Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund is fighting for the future of open source software
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He lost a high profile case last year against a podcaster who called him a fraud. The judge ruled against Wright and found that he had "advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial".
Obviously he's fighting the costs, which are due to earlier phases of the proceedings where McCormack tried to get the case summarily dismissed and was unsuccessful, resulting in Mr. Wright being awarded costs.
Sadly this is not true. Wright was ruled to have won the case but had the damage award reduced to only 1 pound.[1] (Wright is being bankrolled by billionaire Calvin Ayre. They are not worried about the money here.)
How someone can win a case while found to have "advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial" just goes to show how utterly deranged the British legal system is. As long as it is such, scammers like Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre will continue to torment innocent people.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/01/craig-wri...
> looking at the “big picture”, Dr Wright was awarded only nominal damages, so Mr McCormack is the successful party, as were the defendants in Joseph v Spiller and FlyMeNow,
...and the court awarded McCormack his costs for the trial on an indemnity basis-- which still doesn't cover his time lost and stress due to this, but it's about as good as you can get as a defendant. EXCEPT, in the interest in finality the court declined to reverse a ruling from an earlier stage of the trial that awarded Wright his costs, and Wright has now delivered his bill of £3.379m, still attempting to deliver on his public promise[*] of ruining McCormack.
So the fact that Wright "won" £1 isn't preventing a somewhat just outcome this case... because the court still rightfully regarded that as a loss for the purpose of awarding costs. The bigger issue is that the UK awards costs incrementally and so has left McCormack potentially paying Wright's inflated costs for his earlier efforts to get the deliberately false case discharged. And, of course, Wright is appealing is his "win" too.
Since Wright himself isn't funding his litigation, this suit was well worth his time in chilling his critics. And it has worked too: it's been difficult to get outlets cover what he's doing, except in the form of repeating both-sideism rendition's of Wright's press releases. I had previously been told outright by a least one journalist at a big publication that they didn't want to print on his claims being falsified because they didn't want to get mired in litigation.
[*] The most recent of which was also breach of a court embargo in the ruling on the case, which Wright was sent up for contempt for ... which had no effect "Faced with a 17,000-word skeleton argument advanced by Wright’s new attorneys, buttressed by 1,600 pages of legal authorities, [The court] concluded that the cost of continuing outweighed the benefits." in other words, he simply DOSed the court and the court dropped it.
For whatever their motivations they already seem to be intentionally racking up their legal bills as high as they possibly can. Some have suggested that since in the UK it's possible for non-attorneys to own firms that this could be used to launder money (Wright's known sponsor spent a decade on a DHS most wanted list for money laundering), though I've seen nothing but speculation. ... whatever the reason they clearly don't mind spending on litigation.
If you win anything they won't pay-- they already have an unpaid judgement against them for ~$140 million dollars in Florida-- their latest gambit in that case has been to announce Wright's wives are actually the plaintiff, that they've fired the plaintiff's attorney and appointed their own. ( Probably a good place to read was the real plaintiff's ultimately unsuccessful motion to strike the fake one's appearance https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.52... the entire docket there is confusing now because you have to scroll to the bottom of each brief to find out if its the real plaintiff or the fake plaintiff).
Wright himself almost certainly couldn't pay-- he has no known source of funding except from extracting money from sponsors via his creator of Bitcoin fiction. Losing cases in and of itself hasn't made him stop or even really slowed him down. Engaging with him in civil court at all is necessary to prevent the personal ruination of his targets, but doesn't seem like a likely path to make him quit.
Who do you think will win that fight? The fundamental flaw of the court system is that it's biased towards those who have money due to how politics work.
Here's food for thought, why isn't Prince Andrew in any serious trouble regarding the Epstein rapes? I don't know a single citizen who can just put their hand up and say "nope", and walk away without repercussions, unless you know, they're extremely rich. And we see that in the news again and again in every category of crimes.
The system is broken, worldwide. The only true way to fight 'fire with fire' is solidarity. Look at France, fighting together and protesting against raising the pension retirement age. It's been a month and they're still fighting. And for the government to just push that forward without regard to its populace, who do you think that action is actually for? Not the people.
The only fight worth fighting is one where you stand shoulder to shoulder. The French are doing just that. And even though their government passed the pension age raise, they're still fighting. Because at the end of the day, who did they pass that for? Not for the working class. Look at how fast they got it out without regard to what their citizens were saying.
If you were to fight that in court, not only would you be fighting billionaire funded defense lawyers, but it'll take years and ... ? You see the discrepancy? They're fast to pass laws favorable to billionaires, but for the people? It takes years?
Don't waste money on courts. Real change comes from blood and solidarity. Workers in the past have died for our benefits today.
Maxwell has is own history of drama, but I can certainly agree with him that Craig Wright sucks.
I'm flattered, but that's not so! I was a relatively insignificant developer (e.g. 163 mostly minor commits to a project that has had >24k)-- though I've been frequently targeted in public, in part due to my own error in choosing to discuss Bitcoin with naysayers rather than just ignoring them. If you wanted to call me an formally outspoken Bitcoin philosopher, I wouldn't argue!
But the post in question was on a thread about Wladimir who was, in fact, lead developer of the Bitcoin Core project for many years, and the most active developer as far back as 2011. He posted shortly after Wright won an appeal overturning our summary dismissal stating that he regretted ever participating in open source specifically because the MIT license waver of liability was not, apparently, strong enough to get an abusive lawsuit dismissed on a summary basis. (the page is now down as he's mostly dropped off the internet since).
There are probably many new users of Bitcoin who don't know about Faketoshi. It's utter insanity that such lawsuits are possible, the Bitcoin community must rally to support you guys.
Technically true, but he's looking for $4 b-b-billion.
Some thoughts about this that interest me:
- Things like the Bitcoin Cash fork & DAO fork arguably set the precedent that the developers control the funds. They never should have done that because now anybody can argue "you did it for them, why not me?" And this time it's being argued in the legal domain instead of just on heated GitHub comments. Judges aren't known for understanding the details of blockchains and can probably swing either way on this, especially if you jurisdiction shop.
- The "assets you don't own" part. He can't prove he had the keys, or lost the keys. But he just needs to present a compelling argument, not have an argument beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fact that the real Satoshi is unlikely to appear to defend themself makes it easier for Wright to argue Wright had the keys at some point, even if he wasn't the first or last owner.
- Combining these points: If you have established you will change the blockchain through a compelling argument; and if _nobody_ presents the keys; but if you have the best compelling argument _without_ the keys, then the coins probably belong to you.
- The big problems that lead to this situation were opening the Pandora's box of blockchain forks; & the tying of physical identities to wallets through KYC (which was the death of BTC.)
Perhaps it made people more aware of that fact, but this was always true. Bitcoin has never been "trustless"; that's always been a mirage. (Not even the original Bitcoin whitepaper makes that claim, and it claims some pretty dubious things!)
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
(edit) And you clearly never read the whitepaper: "What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party."
^^ Literally trustless right there.
We don't disagree. Many people act like the consensus algorithm is somehow magically obviating the need for a consensus among humans. One must inherently trust that, if one is to use something like Bitcoin.
Functionally, as long as the consensus is to install the latest version of Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Core's maintainers control Bitcoin.
The whitepaper claims that Bitcoin removes the need for a trusted third-party to transactions. If you consider mining pools to be "a party", that claim isn't strictly true: on several occasions, one mining pool has held 51% hash power (e.g. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/184427-one-bitcoin-group... is a notable example; before that, pools normally kept their hashing power below 30% voluntarily), so in reality, you're trusting all sufficiently-wealthy parties not to do that. However, the whitepaper doesn't make the widely-believed stronger claim about magical trustlessness.
This is obviously not true, has never been true, and I have no trouble predicting that it will never be true.
What I took exception to was the fact that you were asserting developers themselves control funds, and that they specifically were trusted parties. Overall, Bitcoin depends on no trusted third parties, since in your example, mining pools with 50% hashrate do not arbitrarily control funds either.
And no, writing software does not imply control over the network, since there were plenty of other node implementations which existed (and exist) and which users choose to run for X or Y reasons. Writing software out of consensus which arbitrarily controls funds, in your assertion and in consistency with your string of logic (context across multiple messages,) "devs writing code" is not what consensus is. Even the github repository where Bitcoin is currently published is not current consensus. Current consensus is the current behaviour of the network right now. That is current consensus.
So, no, you're still wrong.
> This is obviously not true, has never been true, and I have no trouble predicting that it will never be true.
IANAL, especially considering the number of jurisdictions involved.
It seems totally possible to me that a BTC developer could be rubber-hose compelled by the legal system to publish a patch, just as they might compel a bank to refund someone's stolen funds. Governments sometimes protect from "compelled speech." But what if the speech is publishing "from=acct1 to=acct2 value=100" to a blockchain? How is that different from a banker being compelled to click a button in their own UI, thats value is the same thing?
Secondly, you are right that people would probably fork and not update if the developers became compromised... then the new developers would have the same thing happen to them and become compromised. As long as the developers aren't anonymous they will be a SPOF. (This is why my initial comment said KYC killed bitcoin - its entire premise fails when it is nonymous.)
Finally, cryptocurrencies as a whole are just BTC, ETH, and a bunch of nothing. Repeated forks of BTC because of legal drama, departing/jailed developers, will rapidly move the BTC forks into the nothing category. Without consensus on a path forward (to fork or not to fork) both sides of the network are diminished. It isn't even clear if Wright's goal is to get 4b, or just to destroy BTC far enough to collect the ashes.
> you are right that people would probably fork and not update
One of us is misunderstanding how the Bitcoin core works. You're correct that a BTC developer could be compelled to publish a "bad patch", but nobody is obligated to accept it. If it's sufficiently controversial (eg. "accept my new ledger!"), there wouldn't even need to be a fork in the first place. It would die as a PR, and if it was forced through then miners would almost certainly protest since it undermines their authority.
You're right in the strictest possible purview of "this is possible", but Bitcoin's community would be left bereft. Anyone who tries modifying the ledger knows the weight of what they're suggesting, that's why it just doesn't happen.
Since we're talking about trust… what would happen if it were waved through the PR process, bypassing those checks entirely? (Do miners normally conduct code reviews?) What if it were obfuscated, disguised as something else – perhaps complete with tests "proving" that it was, in fact, that something else. It's been done before: http://underhanded-c.org/.
> Anyone who tries modifying the ledger knows the weight of what they're suggesting, that's why it just doesn't happen.
In other words… you're trusting that everyone in "Bitcoin's community" wants Bitcoin to continue to exist, and won't do things like this?
I think if even 1 developer has a court order for them to push to master, it will happen whether anyone wants it to, since GitHub is already known to mindlessly abide by government requests. (see popcorntime dmca)
The people who merge or pull the code have the ultimate decision. But it's a problem. Who is accepting the code and who isn't? The developer can be disallowed from contributing to the code if this change isn't accepted. (Explicitly not "compelled speech" to "not say" something - this would be a gagball.) So the next patch comes. The question of who is forking and is who isn't raises from 50%/50% to 25%/75% until the numerator approaches zero. For the sake of networking the question isn't "whether I want to accept this patch" but "whether I think most people will accept this patch."
So the miners have a endless chain of developers who are asking for this patch or no more patches. For the miners to have leverage with developers they need to be able to take over the code themselves. The next set of developers will have this issue, ad infinitum, unless the cycle is broken somehow.
IMO the solution has to involve zero knowledge proofs which is the closest we can get to preventing rubber-hose legal attacks. Since XMR probably won't gain the traction to become a competitor to BTC, BTC will probably have to integrate it or continue to suffer from problems like this.
edited to add addendum:
The incoming/departing core developers & the open source nature of the BTC codebase also presents an issue. Unless the miners are reviewing each pull indiscriminately, they are trusting the code developers to have merged PRs that they want. How does an open source contribution, blessed by a core developer, become trustless? Anonymity is necessary to prevent core developers from being compelled, but names are necessary for trust of core developers.
No, it will not happen since a majority of the devs are US-based and developers in the US can't be compelled to produce speech in the USA. Neither will it matter even if someone with push commits pushes a theft-branch to the github repository, since nobody would run it.
> The question of who is forking and is who isn't raises from 50%/50% to 25%/75% until the numerator approaches zero. For the sake of networking the question isn't "whether I want to accept this patch" but "whether I think most people will accept this patch."
This is false, no. There are literally tens of thousands nodes worldwide and achieving a worldwide-jurisdiction hostile patch push when compelled speech is illegal in many developed nations would be essentially impossible, and I would be glad to bet you impossible unless Bitcoin were already dead. In any event you're presuming nobody would be able to mount a legal defence in the first place against illegal court orders.
A hardfork change of this nature literally requires global, immediate, coordinated roll-out, or it will simply fail. There's a reason why there have been no contentious hard forks in the entire history of Bitcoin.
> For the miners to have leverage with developers they need to be able to take over the code themselves. The next set of developers will have this issue, ad infinitum, unless the cycle is broken somehow.
This is a fantasist scenario, completely at odds with reality. There are literally hundreds of billions of dollars wrapped up in Bitcoin. That block of wealth and capability won't just sit there and be pushed to run something that would literally wipe them all out overnight. It's fantasist nonsense.
The scenario of one bloc or another demanding some change or other is similarly nonsensical due very specifically to the carefully-curated decentralization of Bitcoin and the nature of its consensus—again, the hard forks you are envisioning have a zero chance of being committed as locally-compelled speech, let alone by some legal jurisdiction attempting to compel tens of thousands of people worldwide into running backdoored software which literally none of them would consensually run. Like it's nonsense.
Similarly, miners who produce blocks which reassign any money without cryptographic signatures behind the money will be very simply, producing blocks which are the exact same thing as not producing blocks at all.
At this point, with the newness of your account and your odd half-blind awareness of how Bitcoin works, I'm going to presume you're not actually discussing this in good faith.
The DAO fork is a good example, but the Bitcoin Cash fork is not a good example as the developers did nothing with any of the funds. That was just a normal fork that created a new cryptocurrency.
Maybe you're thinking of Craig Wright's own Bictoin fork, Bitcoin SV?
> If you have established you will change the blockchain through a compelling, non-technical argument; and if _nobody_ presents the keys; but if you have the best compelling argument, they _probably_ belong to you.
I get that it's what he's going for, but one of the keys he has claimed was his has already signed a message claiming Wright is a fraud:
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2020/05/25/craig-wright-call...
The Parity project later requested a rescue attempt for themselves and their wallet users, and the community strongly resisted the idea. Parity was run by a cofounder of Ethereum, and the issue was way more clear than someone claiming without proof that they'd lost their keys; if Parity couldn't get a rescue done, it's not likely to happen again for anyone else.
Certainly it'd be difficult to get an international community to bend to the demands of a court in one jurisdiction. Even if they forced the issue in that one jurisdiction, it'd just be a fork, probably with little value.
In fact, there are specific counter-examples with Jeff Garzik's godmode patches which were so roundly denied and rejected that they were DOA.
Ethereum is irrelevant because of how much total premine it was and how they misrepresented it, and misrepresented the involvement of famous cryptographers like Ralph Merkle.
None of your comments about key ownership have any basis in reality or even logic, because of the direct counter-evidence of key ownership for the keys he is claiming ownership of.
So, you also have no idea what you're talking about.
I saw someone comment above that one of the keys in question signed a message saying that they were not Wright, which is a good example for that particular key.
My comment you replied to specifically mentioned a scenario where the key owner did not defend themself. So we are talking about different scenarios.
In any case, I wasn't lying when I posted what I referred to as my thoughts, & certainly do know what I'm talking about. Thanks for the correction.
The direct counter-evidence against Craig's claimed key ownership are the facts that many of his claimed addresses signed that he was a fraud, that Wizsec showed that the 1feex address was actually stolen MtGox funds (and nothing to with Craig at all,) the court records of Klein v. Wright showing he completely made up the list of claimed addresses by instructing Shadders (a shoddy programmer from nChain) to construct the list entirely algorithmically from broken precepts.
So no, it wasn't just "one" key. It was dozens.
(Lots of addresses that Craig claimed were his, signing that Wright is a fraud): https://craigwright.lol/
(An outline of why the 1feex are entirely NOT Wright's Bitcoins): https://blog.wizsec.jp/2018/02/kleiman-v-craig-wright-bitcoi... https://blog.wizsec.jp/2020/06/mtgox-march-2011-theft.html
(An ultra-early miner, maybe the second miner, signing his own early blocks proving they aren't Craig's, either): https://twitter.com/druidian/status/1447833107143483393
You are doing a slippery thing here by claiming that your directly-falsifiable statement about Bitcoin Cash being a "precedent" where "developers control the funds"—while now in the above statement claiming that this was actually in regards to Satoshi likely not stepping up to defend his own key ownership—is somehow related.
You clearly don't know what you're talking about, or else you could show me even a single instance where Bitcoin Cash moved funds absent its owner's key signature—which is entirely what this entire thing is about, namely a court case where Wright is suing to attempt to force a backdoor into Bitcoin which would move funds specifically to his possession without a key owner's signature (or a coinbase pay.)
Finally: reasons why you don't have any idea what you're talking about, itemized:
1) You didn't know that Bitcoin Cash never moved funds without a coinbase payout or a key owner's signature but asserted it did.
2) You didn't know about the direct evidence of Craig's claimed keys being owned by other people.
3) You don't know how hard forks work because you think that hard forks can happen gradually and that pressure from minor buy-in can push it to adoption.
Aside from the DAO (which is irrelevant because Ethereum is a scam) you haven't had a very good batting average in general, and for Bitcoin, it's atrocious.
Anyone can file a lawsuit if they pay the filing fees.
If they hire a lawyer, the lawyer must uphold the ethical standards of the bar, which carry suspension/disbarment penalties. Those standards generally include a good-faith belief in the legal merits of your client's case, adherence to all laws and court procedures, speaking up when you believe a law is about to be broken, etc.
The client (you) will eventually be called as a witness, and you can go to jail if you lie on the stand or otherwise present false evidence. Unfortunately, the penalties seem to happen a lot less often than the perjury. That's partly because perjury is a criminal offense, carrying a higher burden of proof than a civil claim.
The main consequence of perjury in civil court is that it tends to cause you to lose. But when you're bringing cases with no serious prospect of success for collateral purposes... it doesn't really matter if you lose, and if lying is the only way you might win... The other consequences seem calibrated for otherwise upstanding people that actually care about the consequences of their actions, not for grifters using the courts as a weapon.
They may tangentially share the same software/sexual space, but their intentions are completely different.
Or, that Dorsey has initiated litigation against Wright to steal his patent portfolio here: https://www.opencrypto.org/
Dorsey is a sociopath.