BSV Hardfork – Security Considerations

Some additional context is that the same fraudster is using a dozen current and former open source volunteer Bitcoin Developers demanding that they publish Bitcoin software with an equivalent backdoor or pay him billions of dollars in damages.

We defeated the lawsuit in a pretrial action with the UK courts denying jurisdiction on the basis that the case had no serious chance of success. He sought permission to appeal and unfortunately it was granted. So the case appeal will be heard starting December 7th.

I think the case has concerning implications far beyond Bitcoin: if case law in the UK is established that OSS developers can be sued, forced to take on on millions of UKP in legal costs, because a user demands a backdoor be introduced because they claim they suffered losses at no fault of the developers, in spite of the unambiguous MIT expat disclaimer of liabilities, even years after they stopped working on the software (as is the case for me, for example)... then that is bad news for open source in general.

Mr. Wright's demands are particular absurd and his facts particular deficient, since they're all predicated on his obviously falsified history of Bitcoin usage. If his case can escape summary judgement than pretty much any well funded case could.

It's important as open source developers that such frivolous cases can be discharged at the earliest possible juncture to prevent the legal costs from being personally ruinous.

On top of this backdrop, issues like this BSV backdoor present a general risk to users of exchanges that support BSV (Robinhood and Bitfinex being the two best known)-- if the backdoor ends up making these exchanges significantly insolvent with respect to the BSV customers it's likely that customer assets will be pooled in a bankruptcy creating risk for customers prudent enough to not touch BSV.