Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof
drcraigwright.net
drcraigwright.net
Purposely release 'proof' you know could be quickly refuted. Get the papers covering you with lots of photos and unnecessary blurb about companies you have been involved in. Drag the whole ordeal out over a week or two. Would come across as a complete loony, attention seeker in the tech community no? Quickly forgotten about and dismissed as Satoshi for a long time.
Do note! I do not imagine this is the case, but wouldn't it be great if it was?
If the intent is to escape authorities and supervillains, this fails as well. They don't tend to discredit things without an actual investigation, which will reveal the ruse.
Of course this conspiracy has a low prior probability due to it's complexity, but it does explain why the inventor of bitcoin would be 1) taking of screenshots of buggy code in notepad, 2) using factorial notation to enumerate combinatorics of bitstrings, and 3) being so generally dislikable.
Of course, if you are holding a large chunk of the initial coins, this is exactly what you want. In addition, there are always lots of people willing to fall for pyramid schemes, so it's good to bootstrap adoption.
Once Bitcoin finishes being "mined out", we'll see if it has any value. I suspect that answer is "not".
1) If Wright meets them, they will accept he is Satoshi 2) If Wright doesn't, then they will not
A great exercise in avoiding the moving of goalposts, by setting a clear expectation ahead of time.
Moving the coin and giving an unambiguous explanation of his so-far confusing 'reveal' would do it for me.
If Wright can provide signatures or transactions for the original block, he will be accepted as someone special, if not necessarily Satoshi. If he can't, he certainly won't be accepted.
If he can do that, then it comes down to deciding how he came by those private keys. It's certainly good to pre-register standards, but it's also a really hard question; Wright gave no indication of what evidence types he'll be using, so it's hard to pre-judge every sort of evidence he might offer.
My one other expectation would be that he would explain why the "signature" that got him onto BBC wasn't what he claimed it was. If he is Satoshi, it's a damned odd thing to use a faked signature for his basic proof.
Just like Charlie Lee did for Litecoin here: https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/727157971428331520 (he did it to show just how easy and provable it is)
Anything less and I have to question it or call bullshit. Current state is complete bullshit.
Moving coin from early blocks is not nearly as good. Bitcoin was publicized early on a few mailing lists so it'd be entirely possible he's just an early user trying to game himself up as the creator. Statistical evidence combined with moving early coin could be semi-convincing, but still not as simple and absolute as a single signature using the pubkey in the genesis block. Proving this is dead easy and that signature is the on/off bit for me.
Heck what if the real Satoshi lost that key, how would he make us believe him if he were to step out of the shadows?
"Satoshi's identity is unknowable" would be a more accurate description of that scenario that "Satoshi is dead".
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hnbli/did_someone...
a) A message identifying himself signed with a key from one of the original blocks.
b) Testimony of one of the early BTC people who interacted with him that he is the same person.
a alone would mean he could have otherwise acquired the keys, b makes this unlikely. b has been provided, but it is insufficient without a.
AAMOF, in yesterdays post, he talked about crypto, but he did not claim it to be proof for anything. Today he is announcing proof for the next days. We'll see...
In the event, such proof is not merely absent but has been shown to be falsified, which is both dispositive of bad faith on Wright's part, and totally in keeping with his own reputation. He's a con man. This is a con. What more do you need, a couple stone tablets and a mountaintop?
No he has appeared in person and confirmed the story.
If the goal is to convince people that he is Satoshi, and he really was Satoshi, this would never be his best choice of action. Given that goal, what conceivable reason is there to delay this simple action?
The most probable conclusion is pretty simple. I'll cop to hedging a bit with "probable", but in the event that this claim turns out to be true, it would be fair to ask questions about why on Earth this was considered to be the correct way to prove the claim.
Or he could be a lying douchebag who's assuming that he will be associated with Satoshi in the general public consciousness after the media gets bored of the story and expects to profit from that.
I have to admit, it would be awesome to see this as an elaborate way to get send a "fuck you" to all the people that accused him of fraud initially, when he claims we was trying to just lay low and let it pass. It would be the most elaborate trolling ever carried out.
Then, as Satoshi, who is the founder of BitCoin and owner of quite a lot of them, who must be quite intelligent to be able to have created the system in the first place, he must also be quite colossally stupid and bereft of self-interest to not realize that proving the founder of BitCoin deliberately generated that much drama is likely to significantly negatively affect his substantial BitCoin holding by making a lot of people reassess the stability of BitCoin if the creator is suddenly proved to be this drama-prone.
We must also hypothesize a very rapid flip between someone who has successfully hidden the identity for this many years, the very definition of Minimum Drama, suddenly flipping to Maximum Drama.
It's not an impossible theory... which I mean, it's not impossible, and should it prove to be true, I won't apologize for this analysis because I think it'll still hold.... but it's an awfully precise one.
He has a claim that would take five minutes to conclusively prove, but he keeps spinning it out.
Regardless of whether his claims are true or not, this portion seems self evident. People have too much invested emotionally in the outcome of this, for some reason, to allow this to be settled easily. One only needs to look at some of the discussions regarding this on HN to see people pointing at a single piece of evidence that can be interpreted multiple ways to make absolutist claims about this subject.
> This could all be easily settled - no faith required.
My point is that I think there will be some people, far more than we should be comfortable with, which at this point have invested themselves so much emotionally in the outcome, that no proof will be enough. There's always some possible explanation, no matter how outlandish.
It is the context of the "sociological event" that I refer to, not the discussion about the discussion that you seem to have in mind.
> There's always some possible explanation, no matter how outlandish.
You are describing the satisfiability problem, where a lot of contrived problems are obviously impossible to satisfy. That isn't emotionally driven goalpost moving, that is a strict adherence to reason.
Then let me clarify my intent. That "for some there is no burden of proof high enough, no evidence that cannot be dismissed as fabrication or manipulation." see,s self evident from my experience in seeing how people are treating this discussion, and the "evidence" being put out to support or discredit any specific claim, not just of Craig Wright, but of those just putting forth possible explanations for his reasoning for his actions, in cased presupposing him as both a fraud and as Satoshi. I think this has less to do with it being about a cryptographic system than it does with people really liking the mystery, and wanting to hold onto their belief in it.
> You are describing the satisfiability problem, where a lot of contrived problems are obviously impossible to satisfy. That isn't emotionally driven goalpost moving, that is a strict adherence to reason.
I wouldn't call the belief the moon landing was faked a strict adherence to reason, and I think the same underlying motivations are at play. This will play out, and the vast majority of people will come to the same belief, but I believe, through what I've witnessed so far, that there will be a core the refuses to let go of some of the more outlandish possibilities.
I'm not saying at all that this is indicative that Dr. Wright is Satoshi, but IMO it's definitely interesting.
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor...
which at one point (probably) belonged to Satoshi, but by September 2014 (almost certainly) belonged to someone else. The account was only used three times before that, in February 2009, to write a post about Bitcoin and two replies. It's certainly possible that if one non-Satoshi person gained access to the account between 2009 and 2014, multiple people could have, and that the person who sent the March 2014 message was just an unrelated kindhearted person who wanted the paparazzi to stop bothering Dorian Nakamoto.
later:
> You should be sceptical. You should question. I would.
So he's saying people are being too skeptical, and then he says people should be skeptical. This guy really has no idea what he's talking about. There's no way he's Satoshi, he reads like a con-artist.
"Soon, I will provide proof" sounds religious, not factual.
Having people think you invented bitcoin can be quite valuable.
"I posted this detailed analysis describing a likely motivation for Craig needing to "prove" he is Satoshi. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w9xec/just_think_... The short version is that he made fictional investments in a company by claiming to have transferred his personal "interest" in $29m of bitcoin to the target company. (I.e. no blockchain transfer, just a legal document claiming to transfer that amount of bitcoin.) He then claimed substantial cash R&D credits from those transactions. Australian taxation office (ATO) began investigating. He has paperwork showing the transactions, but knows that ATO might dig around and want to see verification that he truly owned $32m of bitcoin. To cover that, he claims he put all his bitcoin in a trust, where the trustee was another early bitcoiner. Unfortunately, that friend has now passed away, and the private keys are lost. In order for the BS to be even vaguely plausible, he needs to show that he originally had access to $32m of bitcoin. This is why he pretends to be Satoshi."