright isn't Satoshi" and that's interesting and useful. But I haven't seen anyone establish why Craig Wright would be lying.
Also, it's interesting that "The Real Satoshi" has not posted something saying he's not Craig Wright, as we have seen with previous "exposés".
If you don't understand, I'm actually in possession of 400 million dollars bound to a trust, not available to me until 2020, but if you send me your bank details and help me in current affairs I promise I'll compensate you with the 10 percent of the whole sum.
I'm also famous, maybe they'll even get me a Nobel prize, I'm playing I'm hard to get, anyway, and you can be too if you confirm that I proved to you too I'm the one who I claim to be. Think about it, there will be even a Hollywood movie about us. For the start, see I've already agreed for more exclusives.
And oh, I can help your case for introducing bigger blocks to Bitcoin. There's going to be this nice conference in NY where you can present your argument exactly on the first day of my "big announcement."
From the Economist's article:
"About six months ago, before he was publicly outed in the technology press, he approached Andrew O’Hagan, a Scottish novelist who wrote an “unauthorised autobiography” of Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks. Since then the author, whose most recent novel, “The Illuminations”, was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, has had complete access to Mr Wright and his family, as well as to his research and business colleagues. Mr O’Hagan is writing a long article for the London Review of Books on Mr Wright and “his journey towards revealing his work.” (Mr O’Hagan, too, has come to be convinced that Mr Wright is Mr Nakamoto.)"
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2016/05/01/andrew-ohagan/the-search-for...
"Online exclusive · 1 May 2016: The full, long-form account will be published here later this month." "In a world exclusive for the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan spent many months with Craig Wright, the man responsible for what Bill Gates has called ‘the technical tour de force of this generation’."
As I've already said in another comment, I can't wait reading O’Hagan's story. He should publish it even if he understands that he'll thus show how credulous he was.
Also read about big-blockians, the conference in NY that started exactly yesterday etc.
https://cp4space.wordpress.com/2016/05/02/is-craig-wright/
http://gizmodo.com/gavin-andresen-i-was-not-hacked-and-i-bel...
My best guess is that he thought 99% of people would take what he said at face value, and the other 1% would be ignored as nutters, but he judged it wrong.
I guess another alternative is that this is some kind of long-play by the Bitcoin Foundation. They need to establish who Satoshi is for the general public in order for Bitcoin to gain further credibility, but since the real Satoshi won't come forward, they have agreed to put up Craig Wright. They can't put forward the real proof everyone is demanding, but they're hoping that enough good PR will make it widely believed. However, even then, it would only take one bit of evidence from the real Satoshi to prove it wasn't Craig Wright so even this theory doesn't seem very good.
He is just not a teenager but he is absolutely attention-seeking. Hint: don't believe the statements he gave, do your own research. He has a history of doing exactly the kind of tricks he did this time again.
Edit (I can't post new posts):
An answer to your next comment where you write "he was clearly making good money out of being an IT consultant:"
As far as I understand, the biggest money he tried to make was to get millions from Australia as tax returns for the bitcoin transactions between the companies he made.
Far from having a history of a "clean IT consultant."
> the details of how he convinced some of the leading Bitcoin devs and major journalists will be fascinating.
The expectation of fascination can also be nicely sold.
One nice detail is already for all of us to see, on his page and Dan Kaminsky explains it in the title post.
I also need less than a minute to send to you anything you want "from the e-mail" "satoshi@vistamail.com" I don't understand why you'd refer to such an e-mail as an argument for anything.
But, still, he was clearly making good money out of being an IT consultant. How's he going to do that now? I believe more people thought he was Satoshi after the Wired article than believe it today. So he has a lot to lose.
I'm not saying he is Satoshi, but I am being sceptical of the sceptics claims. A lot about Craig Wright doesn't add up. Perhaps he is just the Frank Abagnale Jr of our age, but even then, the details of how he convinced some of the leading Bitcoin devs and major journalists will be fascinating.
Why should we waste any time to consider whether he is or isn't the right person? The situation did not change from 2 days ago apart from him being more of an ass.
I believe it's worth wasting my time because two of the leading people involved in Bitcoin, as well as two leading news organisations, have all reported on this so it's interesting.
When I asked "why would he do this?" it was a genuine question, and I think you've given some good answers.
So how did he manage to fool Gavin Andresen and Jon Matonis? Again, serious question.
Neither from them claims to be in possession of any digital proof, which would be a trivial and the only reasonable way to show that somebody actually has an access to any of Satoshi's keys.
And we, the general public, even have an access to two examples of something that was supposed to be a digital proof but it surely isn't, and that something was presented in a way to make the chance for verification as small (or the process slow) as possible (first example: the fake "Satoshi" PGP message, second case: the Sartre blog post). We see that the author is quite capable of presenting something as something that it isn't.
This is close to my theory. He thought he would get the media on his side, to write articles about how he is Satoshi, and then it would go into Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia cares about what journalists say, not some bitcoin basement guy who can mathematically prove he's lying.
Well that explains everything.
The guy in question apparently makes a living creating faux companies and filling fraudulent tax returns in Australia, it doesn't sound like he cares of his reputation that much.
All I'm saying is people are looking for some rational master plan, perhaps there isn't one. Maybe this lie just snowballed out of control.
EDIT: I didn't attempt to explain why the establishment/media would like to enshrine his narrative. They really like having a face to their enemies, someone they can ad-hominem and quote out of context to support the global finance agenda.
AFAIK that's only happened once, in the Dorian case. In that case, the media and papparazzos were hounding a frail old man who was clearly very uncomfortable with the whole thing.
Craig Wright seems to just love being in the spotlight. So there's no reason to deny the claims for empathic reasons. It would suck for the real Satoshi to create an expectation that he'll have to individually refute all these claims, I imagine he has other things to do.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/10/bitcoin-c...
Again, no proof that the real Satoshi posted this (as mentioned in the article) so I realise we're dealing with many layers of hypotheticals.
And no, I'm not speculating.
I can't very well cite sources as I'd normally be the one being cited.
I'm sceptical because somebody on Reddit claimed to have sent the Dorian message over Telnet.
That's a (easily verifiable) sample of the DB that was taken during the latest bitcointalk hack, it is not publicly available on the internet.
If despite a preponderance of supporting public evidence(both of satoshi hack and the GMX direct object reference bug), you assume that everyone is lying, you'll have a very hard time in life.
> How can I cite you in conversations or decisions in the future?
I don't know, nor do I particularly care. Evaluating the information and fact checking is something that you need to do, I can't possibly fact check myself for you.
>If no one can use the information you provide in any meaningful way, what is the point of sharing the information in the first place?
If you actually cared about the information, I'd imagine that you'd be trying to verify it instead of writing this post.
1. There is not a preponderance of public evidence supporting your claim.
2. I am not assuming you're lying, I'm simply pointing out what you've said is useless.
3. You can fact check yourself, in fact many people do it to themselves every day.
4. Probing the source of information for verification is precisely what I am doing right now.
If you don't care about people believing what you wrote, then you didn't write it to convey information. Maybe you wrote it to feel good about yourself?
There is unquestionably a preponderance of public evidence regarding satoshis email compromise.
>2. I am not assuming you're lying, I'm simply pointing out what you've said is useless.
If you assume that I am lying, it is.
>3. You can fact check yourself, in fact many people do it to themselves every day.
I think you should read that part of my comment again.
>4. Probing the source of information for verification is precisely what I am doing right now.
That's fair, but I think you're taking the wrong approach. There's just not much I could realistically do to prove this.
However, I'd suggest contacting Roger Ver. They may be able to shed some light on the topic, and probably (unlike me) wouldn't have a problem with incriminating others.
> If you don't care about people believing what you wrote, then you didn't write it to convey information
I do care about people believing what I wrote, but if you assume that I am being intentionally deceitful there's not much I can do to convince you. What proof could I possibly post that couldn't be forged? My entire life isn't recorded in a blockchain.
I honestly don't believe your reaction here is particularly reasonable, it would be if my comment had contained something that was difficult to believe for one reason or the other, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
>Maybe you wrote it to feel good about yourself?
I wrote it to confirm what TazeTSchnitzel seemed to be implying.
Perhaps Wright is gambling that Satoshi is dead (for whatever reason, foul play or not). The purpose of his previous (original) Satoshi scam was to ascertain that nobody has access to Satoshi's private keys.
Wright can't get Satoshi's bitcoins, but presumably if people think he is Satoshi, this would help him with his other tax evasion scams he seems to be involved in. Perhaps it doesn't even matter if the tech community immediately realised that he is lying, all he needs is some reasonable belief in the other laypeople he is scamming.
Gavin might have been bought, or Gavin knows that Satoshi is dead, and Wright threatened Gavin, pretending he was the one who killed Satoshi.
Satoshi and Wright were involved on Bitcoin from the beginning. Satoshi did the tech, Wright did the marketing. It starts off as just another of Wright's wacky business scams, but actually takes off. Satoshi dies, Wright takes advantage by telling everyone he's Satoshi, but can't actually get Satoshi's coins.
We have stories of Wright orchestrating complex staged technology theatre which involves hijacking DNS on a wifi network he controls and forcing an unaltered Electrum client on a clean laptop to connect to bitcoin nodes that he controls to fake the signature verification for Gavin. We're talking about 2 or 3 different MITM attacks necessary to pull off such a stunt, in front of people who obviously understand Bitcoin and are skeptical because of the December story.
I just think the speculation on possible stories for what really happened is getting a little out of hand.
Somebody develops a brand new technology which has wide-ranging implications, from drug enforcement to currency control (and well beyond). Within a few years it's worth billions. But it's developed by somebody with a Japanese pseudonym. Multiple people are unmasked and then debunked as the inventor. Then a serial dodgy geezer, who was previously unasked and debunked, says they are in fact the inventor - but it turns out their evidence is meaningless.
It's the closest thing we have in real life to "Who is Batman?" so of course we're all fascinated.
In short, if you are Satoshi, what's the point of deceiving everyone into thinking you aren't when the only reason people think you are is because you chose to say so?
If I were disrupting the banking industry, I wouldn't be too eager to forgo anonymity either. That's a lot of money that stands to be lost for some already very rich people.
The more immediate explanation was probably "he or she or they knew the first use was going to be facilitating illegal transactions and didn't want to be associated."
This is a quintessential example of bitcoin hyperbole. Please offer an example of how bitcoin is disrupting the banking industry.
Perhaps Wright paid somebody to develop the Blockchain technology. Perhaps he developed it himself and then lost the original key, assuming the project was worth nothing. Perhaps he was one of a group of people, and that group has now decided to nominate him as the frontman for the technology, perceiving that the whole Satoshi thing is holding back its development.
> 3. He probably would have gotten away with it if the signature itself wasn’t googlable by Redditors.
Did he think this wouldn't happen? He got the hash in some way, did he think nobody else would be able to find it?
He looks like a conman, but a clever one; this is very weak so far... except if there is another move in the works that we don't know yet.
Hell, right now he's the only person in any of the page title results for q=bitcoin.
He presumably doesn't care about scamming the inner circle of Bitcoin, but does care about building up the façade of a reputation in order to scam other people.
Exactly. He has promised to release more evidence, and for all we know, by this time next week there will be incontrovertible evidence that he is Satoshi beyond all reasonable doubt.
Maybe he's releasing the evidence in a trickle because he's loving the attention, and he has some PR team advising him this is the best way to get it. Maybe he's doing it because he doesn't give a f* and enjoys reading about how "he's not the real Satoshi" and then he says "here you go, it's me". Of course, maybe he's not the real Satoshi.
I think, however, that this would have given him at most an additional 48 hours before discovery.
If your goal is to eventually start spending the large quantity of initially-mined Bitcoins, it seems like the first step would be to ensure that they're never traced back to you, especially if you don't want to pay taxes on the proceeds. And getting crossed off the list of potential Satoshis is a good first step.
I am not expecting Le Roux to be the true creator of TrueCrypt but this seems to be a pretty solid link between Le Roux and TrueCrypt.
Now about Wright, he can't even write a proper blog post with proper working scripts about cryptography...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/03/bitcoin_craig_wright...
Is it satire or real Craig Wright?