Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

Comment by betwixthewires | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There's a difference between being an anonymous owner of a domain registered at a central authority which can be compelled to turn over the domain and an anonymous contributor to a codebase which cannot be compelled to modify code if their identity is not known.

The default judgment to me is a flaw in the legal system, if an anonymous party cannot defend themselves, how can an anonymous party be sued? This default judgment is a shame. The proper default judgment should've been "who exactly are you suing?"

He can't demand coins he doesn't even know exist, he can't even prove the coins exist to a court without keys to show that they exist. Being private would absolutely prevent this vector, he'd have to have the keys to prove to a court he owns the coins, which means he wouldn't have to prove anything to a court, he would only have to move the coins.

Interesting vector with impersonation sites, I'll have to roll that one around in my head for a while.

The courts generally will act against anyone within their jurisdiction. In the UK we have the contra mundum injunction, for example, which is a legal order enforceable against the world. These orders occur occasionally in things like witness protection (noone may name this person) and narrower 'persons unknown' ones in the context of public protest (you can get an injunction against whoever has tied themselves to your development site, for example, without having to find out their names first).

The common thread is that they are defendable against, but not without potentially losing your anonymity. So someone can turn up to contest the injunction against the protestors, but whether their name is made public is then in the hands of the judge (public justice normally means that parties names are in the public domain). Likewise, the anonymous contributor could show up to make a case (the court will have tried reasonably hard to effect service so they're aware) but at significant risk to their anonymity, which is only going to be defended by the judge on public interest grounds, not simply because the contributor would prefer it.

While this can lead to harsh outcomes, it's not completely without sense. 'I'm hiding, you can't sue me' creates a hole for lawless behaviour, and the legal system is more or less intended to stop that kind of thing.

I think it would generally be just to allow the anonymous defendant to at least make a motion to strike out the claims while preserving their anonymity.

In this case we have a lot of reason to believe that the plaintiff brought the case exclusively to learn the defendants identity. E.g. Before bringing the action they offered $10 million dollars to acquire the domain, and have made threatening remarks. Not to mention no actual advantage is gained by removing the Bitcoin whitepaper from a single website, as there are easily found mirrors on thousands of locations all over the world, and since Wright's initial threats that includes the websites of several national governments, US congress, research institutions, and some of the largest financial institutions in the world (e.g. Fidelity).

This privacy invasion belief was only furthered when after the case the plaintiff refused to accept the ordered costs payment from anyone except the defendant and only if they identified themselves (also, after the case the plaintiff pretty much said as much).

Their case was seriously deficient too, e.g. falsely misstating that a US copyright registration was evidence of authorship even when the copyright office had made an unprecedented move of saying exactly the opposite in the matter of this specific case. Failing to disclose that there were other copyright registrants, failing to disclose that the supposedly infringing whitepaper was distributed under the MIT license and so on. Not to mention that there were major equitable issues, e.g. the whitepaper has been on the website pretty much since it was written some 13 years ago without issue-- placed there by its (actual) author.

Cobra wrote a letter to the judge and attended the hearing via zoom, and the judge took the position that he was required by the law to ignore the letter.

But at the end of the day the UK courts are powerless to protect cobra from harassment or even assassination so exposing his identity just didn't make sense. Particularly since Cobra is outside of the UK (or so I believe, no one in the bitcoin ecosystem seems to know cobra by any other identity).

And this is why you can't access the Bitcoin whitepaper at its original location or download the bitcoin software on bitcoin.org from within the UK today.

They're now seeing an additional nearly million usd worth of costs for their unopposed default judgement too. O_o

I think I agree at least about a motion to strike out. There's a chance that an abuse of process argument could have been made, though if that failed the existence of the US copyright registration does seem to at least raise issues of fact (about Wright's ownership and/or the meaning in US law of a copyright registration, as foreign law is often a matter for expert evidence) that would need a trial.

For me, the question is not so much whether the respondent should be anonymous from the legal system (I think fairly clearly not) but whether there should be a scope of anonymity from the claimant and the public (a reasonable case here, I think, as none of the copyright issues really turn on the respondent's identity) and whether the application could be made without putting the identity on record first. And the High Court, against a deep pocketed opponent, without my own legal team, is not an ideal venue to try to find out. And, depending on Cøbra's opsec, it may be that they would be exposable via a third-party Norwich Pharmacal order anyway :-/

The costs are really in the same problem space as the main claim, I think: an application for costs to be assessed would probably dramatically lower the amount 'reasonably' due - but that would mean appearing as a party. [edit: not to say it wouldn't be ruinously expensive anyway - I see the summary assessment of costs up to summary judgment already runs to £35k. The High Court is not cheap.]

> For me, the question is not so much whether the respondent should be anonymous from the legal system (I think fairly clearly not) but whether there should be a scope of anonymity from the claimant and the public

The tricky thing here is that what Cobra needs isn't protection from the public, -- which would be hard to provide with any reliability but at least is conceptually not challenging, but privacy from the plaintiffs -- because he has a reasonable fear that the plaintiffs will use the information in some criminal way to harm him.

(Also because in another case Wright went ahead and publicly disclosed the identity of a confidential witness that the court had sealed, and Wright suffered no consequence for it.)

I think privacy from the plaintiffs is harder conceptually, because there may come some point where there needs to be a factual argument that depends on their identity-- certainly the plaintiffs would push as hard as they could in whatever direction they needed to accomplish that-- including, based on prior conduct, forging documents to support a false narrative.

[One of the reasons we think they've been trying to get Cobra's identity-- beyond just threatening him with it-- is that we know wright has told people that Cobra "stole" bitcoin.org from him, but since he knows nothing about who cobra is or how he ended up in control of Bitcoin.org he can't fake up any documentary support for this fiction.]

It's unclear if they could obtain Cobra's identity from a third party. They certainly tried pretty hard. When they were trying to obtain my address they used a storm of pretexting phone calls and such. At least they tried very hard, and were unsuccessful absent an order.

Yeah, indeed, Cobra has the same problem with costs-- he's having a difficult time within the legal framework of challenging them without exposing his identity.

> owner of a domain registered at a central authority which can be compelled to turn over the domain and an anonymous contributor to a codebase

Agreed. But imagine that there is no normie accessible place on the web to get non-malicious Bitcoin software. And anyone running a site distributing it is at risk if their identity is leaked. What effect is that going to have in the long run?

"There are levels of survival we are prepared to accept." -- Bitcoin would survive in such a state, but I don't think it would be a great outcome.

> The default judgment to me is a flaw in the legal system, if an anonymous party cannot defend themselves, how can an anonymous party be sued? This default judgment is a shame.

Fully agreed.

> He can't demand coins he doesn't even know exist, he can't even prove the coins exist to a court without keys to show that they exist.

He's actually argued that he could just demand the developers issue more coins too. And he doesn't have keys, but that isn't slowing him down!

The big legal flaw he exploits is that if you go to trial it can be extremely expensive (esp in the UK where you pay the other sides legal costs for every failed motion, and wright sticks a whole firm on his case). ... normally the expense of trial is protected against by preliminary motions like summary judgements. But in a summary judgement the court assumes all disputed facts favor the non-movant, and wright fills his cases with forgeries to makeup whatever disputed fact he needs to keep the case going. The huge volume of forgeries which require expert analysis and debunking also add massively to the cost of being in litigation with him. His goal isn't to win (though I'm sure he'd be happy if he did)-- his goal is to burn time and the opponents resources.

> What effect is that going to have in the long run?

This is where we get off in the weeds about the architecture of the internet. Ideally, we would have a decentralized domain registry and everyone would use tools like onion sites for everything. Hopefully that is the outcome, but likely not.

But all of this has to be fairly expensive for Wright, too...

It's profitable for Wright. His litigation is financed by is advanced fee fraud victims who think they're going to score billions worth of Bitcoins. So the more lawsuits Wright can file, the better for him.

Sounds like this is a failure of the UK judicial system, not bitcoin in general.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com