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Comment by bhaak | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

> 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.

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.

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