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As others have said, I lost a little confidence in Gwern, who was a co-author of the the Wired piece and who I, until now, viewed as more skeptical. Especially
by runn1ng 11y ago
As others have said, I lost a little confidence in Gwern, who was a co-author of the the Wired piece and who I, until now, viewed as more skeptical. Especially given his history at LessWrong.
- Kiro 11y agoYou say it like he's wrong now.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y agoGwern has a sterling reputation at LessWrong - or do you just mean having an association with LessWrong is bad in itself. One Satoshi candidate, Hal Finney, was a LessWronger, too. I, too, am surprised he believes this, but I'm not about to write him off. He could still be right and if he's wrong so what.
- runn1ng 11y agoYeah, that's what I meant. He has a great reputation, so I held him in high regard somewhat until now
- spooningtamarin 11y agoGwern is Satoshi.
- clamprecht 11y agoTo be fair, the original Wired article did end with this sentence: > Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.
- jnbiche 11y ago> Either Wright invented bitcoin, or he’s a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did. That's a total cop-out, and may represent the last sentence I ever read from Wired (used to love it). Anyone with a modicum of technical ability could have done all the "brilliant" hoaxing Wright has done, such as back-dating GPG keys and spoofing email. He even screwed up those (e.g., not realizing that he used GPG preferred hash algorithms that didn't even exist until 2009 when back-dating a key to 2008). In addition, Wright totally, completely ruined his scam with his ridiculous bragging about his half dozen of (non-existent) degrees, which set many people's Spidey senses tingling. Satoshi was a pretty low-key guy. A competent hoaxer would have made a bigger effort to match the personality and character of the person he was trying to emulate. This isn't Kaiser Soze level scheming here. This is a fairly uneducated, boastful man with a bit of technical knowledge and a load of dishonest intentions. It's horribly disappointing that so many people in both the journalist and Bitcoin communities were so quick to fall for it, especially after what happened with Dorian Nakamoto.
- pbreit 11y agoYeah, it didn't seem any more elaborate than, say a Stripe capture the flag. I'm guessing he did it to have a little fun. When the Wired article moved from all the compelling evidence to the part where they run down how all that compelling evidence was tampered with, I was shocked they continued on thinking they had their guy.
- jnbiche 11y agoGiven Gwern's naturally skeptical nature, along with how obvious of a scammer this guy Wright is, combine to make me wonder what drove Gwern to burn his reputation like this, even if it was just his pseudonym.
- nkurz 11y agoI feel the same, but would put a different "spin" on it. Gwern is still the same bright skeptical individual that you wanted him to be, but his imperfect track record might be as good as one can hope to expect from any expert. Losing some confidence is appropriate if one was overconfident to begin with. But rather than restricting this update to future proclamations from Gwern, possibly I should reconsider my reliance on expert opinion itself, even my own.