He Says He Invented Bitcoin and Is Suing Those Who Doubt Him | Hacker News Reader

He Says He Invented Bitcoin and Is Suing Those Who Doubt Him

bloomberg.com

70 pointspseudolus87 comments

It would be so easy. If CSW signed a message with Satoshi's private key, it would be enough to prove that he is Satoshi (or at least had access to Satoshi in a way nobody else had).

But no, he's going the legal route for some strange reasons and it doesn't seem he's convincing the judge.

I have no clue what he intends to do. Maybe he got so into his role that he really believes now to be Satoshi?

He did demonstrate signing a message with Satoshi's private key. Except it was an elaborate trick involving an old signature lifted from a Bitcoin block mined in 2009[1].

[1] https://www.ccn.com/technical-proof-craig-wright-not-satoshi...

Jesus christ, that's outright fraud.

he also modified his blog post from 2008 to insert a reference to some cryptocurrency paper he's working on, compare content of last paragraph in "Tonight" post here (captured jun 2nd 2014):

https://web.archive.org/web/20140602022658/http://gse-compli...

and here (captured nov 22nd 2015):

https://web.archive.org/web/20151122172143/http://gse-compli...

"I have a bottle of wine (a bottle of well aged Penfolds Cabernet Sauvignon (1995 vintage). How to put it, Plum red. with a nose of tobacco leaf, cedar and capsicum. A light vanilla with a slight aftertaste. The tannins are mild and it is drinking well now. I do not see much more time for this wine. It is at to just past its peak and needs to be drunk now).

I have a mixed vegetable lassangne with a rich capisum sauce and nutmeg bechmel."

The fact that he needs to use capsicum (he even misspells it) instead of the colloquial word, pepper, shows what an insufferable twat this dude is.

As an ex chef, I gotta point out capsicum is the native word in some English countries :-)

Also as a chef anyone who uses a nutmeg bech is an insufferable twat

Edit: fat thumbs :-p

it may be native but is it colloquial?

Yes, it completely is for Australians.

In Australia where Craig Wright is from, capsicum is the colloquial word for what you call peppers.

So is the backdated blog posts edited after the fact (thank you internet archive for proving that). So was the fake PGP key, again backdated and created with a version that didn't even exist back when it was dated. Craig Wright is an incredibly transparent fraudster. No one with even an ounce of intelligence believes his claims are legitimate unless it suits their goals.

There are plenty of intelligent people who are ignorant of cryptography. Including many with power in the judicial system.

Fraud? It's bitcoin man. There's no concept of fraud. Or are you implying that there should be some sort of regulating body that would enforce generally accepted fraudulent behavior?

In the same way that cryptography and distributed ledgers create a way to validate property ownership without a central authority, signed messages provide a way to validate identity without the need for courts. There is definitely a framework for identifying truth versus fraud using solely cryptography. I don't understand your point.

His point is that cryptocurrency is the wild west. Claiming to be someone you're not is, unless you're actually executing identity theft by e.g. taking out loans on someone else's name, is not illegal AFAIK.

I'm not sure what he's trying to achieve, in any case. It's not like the title "you are Satoshi" will do much. You become a key player in the crypto industry by merit, not so much by name.

> But no, he's going the legal route for some strange reasons and it doesn't seem he's convincing the judge.

While most of the HN crowd, and fortunately also the judge, won’t be fooled I am sure that there are a lot of people in the world who don’t understand enough about cryptography, who are willing to buy the idea that this guy invented Bitcoin.

This. I've seen him being invited to otherwise technically well positioned events/conferences. Sad.

My cynical guess is that he doesn’t have the private key, but wants to use legal methods (court cases, registering copyrights for documents, etc) as a means of establishing himself as Satoshi.

Once established he’ll launch a court case requiring a hard fork of the blockchain to “recover” Satoshi’s coins, because they are after all his, and profit ... assuming he doesn’t crack the truecrypt password first.

Yah, from the man himself [1]:

"""You don’t sign a message to prove. Code is not law. Code does not replace law."""

[1] https://news.trijo.co/news/the-unedited-trijo-news-interview...

Except he probably won't be able to create a hard fork; if my understanding of crypto / bitcoin is correct, he needs a majority of miners to go with it, and given that the Bitcoin is international that's going to be very difficult.

Technically, he has been able to create a hard fork without a majority of miners.

You don't need a majority of miners to create a hard fork, you just need any amount. What you need a majority for is to get the chain to adopt your version of history without hard-forking.

one interesting theory i've heard recently is that he and gavin (the guy satoshi handed over the project maintenance to before disappearing) know that satoshi is dead and use that fact (that nobody will ever be able to sign anything or transfer any funds from satoshi's wallets) to their advantage.

not sure what is gavin getting out of it but csw appears to behave as professional conman.

i reckon it is too coincidental that there was a satoshi nakamoto a few blocks away from hal finney. and satoshi was that guy's middle name. i think they both agreed to keep the secret til the end.

Too bad this piece doesn't link to the article containing hard evidence of numerous frauds:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/op-ed-how-many-wrongs-m...

Imagine how easy it would be to prove his claim of being Satoshi: a signed message using the private key from the genesis block or any of the first few dozen blocks.

After all, he did say he would provide cryptographic proof. Instead what he produced was technobabble designed to mislead the ill-informed.

So instead, this performance artist goes around suing people for pointing out the obvious truth.

For the technically minded, here's one summary of one of Wright's signature frauds:

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/81115/if-someone...

Addition: goes around suing people for pointing out the obvious truth.. in the UK. Where the defendants have to prove he is not Satoshi, as opposed to the US where he would have to prove he is.

Nah. All the evidence points to it being me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5692317 :-)

You should sue him

No, that's what fake Satoshi would do. Real Satoshi wouldn't.

And how better to hide your identity than ruling yourself out as a fake?

If he sends me a bitcoin from one of Satoshi's wallets I'll believe him. 10 bitcoins and I'll believe him even more.

Meta: when did this clickbait formulation of headlines become the norm even for serious, reputable news?

I still find it grating, and avoid articles headlined this way.

I would assume it's when someone decided that KPI for news is clicks for headlines.

I wouldn't call Bloomberg reputable. They were the outlet that published the unfounded Chinese chip infiltration story.

I'm somewhat surprised that story wasn't investigated as securities fraud. I'm sure a lot of people stood to make a lot of money shorting supermicro. Anyone who knows more about this than me know why it is ok for Bloomberg to do that?

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emulex_hoax for an example of fabricated news causing massive changes to stock price.

1890?

Have you looked at old newspapers? Clickbait headlines are the opposite of what they did. They're designed so you can get a pretty damn good idea of what's going on by skimming the headlines and maybe first couple lines of each story.

Depends on the newspaper. Long before there were clicks, editors (driven by their publishers) strove to get more readers by coming up with headlines and stories and other elements (such as cartoons) that they couldn't find elsewhere.

In the United States sensationalistic headlines were part of the "Yellow Journalism" trend in the late 1800s - this is how Pulitzer and Hearst got their starts. Britain perfected the art of the tabloid headline, so much so that it exported some of its best writers to Australia and the United States, which is how Rupert Murdoch was able to expand.

Advertisers used similar techniques, leveraging current events and sensationalism to grab eyeballs and customers. A few years ago I found this example (https://www.digitalmediamachine.com/2016/11/a-history-of-cli..., scroll to the bottom) in a regional newspaper in western NY while doing genealogical research. It was from 1904.

The UK press has been doing clickbait headlines for a very long time, occaisionally raising it to the standard of an art form. I particularly like the Liverpool Echo's genius headline from the 1970's - "Super Cally Goes Ballistic, QPR Atrocious."

Is there something wrong with the title?

It's clickbait, because it's deliberately vague.

The natural human response is to to click through to find out who 'He' refers to, even if they have no other interest in the story.

Bloomberg could just as easily have written 'Craig Wright' instead.

I'm pretty sensitive to crappy headlines but I really don't think including the guy's name or not would make a huge difference here.

I think it's semantically incorrect. Pronouns like "he" are placeholders, simplifying the reference to a known object and avoiding cumbersome repetition. But without having any antecedent, the pronoun is left without any meaning at all.

The result is, as you say, a statement that serves only as an advertisement of sorts to click into the story, without carrying actual information.

>when did this clickbait formulation of headlines become the norm even for serious, reputable news?

When clicks and ad views became the target for news outlets.

"Man says he invented Bitcoin and is suing those who doubt him" is a perfectly 'traditional' headline.

I don't see a strong argument that changing "man" to "he" transforms this into a clickbait headline. More modern style of headline yes, but clickbait I don't see.

> when did this clickbait formulation of headlines become the norm even for serious, reputable news?

Before there were clicks to bait. The only thing that makes it not a traditional headline is the length, and “He” instead of “man”.

He's just a scam artist who wants media coverage to further his scams.

This is the truest thing in this comment section.

Australians don't use the word 'neat' and Satoshi did.

Satoshi was American

Creator of anarchist cryptographic money resorts to using the law against his enemies? hmmmmm...

I'm confused why somebody would claim to possess an immense fortune (Satoshi's blocks are currently worth ~$10B) without being able to verify and/or access that fortune.

Congrats. Now you have a huge target on your back. Watch your step and sleep with one eye open for the rest of your life.

But go try to borrow money, and the bank will ask, "Why don't you just... use some of your fortune."

> But go try to borrow money, and the bank will ask, "Why don't you just... use some of your fortune."

Actually banks are much more likely to lend you money the more money you have.

The ones with no money, they're the ones who have a hard time.

Yes, I get that. You're limited by the collateral you can put against the loan.

But they won't accept a pinky swear that you own the collateral. They want proof.

If only there were a way to cryptographically prove ownership of some of the early Bitcoins...

I'm not quite convinced that going to the courts with libel suits really follows the cypherpunk ethos.

Media keeps complimenting this guy as subtext - he's considered a super villain, or a brilliant scam artist. Which part of his playbook is impressive in any way?

Having the time and money to sue people.

Wasn't there some artical on hn earlier about how Paul le roux might have been the inventor? And this Craig guy having worked with him before?I think it got taken down, was that not legit?

One of the guys had a name a bit like satoshi and one of the guys had a name a bit like nakamoto. That's all I can remember.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20115607

I'm not sure if this is conspiracy though cause it was buried down pretty quickly

Can everyone just stop giving him attention?

Yes. This is very petty. I'm ignoring these threads from now on.

From all that I've read about the founding of Bitcoin, my guess would be that it was the guy in the wheelchair who died before bitcoin got really big. I forget his name, but he was involved early on in crypto, he was a white guy, not Japanese. Everything points towards the guy being dead.

Hal Finney!

https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988

https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1153096538 That guy was a real forward thinker-- just the other day there was a HN post addressing just that. Seems that even the original team knew BTC wasn't perfect...

He was an HNer, and explained he got into BTC early but he wasn't Satoshi, and didn't met Satoshi in person so he has no idea who Satoshi is.

The counter argument there is that if he had access to Satoshi's wallet in the last year of his life, why wouldn't he have cashed at least some of it out to provide for his family (and donate the rest to the ALS foundation which he spent a lot of energy raising money for)?

His family was getting attacked by a group of ransom seeking criminals the last years of his life who believed he had a substantial coin stash, so he kept a low profile and may have donated without telling anybody. He did write once he gave to his family as inheritance 'a lot of coins' without saying how much it was. It's unlikely he was Satoshi, the early code was full of security problems.

My money is on Paul Le Roux. He is a pragmatic programmer who wrote encryption software for Windows in the 90s and in the 2000s he had a real need to move money around outside the traditional systems. Bitcoin was scrappy windows software as well like E4M. A lot of academics, open source activists and hacker purists would never write their software for Windows. Le Roux's writing style is similar, his attitude, streak for innovation, and timeline all kind of fit for a possible Satoshi candidate. He also had a real motive to be anonymous and release the software anonymously unlike many other candidates.

Paul Le Roux is a promising candidate except for one thing: by 2009 he was running his crime empire branching in pretty much every direction possible.

Would he have had time to write the software and also kick back to play the part of Satoshi?

It would be interesting to compare the coding style in E4M and original BTC software.

PS. Fascinating series of articles on Paul Le Roux: https://magazine.atavist.com/the-mastermind

I think so. If you look at the total amount of code, his total emails and forum posts - there really isn't much. I wouldn't put it past him as a side project given his past. Also most of the code was done by the beginning of 2009 and he stopped posting at the end of 2010. It wasn't until 2012 he was arrested. Given that he was already wealthy and didn't need the attention - he had good reason to stay anonymous.

>it was the guy in the wheelchair who died before bitcoin got really big.

The problem with that guess is that the guy (Hal Finney) designed, implemented and deployed an alternative to Bitcoin, called Reusable Proof of Work. The alternative never gained traction, but was actively deployed for quite a few years (starting if I remember correctly before the start of Bitcoin and ending after Bitcoin had been deployed for a while).

"actively deployed": the design entailed at least one server with constant connectivity to the public internet, which of course entails at least some cost in hosting fees and some effort at monitoring things. The server ran a few thousand lines of C code written by Finney.

IIRC, English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defence, who once accused must prove they didn't defame, so many conmen throughout history have tried to use it to their advantage such as David Irving vs Penguin Books.

Im the real Satoshi, I won't prove it with a signature, check out my startup.

>> They said he gave a private demonstration of a special digital signature used by Satoshi Nakamoto.

Can someone explain what this "private demonstration of a special digital signature" was, exactly?

Ah yes. If you're wrong, be the loudest person in the room until everyone gives up the fight and leaves, then declare yourself the winner.

Probably trying to trigger a vanity reaction. I'll doubt Satoshi will fall in the trap, but I could be wrong of course.

The inventor of Bitcoin doesn't need to "prove" he invented it and also he did not want to be known.

So what is this guy's end game?

Is this just an ego play or does he plan to make money off this claim?

It lends some credence to investors if they fall under his spell.

I don't believe him though.

He forked Bitcoin and is trying to convince people his fork is actually the real Bitcoin, so yeah it's a money grab.

He should team up with the guy who "invented" email.

hopefully this fraudster's lawsuits end with him in jail.

TLDR: It's Craig Wright again, move along...

I met and know Satoshi, and he is not CW. This is all I will say about this.

I'm no expert on crypto and usually get talked at by a mate about it.

But didn't this chap have child porn uploaded to his coin or something because his data storage was so big?

therefore anyone who uses it is effectivly distributing child porn.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20115607

Satoshi Nakamoto = Craig Wright (wrote white paper) + Paul Le Roux (who created Encryption 4 Masses aka E4M, and TrueCrypt)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com