Craig Wright faces tough questions over forged documents in court
decrypt.co
decrypt.co
It's funny how we decide what's news.
Agreed, he's gone global.
[number of coins] * [ price of coin] =/= value.
I hate this ridiculous trend of "valuing" currencies by the above formula.
I sold myself 1 HackerNewsCoin™ for 1$(featuring decentralized freedom© and proof of steak®). Since there are 1e13 coins, I am now the world's first trillionaire! I own a currency valued at 1$ * 1e13!
It makes much more sense to compare currencies by their transaction volume, or possibly even better by the volume * days destroyed metric.
Bitcoin SV probably has very little real "float" and so it appears far more valuable than it actually is.
He's also made a new cryptocurrency (Bitcoin SV), and may be profiting off of a consultancy he helps run (https://nchain.com/en/).
I don't think he's just some random small fish.
^ of course CSW is a fraud and doesn't actually have access to satoshi's stash. it's quite comical how if he proves he isn't a fraud he will owe somebody billions of dollars, assuming klein wins the case.
It's a wonderful world we are living in.
Later after Wright couldn't (or didn't want to) prove the Satoshi connection in public Andresen later expressed regrets going public with these statements, but never really took them back. It's hard to know, really. Andresen was release manager of the reference implementation for several years and widely regarded as trustworthy.
Other people made business investments based on these statements. Well known investor Roger Ver now seems to regard Wright a fraud, but not before headlining conferences with him and releasing a cryptocurrency together. So Wright has been quite influential, at least with some select people, and is absolutely newsworthy.
In case anyone wonders why someone would want to pretend they're Satoshi.
We have his legally required financial disclosure forms that show a range on his income. Some of the best wealth trackers on earth - those at both Forbes and Bloomberg - have also put together sound estimates on his wealth (closer to $3 billion, not $10 billion).
Factually Trump presides over a sizable, serious business that is generating a large amount of cash.
Prominent assets: $765m Vornado partnership, $525m golf course & resorts, $445m 725 Fifth Ave, $480m 40 Wall St, $420 Niketown building, $330m other properties, $295m liquid, $140m 502 Park Ave, $95m DC hotel
"President Donald Trump’s latest financial disclosure report shows he had at least $434 million in revenue last year, but saw a drop in money coming from his Florida luxury resort Mar-a-Lago. The report, released Thursday, is required to be filed annually with the Government Ethics Office. It covers the president’s finances for 2018, his second year in office."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/16/read-president-donald-trumps...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-12/trump-s-n...
He hasn’t and can’t.
Am I wrong?
Since it is hard to prove that someone cannot do something, yes, technically you are wrong.
[1] https://crypto.stackexchange.com/a/1148
[2] https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nzpv8m/the-large-bitcoin-...
It always stuns me how relatively few people are able to spot frauds (although it explains a lot about our current political situation). I'm guessing 40-50% of the population is susceptible to this kind of trickery.
Being sued for libel in the UK is no joke.
Some of the people who hated those weasels decided that Craig Wright must be great since he says he is against the same people. Instead of everyone rolling their eyes and fighting an OBVIOUS con man interested in VC funding and patents some people thought everyone calling him a con man must be on the 'other side'.
Edit: If you think something is off, use your words. I can back up everything I've said here.
That's an interesting summary of the situation, with parallels again to our current political situation.
"Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy. People who would be level-headed about evenhandedly weighing all sides of an issue in their professional life as scientists, can suddenly turn into slogan-chanting zombies when there’s a Blue or Green position on an issue."
From: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9weLK2AJ9JEt2Tt8f/politics-i....
It does seem to follow Open Source best practice: but I'm not even sure what "decentralized" development would look like?
The confusion stems from the fact that it was renamed at one point to make it clear that "Bitcoin Core" refers to this specific software whereas "Bitcoin" refers to the protocol and blockchain more generally. This distinction wasn't originally needed, as there were no other clients.
There are solid technical reasons to keep the block size low. The current developers were active almost from the beginning, you should take a look. And while Blockstream was founded by Bitcoin developers and sponsors development, it's a small part of the total development effort.
As an early Blockstream employee, I'd love to see some source to your claim that we "get VC funding for their company that they would market by saying it was the 'people that were in charge of bitcoin'"
It seems very likely to me that frauds and those who can detect them are locked in an evolutionary arms race. If that is the case, it would have to be true that there is a substantial number of people who can't detect frauds.
Healthy communities are comprised of people who are trusting and permissive by default. The cost is that on occasion these communities will be exploited.
Personally I think it's a very low price to pay for all its benefits.
It's entirely possible to find a happy medium. You can be trusting without being totally naive about individuals with bad intentions.
In hindsight it’s always easy to say what the right outcome should have been, but, in Wright’s case, he has enough legitimate credentials that it’s hard to argue that we shouldn’t at least hear him out.
his credentials are lacking and also completely irrelevant.
The goal really is to let everyone be safe in trusting others to the point of naivete, because trust is that huge of an efficiency hack.
(I mean, think of the ridiculous amounts of energy Bitcoin wastes with its proof-of-work scheme, precisely because it tries to replace trust with computation. This energy is what trust saves you.)
I went to a three storey old factory turned into an antiques store. 150 000 square feet. Three floors of booths of all kinds of stuff. Coins, cards, collectibles, toys, furniture, everything. The whole place had maybe five visible employees. It was all consignment. You'd pick up $300 worth of nicknacks from the top floor and walk it down to the first floor to buy. It's incredibly easy to steal from if you wanted.
So what I see are hundreds of individual vendors that don't need to be at their booth because of the trust between vendors, the managers, and the public.
If we were part of a culture where theft was all but guaranteed, that store just wouldn't be able to exist.
Do you think they have cameras?
Best state Gini coefficient [0]. Great income mobility (also best in US [1]).
It also has a rampant fraud/ponzi/mlm issue [3]. They come from the same source- There is a general level of trust that is much higher than anywhere else I've lived or experienced. Mostly rooted in a trust in others is part and parcel of the culture and dominant religion. I don't think the upsides would be achievable without the downsides that seem endemic to it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_Gini_co... [1] https://business.utah.gov/news/utah-at-top-in-nation-for-upw... [3] https://www.deseretnews.com/article/900068203/does-utah-dese...
Are we doing that, though? It feels like we're generally very trusting and, organized in society, very forgiving. Hell, in lots of business cases, cheating makes money, getting caught and paying a fine is just the cost of doing business - and it pays.
I understand the theory, and I agree. I don't see it being applied however.
In the dream/goal I presented I was hoping for swift, indiscriminate and - yes - severe justice. The lack of all three wrt. crimes against public or even individual trust is a problem for contemporary societies.
But that doesn't work if the justice is "apparently random".
If that is how it's perceived, then trust violators will have no incentive to avoid violation. They, and everyone else, will believe that it doesn't matter whether they violate trust or not, since justice is a lottery ticket given to everyone, where the prize is punishment, and it doesn't matter what you do.
I strongly disagree. This would make sense if humans were all rational actors who only took an action after performing the risk calculus of expected reward vs. potential punishment. But that's not how humans work, and thinking this way only results in a justice system that is unnecessarily cruel, ignores rehabilitation, and doesn't actually work that well at preventing crime.
Relevant sources:
Sentence Severity and Crime: Accepting the Null Hypothesis "Most reviews conclude that there is little or no consistent evidence that harsher sanctions reduce crime rates in Western populations[1]."
Do Harsher Prison Conditions Reduce Recidivism? "Inmates housed in higher security levels are no less likely to recidivate than those housed in minimum security; if anything, our estimates suggest that harsher prison conditions lead to more post-release crime.[2]"
[1] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/652230
> This would make sense if humans were all rational actors who only took an action after performing the risk calculus of expected reward vs. potential punishment. But that's not how humans work
This is indeed how humans work sometimes. Not in the heat of the moment, but when coldly calculating how to make more money with less effort. Fraud is not a crime of passion, it's premeditated, evaluated in advance. More certainty of consequences, and perhaps the severity of them, may be what's needed to further reduce it.
--
It takes about 20 minutes or so to go through, but I highly, highly recommend it for anyone that hasn't already seen it.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/09/bitcoin-f...
He was raided because he is a tax cheat who has been under investigation for years for multiple unrelated tax compliance events.
* edit. Typo/grammar.
I remember my first encounter with a group of really dishonest people. It was deeply shocking. When I grasped just how much lying was happening and the magnitude of it it took me a while to wrap my mind around it. The folks I encountered had built entire webs of massive lies. I now realize they were small time hucksters compared with some of the cons that are out there.
This keeps happening in court, mostly with Microsoft Word Calibri. It's kinda funny how effective such a simple oversight is at proving document forgery.
It looks like it was released to the public in 2007
So keys to satoshi’s Bitcoins are possibly going to be available in 2020 according to Wright.
At the beginning, it looked like an elaborate fraud but now, he barely makes any sense at all in his declarations.
That aside, I was pretty sure Donald Trump was going to develop a sudden case of Alzheimer's at some point, but so far I've been wrong about that. If the fraudster believes strongly enough in his own fraud, all bets are (literally) off.
He says he cannot produce it because of this splintered trust.
But, the addresses are available for all to see on the blockchain itself, it is the private keys which are hidden away.
How is this basic fact just ignored in all these proceedings?
If Craig is Satoshi, then the article and these comments on it, read very differently.
Then there is his claim to be Satoshi. At this point, nobody knows if that is true or not. Yet everybody is acting as if they _knew_ he is a liar and a fraud. That seems to be the justification for hate. What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
My take is: I do not know if he is Satoshi or not. I also do not care. I listen to want he thinks about Bitcoin and I like what I hear.
And this is one of those situations. There are multiple ways that the real Satoshi could prove their identity, but somehow, Craig Wright has either lost of of them, or they're locked up in some strange escrow with a super-secret board of lawyers or some such nonsense.
Occam's Razor. If ever there was a good application of the principle, it's here.
Also, Craig Wright doesn't have the technical understanding to have written the Bitcoin implementation. Listen to him speak. If you're honest with yourself, and if you code, you'll realize that he's likely never written much running code at all, much less a full implementation of a complex cryptographic and network protocol.
But these are the kinds of guys who unfortunately make it past interviews on the strength of their "dazzle'em with bullshit" approach to interviewing, and that have caused the current situation where most of us have to spend months reviewing our DS and algorithms notes before new interviews.
This is an important observation. Craig gives himself away every time he presents at a conference. His talks just throw up a bunch impressive technical jargon and graphics, but then completely fail to weave it all together into a coherent whole, leaving only a disjointed mess.
It fools people who aren't watching closely and thinking critically. But Satoshi Nakamoto being possibly one of the greatest connectors and integrators of disparate technical ideas in our time, Craig Wright he is not.
If I said I invented cold fusion, would you ask me to prove it first, or give me 300 million in venture capital?
Most of his proof has been systematically proven to be forged or unverified.
> That seems to be the justification for hate.
You're confusing hate with lack of trust.
> What happened to innocent until proven guilty?
It's very much playing itself out in front of you. "Innocent" isn't the same thing as lack of accusation. In the court of public opinion: He's accused of making fraudulent claims. He defends himself. His arguments are shown to be invalid.
I'm sure Bernie Madoff had some good ideas and nice things to say.
> Most of his proof has been systematically proven to be forged or unverified.
If someone fails to prove A that does not mean that (not A) is true
> You're confusing hate with lack of trust.
You are right, hate is a very strong word that I should not have used in this context.
> It's very much playing itself out in front of you. "Innocent" isn't the same thing as lack of accusation. In the court of public opinion: He's accused of making fraudulent claims. He defends himself. His arguments are shown to be invalid.
I'm really not that interested in what the court of public opinion thinks, I'm more interested in the truth. The truth is that I don't know if he is Satoshi or not, neither do you or anybody else here. Yet everybody is assuming that without question. The word fraud occurs 21 times in this threat, in almost all cases without qualification. I would expect more from the HN community.
Here's a good analysis of Craig's own testimony from last week and the inconsistencies:
https://blog.wizsec.jp/2019/07/kleiman-v-craig-wright-part-3...
> I'm more interested in the truth
The only way he is telling the truth is if an enormous number of claims is a massive conspiracy theory.
> The truth is that I don't know if he is Satoshi or not
You don't know I'm not Satoshi. I don't have to prove it:
> If someone fails to prove A that does not mean that (not A) is true
> I would expect more from the HN community.
True. We do have a habit of hero worship (ie Jobs, Musk, etc) so perhaps we should similarly believe Wright just because he said to.
not to mention satoshi himself wished people wouldn't obsess over who he is, and rather think more about the larger team of people behind bitcoin's development, according to a post of his.
fraudulent proof is proof of fraud. you have to play mental mind games to believe there's a case for him being satoshi. all it takes is 30 seconds of basic logical thinking.
people who believe he could be satoshi are the reason the cryptocurrency community is so awful.
He is not particular good in public appearances but to claim that he is an obvious fraud and he possesses no technical knowledge is just wrong. Also he did convince a few very knowledgable technical people.