27 ms·

Bitcoincore.org removes Satoshi's whitepaper from website after threats from CSW

282 points by wildrice 6y ago

wildrice 6y ago
"Yesterday both Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org received allegations of copyright infringement of the Bitcoin whitepaper by lawyers representing Craig Steven Wright. In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org. They also claim he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and the original owner of bitcoin.org. Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org were both asked to take down the whitepaper."
- gaius_baltar 6y ago
  > In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org. Isn't that basically asking for a lawsuit in the format of "Prove that you are Satoshi or be charged with perjury" ? Why is CSW still able to play these tricks?
  - garmaine 6y ago
    Because the cost of the lawsuit would still be carried by these open source volunteers.
  - mathiasrw 6y ago
    Yes it is. He is wanting to get into a situation where he can provide proof in a legal setting so that any outcome can be used in other legal battles.
f430 6y ago
I would be worried too if Paul Le Roux was getting released from federal penitentiary.
- mmcwilliams 6y ago
  Is he being released? I thought he received a 25 year sentence in 2012?
  - hummel 6y ago
    Paul actively cooperates with the US justice and secret services. It is likely that his sentence will eventually be reduced.
    - f430 6y ago
      I've read somewhere that he is being released in 2025 but can't be sure.
      - rwmurrayVT 6y ago
        The BOP website lists his release date as 1/14/2034 with his status as "NOT IN BOP CUSTODY".
        f430 6y ago
        what does that mean tho? BOP? Is he out on bail???
        fogof 6y ago
        BOP is the federal bureau of prisons. https://www.bop.gov/ https://www.bop.gov/
  - waterfowl 6y ago
    The federal inmate locator lists him as not in BOP Custody. Did he get extradited somewhere? House arrest for covid?
UShouldBWorking 6y ago
This is just more of the same Blockstream (Adam Back) trying to rewrite history. Back's Blockstream hijacked the GitHub repo years ago and ever since has been working hard to buy up influence and control the narrative about Bitcoin. They artificially limited the block size which caused an increase in fees, trying to push users to their second layer solutions.
LockAndLol 6y ago
Yeah, only a few years late. Seems like a pretty fraudulent claim.
csense 6y ago
Someone should host the whitepaper on IPFS.
- lawn 6y ago
  They have. It's also hosted on the Bitcoin blockchain and it's forks and there are torrents of it of course. Here's how to decode it from the blockchain: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35959/how-is-the-whitepaper-decoded-from-the-blockchain-tx-with-1000x-m-of-n-multisi/35970 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35959/how-is-the...
- Sargos 6y ago
  Many people thought the same thing. Here it is: https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1352315682193436674 https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/13523156821934366... https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth.link/ https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth.link/ will always work to view the Bitcoin whitepaper from any browser. https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth/ https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth/ is completely decentralized but you need an IPFS enabled web browser to view. (FYI you can add .link to any .eth website to view it through an IPFS gateway)
- mathiasrw 6y ago
  You can get it directly from data stored in the BSV blockchain: https://bico.media/42d44c395904e6743f67011b4198d8bcc07de21c63906457e29fce84888900c6.pdf https://bico.media/42d44c395904e6743f67011b4198d8bcc07de21c6...
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Nursie 6y ago
Isn't this guy literally billions in the hole to the estate of someone he claims was his partner in creating BTC, and who is co-owner of the Satoshi hoard of coins which haven't moved (ever)? Did that court case ever finish or is he still using every trick in the book to draw it out? (Kleiman v. Wright, that's what I'm thinking of) (Looks like it got kicked back to June this year due to covid)
- hanniabu 6y ago
  Yes, that fraud
- vmception 6y ago
  Yes, he failed to produce any keys, the courier with the keys never materialized, the judge has not thrown Craig Wright in jail for contempt of court nor has be been charged with perjury. The judge seems to be mildly entertained by this and views Craig Wright as mentally ill, but won't have him committed. It is all sad and strange. There are a lot of guardrails against using the system this way, but they aren't being used.
  - cheaprentalyeti 6y ago
    As near as I can tell they're letting Craig Wright cosplay being Satoshi because it's another useful way of inhibiting Bitcoin's adoption and annoying the real Satoshi, wherever he is out there.
    - vmception 6y ago
      There’s nothing to suggest this one judge is part of any plan. This is just a judge playing “choose your own adventure” with live characters arguing over something he doesn't care about while providing some form of escapism.
    - IncRnd 6y ago
      Why do you believe this judge is part of an over-arching conspiracy of powerful but mute people who are attempting to inhibit the adoption of bitcoin through cosplay? Why wouldn't those super-intelligent, powerful people do something about the actual Chicago based exchange that already trades Bitcoins?
avmich 6y ago
> This surrender will no doubt be weaponized to make new false claims, like that the Bitcoin Core developers “know” CSW to be Satoshi Nakamoto and this is why they acted in this way. It's like "Bank of America paid 10 millions to the claimant - WITHOUT ADMITTING GUILT - ..." There is specific phrase for that, so - why not insist that the removal was "without admitting the guy is Satoshi"? And reinstall the paper?
MrStonedOne 6y ago
Related: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/744 https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/744 Reason number #420 why you should institute 24 hour rules on your repos (and not abuse lock functions.)
lawn 6y ago
As for why the Bitcoin Core developers were so quick to do this, the whitepaper has been a thorn in their side for years as it runs counter to the argument of Bitcoin being "digital gold" and should just be a settlement layer. So they saw this as an excuse to remove it.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  The whitepaper is why I view bitcoin’s value proposition as a gold-like store of value. Can you say more about why you think the whitepaper discourages that view?
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    The whitepaper didn’t expect/predict most hashing power being controlled by very few actors. Edit: I’d say the whitepaper did expect this and basically said it could be a problem: From the abstract: > As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attacker.
    - tylersmith 6y ago
      That's a fundamental security assumption made by Nakamoto consensus. It's like assuming the discrete log problem is hard. If/when the assumption doesn't hold the security is gone.
      - Scoundreller 6y ago
        That’s a better way of putting it. It’s a good argument for ASIC resistance and CPU dependence because it’s a lot harder to control General-Purpose CPU supply than ASIC supply. Meanwhile my regular joe laptop can earn double its electricity cost in Monero (before it thermally locks up).
      - sedeki 6y ago
        I am not a hardcore bitcoiner, but the price would fall quickly if these few controlling nodes would do something malicious. Which is against their own interest.
__blockcipher__ 6y ago
This is so bizarre. For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years). Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud: - The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back. - If Satoshi ever did want to reveal themselves, they would do it in a cryptographically undeniable way (moving coins from their wallet or signing a message with a known keypair of theirs). Also, given they dedicated at least a huge chunk of their life to giving birth to Bitcoin, which unified a bunch of cryptographic primitives and Austrian-economics type theories into a system that found the right balance of technology and economic incentives to be viable, they wouldn't be issuing frivolous lawsuits and trying to get their (anonymously distributed, freely released) whitepaper pulled from websites. - The fact that Bitcoin Core would even consider taking the whitepaper down is lunacy. Note: There's a (mostly) unrelated whole dramatic history of the great Bitcoin fork, where Bitcoin split into BTC and BCH. Supporters of BTC believe it's the one true bitcoin, and likewise for BCH. Personally, since I actually have used bitcoin as a currency, I'm team BCH because BCH is the fork that increased the blocksize limit, which was arbitrarily limiting the global transaction rate to a level so small that it led to fees in the $20-80 range at its worst (and the way BTC works is the fees are related to the bytes in the blockchain, not the amount of bitcoin itself transferred, so you'd pay an $80 fee on a $5 tx just as much as a $500 one). That transaction fee insanity was also necessary for Blockstream (a private company supporting the BTC side of the fork) to be able to profit off the delta between an idealized $0 tx fee and the actual $80+ fees, by creating systems like the lightning network which basically reinvents the whole credit card system in Bitcoin and moves transactions off chain, which as far as I'm concerned misses the point and destroys the value completely. I'm only mentioning all this because at least at one point, CSW threw his support behind BCH, which was unfortunate because now you have an actual fraud backing the coin which was actually the better coin, but made it appear like a total joke. Lastly, it's worth mentioning that even though this guy is a charlatan and fraud, he has some ideas that aren't bunk. He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). I believe that paper was this one for the curious: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312
aftbit 6y ago
If Craig Wright was Satoshi, he would be able to sign a statement proving that with the keys from the genesis block. Otherwise, he's just an obvious fraud.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Unless satoshi lost his keys lol like virtually everyone else of that cohort.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private key? You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.
    - arcticbull 6y ago
      Sure why not! It was utterly worthless at the time (and today in my opinion) and we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins. All it takes is spilling some coffee on your laptop.
      - ogogmad 6y ago
        Everything you say is true*, but there's plenty of other evidence that Craig Wright is a fraud, independent of whether he's in possession of Satoshi's private keys: https://craigwright.online/ https://craigwright.online/ * - Except where you point out that it's your opinion
      - CyberDildonics 6y ago
        > Sure why not! For multiple reasons > It was utterly worthless at the time If you read what Satoshi wrote, he didn't think it would be worthless in the future at all. > (and today in my opinion) Your opinion is contradicted by reality > we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins. They weren't the creators
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sneak 6y ago
Note that the canonical Bitcoin whitepaper url (which appears on tshirts and stickers and the like) is still just fine: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf That URL's been up since the beginning, and AFAIK isn't going anywhere. I didn't even know bitcoincore.org was a thing until today.
thedudeabides5 6y ago
Wouldn’t it be great if Satoshi’s true identity was left ambiguous...because Satoshi forgot their password and couldn’t log in again to prove it.
StreamBright 6y ago
And the bitcoin circus continues with the most bizarre turn of events.
Bellamy 6y ago
Why would "real" Satoshi first add the paper and now want to take it away?
cwkoss 6y ago
Craig Wright has done enough to hurt Bitcoin over the years that I effectively think of him as a canary: the fact that he is still walking around is evidence that there are no darkweb assassination markets that are not just scams or honeypots.
- DonHopkins 6y ago
  It just goes to show that effective assassination markets need to be centralized and corporate, not distributed and anonymous.
  - ruined 6y ago
    Unfortunately the operating space is monopolized in every jurisdiction with strong barriers against new entrants. Regulatory capture is so thorough at this point it will probably take an unforeseen externality to generate any disruption.
    - DonHopkins 6y ago
      Uber Offs!
nightowl_games 6y ago
I think Craig is a pawn who's handler's goal is to reveal Satoshi's true identity.
throwaway4good 6y ago
I am the only one who thinks Craig Wright is the writer of the Bitcoin whitepaper and the original developer? I understand why it is controversial and doesn't fit the bitcoin myth. And I don't find him particular symphatic. But he convinced Gavin Andresen and in general has the background of someone who could build this and do the writing that followed on various mailing lists and discussion forums.
- chabes 6y ago
  There’s a simple way to verify his claim, yet he has yet to do so. Why, if he could, would he not? And why would the opinion of a single person (Gavin, or anyone) be relevant to wether or not Craig’s claim is factual?
  - jonathanaird 6y ago
    He’s stated his reasoning many, many times. Legally speaking, keys do not prove identity. They prove access to keys which can be stolen. He’s making an intentional point to prove it in a court of law as a part of his bigger point that Bitcoin exists within existing legal frameworks and was not created to evade the law. Quite the opposite, it was created as a system to provide immutable evidentiary trails.
    - smitj 6y ago
      Craig worded this nicely 2 weeks ago here https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=2133 https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=2133
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  And if you read the whitepaper it is pretty obvious that the author did not intent bitcoin to be a "digital gold" secondary settlement layer. And the low transaction fee "BSV" version is a lot closer to the original idea than the current "BTC" version.
- garmaine 6y ago
  Yes. There is strait up clear evidence of his fraud. The tricks he used to convince Gavin were revealed later and shown to be fraud—he used slight of hand to reuse a historical block chain signature rather than produce one.
tehjoker 6y ago
TF even if he is Satoshi, scientific papers belong in the public domain.
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  What makes it qualify as a scientific paper? It has only 8 references, less than papers published around the same time It was self-published, not subject to peer review It has no proofs It has errors: https://gist.github.com/harding/dabea3d83c695e6b937bf090eddf2bb3 https://gist.github.com/harding/dabea3d83c695e6b937bf090eddf...
  - tehjoker 6y ago
    The content is scientific in nature and it spawned an entire field of research. The quality of the paper is of course debatable as are the ideas contained within.
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      Haha this whole exchange is such a good metaphor for classic academic gatekeeping. Satoshi gave birth to an idea that spawned an entire new type of financial system, with revolutionary implications for the world, and the GP is spending his time arguing that it didn't go through peer review and wasn't published by a real journal and therefore it's not real science :P
      - tehjoker 6y ago
        This kind of thing drives me crazy. Peer review is very valuable, but it was basically instituted to make sure government science grants were not being wasted. It also has a function of keeping crackpots out of the public information stream and increasing paper quality. However, Newton (and "Satoshi", though not at the same level as Newton by a long shot) didn't use such mechanisms but their ideas were eventually accepted (in some fashion) through wide ranging debate.
jonny_eh 6y ago
Is it even legal to claim copyright on a pseudonymously published work?
- SilasX 6y ago
  I'm more worried about whether a pseudonym can (with legal credibility) place their work under an MIT or other Free license.
  - Vespasian 6y ago
    I don't see a reason why not. If it's an original copyrightable work one would assume that the author can grant rights to others or the public. IANAL and the legal system is sometimes strange, but there is no obligation to register yourself as a copyright holder.
    - SilasX 6y ago
      Right but I was thinking more in terms of there being no legal person to say, should it go to court, “Nah, I totes licensed that for anyone to use.”
- detaro 6y ago
  Sure, just because you used a pseudonym you don't lose the rights associated with being the author. Getting people and the legal system to believe you that you are the author is your problem though.
scarmig 6y ago
There is this constant thread of seediness to the point of absurdity running through Bitcoin that makes it look like a joke that everyone is in on except the suckers buying into it. Which makes it hilarious for an observer... though I guess I don't get to laugh all the way to the bank, which is a fitting punchline.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money laundering. Were there seriously billions of dollars worth of gullible people buying ICOs and every random alt coin a few years ago? On Reddit, there are tons of spammers selling "copy trading" services. Are there actually customers for that?
  - notretarded 6y ago
    Yes
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gruez 6y ago
    >I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money laundering Because the best way to clean your dirty money is to sell tokens (which are "totally not securities") and get investigated by the SEC.
  - Stevvo 6y ago
    In the ICO boom, I worked on many of their products. For the most part, everyone from the CTO to contractors like myself knew the business plan was terrible and the founders were as deluded as the investors. We were just trying to extract as much money as possible from these companies before they went under. It worked. I was earning anywhere from $400 to $5000 an hour.
superpanic 6y ago
Would be interesting to run linguistic analysis on written text by CSW and Satoshi.
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
Huh? You can't claim authorship of anonymous publication. Neither the author, nor anybody else, it's the whole point, anonymous once anonymous forever.
- bidirectional 6y ago
  There are multiple ways one could prove themselves to be Satoshi. He has known public keys, bitcoin wallets, email accounts etc.
- aeturnum 6y ago
  As they point out, the paper is not anonymous. It is pseudonymous. "Satoshi" is a person or persons whose communications are validated through a public key (Qanon folks take note). Anyone claiming to be Satoshi can simply sign something with the associated private key and prove they were involved with the identity.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    What is the reason to believe that the key belongs to Satoshi? Did he post a proof?
- FabHK 6y ago
  That is not only false in this case, but also in general. As another refutation, consider A Warning, by Anonymous, subsequently revealed to be Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    You can personally believe such revelations, but they aren't binding.
Thorentis 6y ago
He seems like somebody who is very concerned with taking credit for things. And not just in a "hey, I made that!" kind of way, but in a "I will sue people who say I didn't make it. " [0] kind of way. This alone is enough for me dismiss his claims. Satoshi clearly intentionally wanted to remain unknown. It might be a real name, but it likely isn't. There was plenty of opportunity to reveal himself. Now that BTC is suddenly valuable and Blockchain has taken off, it is inevitable that there will be opportunists who want to personally gain from it. CSW is just one of many. Not to mention that CSW has made other false claims, such as claiming to hold a PhD when he actually doesn't [1]. There is a lawsuit where his name is titled as "Dr.". Again, alarm bells should be going off for anybody that sees that. And of course, there is a very simple way to prove he is Satoshi, which is to prove he holds the private key for a known Satoshi public key. But he can't do that, and almost certainly forged multiple keys he claims are Satoshi's [2]. [0] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bitcoin-craig-wright-20190620-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bitcoin-craig-wright-... [1] https://twitter.com/mashable/status/675193059408265216?s=20 https://twitter.com/mashable/status/675193059408265216?s=20 [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-are-probably-backdated-and-point-to-a-hoax https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-are...
- louloulou 6y ago
  Also here are a bunch of signed messages calling him a fraud using the keys to addresses HE CLAIMED TO OWN IN COURT -_- https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/ https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/ Edit: Explanation/thoughts from Wladimir regarding the removal & future of Bitcoin Core - https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html
- imaginenore 6y ago
  If CSW wanted to prove he is Satoshi, he could easily do it by signing a message with the private keys of one of the early blocks. A simple message "CSW is Satoshi" would be enough for me. But he absolutely is not Satoshi. And neither is Adam Back.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
  A real Satoshi could have lost his key, like many people lost their Bitcoin wallets. A fake Satoshi could possess the keys, by stealing or by receiving them in gift etc.
randomopining 6y ago
Bitcoin slow descent to zero? Or buying opportunity before the next moonshot?
- whoisjohnkid 6y ago
  no way to tell for sure, but the stock to flow model has been pretty accurate over the years and it projects around $90k+ by year end ... institutions like PayPal are buying directly from miners, others are applying with SEC to buy BTC for their funds ... price looks shaky, but the big players seem confident in the fundamentals ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - randomopining 6y ago
    Or are they just getting in to be the ones selling the axes during the gold rush?
    - whoisjohnkid 6y ago
      There’s definitely multiple ways to make money as an institution and yeah this is a possibility as well.
yawniek 6y ago
wouldn't he need to pay taxes?
upofadown 6y ago
>Furthermore, Satoshi Nakamoto has a known PGP public key, therefore it is cryptographically possible for someone to verify themselves to be Satoshi Nakamoto. I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't exist 50 years ago. They are a completely new discovery. The long term implications are not yet clear. They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time. This is a great example of that.
- IncRnd 6y ago
  > They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time. The fundamental difference is the medium not the properties. People can sign papers with false signatures and be erroneously identified as the actual party. That is why there are notaries, to authenticate the identity of the signer, subject to trust in third party documentation. For example, people steal houses by signing false quit-claim deeds. Signatures on paper do not have any positives properties over cryptographic signatures.
- aaron695 6y ago
  > I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't exist 50 years ago. Very new, I think you could even say almost all of computer science pre-dates them.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
  In 1655 an astronomer discovered Saturn's moon Titan. He wasn't sure of his observation but wanted to preserve his priority. So he scrambled text of his discovery in an order only he knew (a private key) and published the resulting gibberish. In this way he made it possible to verify himself later as an author of the discovery. Maybe not a very strong encryption by today's standards, but good enough for the time.
smitj 6y ago
Craig discussing the very website 2 weeks ago https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=4328 https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=4328
ur-whale 6y ago
Buterin & Poon on Wright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglmWKJBTec&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglmWKJBTec&feature=emb_logo
fogof 6y ago
I always thought bitcoin core and bitcoin.org were run by the same people. Who controls bitcoin.org?
- haakon 6y ago
  A pseudonymous individual called C0bra controls bitcoin.org.
nolim1t 6y ago
That clown is still around? Surprised no-one has put a hit on him yet.

282 points by wildrice 6y ago

"Yesterday both Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org received allegations of copyright infringement of the Bitcoin whitepaper by lawyers representing Craig Steven Wright. In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org. They also claim he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and the original owner of bitcoin.org. Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org were both asked to take down the whitepaper."

gaius_baltar 6y ago
> In this letter, they claim Craig owns the copyright to the paper, the Bitcoin name, and ownership of bitcoin.org. Isn't that basically asking for a lawsuit in the format of "Prove that you are Satoshi or be charged with perjury" ? Why is CSW still able to play these tricks?
- garmaine 6y ago
  Because the cost of the lawsuit would still be carried by these open source volunteers.
- mathiasrw 6y ago
  Yes it is. He is wanting to get into a situation where he can provide proof in a legal setting so that any outcome can be used in other legal battles.

f430 6y ago

I would be worried too if Paul Le Roux was getting released from federal penitentiary.

mmcwilliams 6y ago
Is he being released? I thought he received a 25 year sentence in 2012?
- hummel 6y ago
  Paul actively cooperates with the US justice and secret services. It is likely that his sentence will eventually be reduced.
  - f430 6y ago
    I've read somewhere that he is being released in 2025 but can't be sure.
    - rwmurrayVT 6y ago
      The BOP website lists his release date as 1/14/2034 with his status as "NOT IN BOP CUSTODY".
      - f430 6y ago
        what does that mean tho? BOP? Is he out on bail???
        fogof 6y ago
        BOP is the federal bureau of prisons. https://www.bop.gov/ https://www.bop.gov/
- waterfowl 6y ago
  The federal inmate locator lists him as not in BOP Custody. Did he get extradited somewhere? House arrest for covid?

UShouldBWorking 6y ago

This is just more of the same Blockstream (Adam Back) trying to rewrite history. Back's Blockstream hijacked the GitHub repo years ago and ever since has been working hard to buy up influence and control the narrative about Bitcoin. They artificially limited the block size which caused an increase in fees, trying to push users to their second layer solutions.

LockAndLol 6y ago

Yeah, only a few years late. Seems like a pretty fraudulent claim.

csense 6y ago

Someone should host the whitepaper on IPFS.

lawn 6y ago
They have. It's also hosted on the Bitcoin blockchain and it's forks and there are torrents of it of course. Here's how to decode it from the blockchain: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35959/how-is-the-whitepaper-decoded-from-the-blockchain-tx-with-1000x-m-of-n-multisi/35970 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/35959/how-is-the...
Sargos 6y ago
Many people thought the same thing. Here it is: https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/1352315682193436674 https://twitter.com/BrantlyMillegan/status/13523156821934366... https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth.link/ https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth.link/ will always work to view the Bitcoin whitepaper from any browser. https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth/ https://bitcoinwhitepaper.eth/ is completely decentralized but you need an IPFS enabled web browser to view. (FYI you can add .link to any .eth website to view it through an IPFS gateway)
mathiasrw 6y ago
You can get it directly from data stored in the BSV blockchain: https://bico.media/42d44c395904e6743f67011b4198d8bcc07de21c63906457e29fce84888900c6.pdf https://bico.media/42d44c395904e6743f67011b4198d8bcc07de21c6...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Nursie 6y ago

Isn't this guy literally billions in the hole to the estate of someone he claims was his partner in creating BTC, and who is co-owner of the Satoshi hoard of coins which haven't moved (ever)? Did that court case ever finish or is he still using every trick in the book to draw it out? (Kleiman v. Wright, that's what I'm thinking of) (Looks like it got kicked back to June this year due to covid)

hanniabu 6y ago
Yes, that fraud
vmception 6y ago
Yes, he failed to produce any keys, the courier with the keys never materialized, the judge has not thrown Craig Wright in jail for contempt of court nor has be been charged with perjury. The judge seems to be mildly entertained by this and views Craig Wright as mentally ill, but won't have him committed. It is all sad and strange. There are a lot of guardrails against using the system this way, but they aren't being used.
- cheaprentalyeti 6y ago
  As near as I can tell they're letting Craig Wright cosplay being Satoshi because it's another useful way of inhibiting Bitcoin's adoption and annoying the real Satoshi, wherever he is out there.
  - vmception 6y ago
    There’s nothing to suggest this one judge is part of any plan. This is just a judge playing “choose your own adventure” with live characters arguing over something he doesn't care about while providing some form of escapism.
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    Why do you believe this judge is part of an over-arching conspiracy of powerful but mute people who are attempting to inhibit the adoption of bitcoin through cosplay? Why wouldn't those super-intelligent, powerful people do something about the actual Chicago based exchange that already trades Bitcoins?

avmich 6y ago

> This surrender will no doubt be weaponized to make new false claims, like that the Bitcoin Core developers “know” CSW to be Satoshi Nakamoto and this is why they acted in this way. It's like "Bank of America paid 10 millions to the claimant - WITHOUT ADMITTING GUILT - ..." There is specific phrase for that, so - why not insist that the removal was "without admitting the guy is Satoshi"? And reinstall the paper?

MrStonedOne 6y ago

Related: https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/744 https://github.com/bitcoin-core/bitcoincore.org/pull/744 Reason number #420 why you should institute 24 hour rules on your repos (and not abuse lock functions.)

lawn 6y ago

As for why the Bitcoin Core developers were so quick to do this, the whitepaper has been a thorn in their side for years as it runs counter to the argument of Bitcoin being "digital gold" and should just be a settlement layer. So they saw this as an excuse to remove it.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
The whitepaper is why I view bitcoin’s value proposition as a gold-like store of value. Can you say more about why you think the whitepaper discourages that view?
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  The whitepaper didn’t expect/predict most hashing power being controlled by very few actors. Edit: I’d say the whitepaper did expect this and basically said it could be a problem: From the abstract: > As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and outpace attacker.
  - tylersmith 6y ago
    That's a fundamental security assumption made by Nakamoto consensus. It's like assuming the discrete log problem is hard. If/when the assumption doesn't hold the security is gone.
    - Scoundreller 6y ago
      That’s a better way of putting it. It’s a good argument for ASIC resistance and CPU dependence because it’s a lot harder to control General-Purpose CPU supply than ASIC supply. Meanwhile my regular joe laptop can earn double its electricity cost in Monero (before it thermally locks up).
    - sedeki 6y ago
      I am not a hardcore bitcoiner, but the price would fall quickly if these few controlling nodes would do something malicious. Which is against their own interest.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago

This is so bizarre. For those that aren't aware, Craig Steven Wright has publicly claimed to be Satoshi but failed to provide cryptographic proof as such, and uses his supposed identity as Satoshi to justify having a bunch of sketchily-acquired Bitcoin (I forget the full details here, it's been years). Even someone without much prior knowledge should be able to trivially deduce that this guy is a fraud: - The real Satoshi (assuming they're one individual as CSW is essentially implying) took care to maintain their anonymity, and is almost certainly aware that they would be the target of intelligence agencies around the world, in addition to your more run-of-the-mill "let's kidnap this guy and force him to transfer his enormous wealth to us" criminals. So releasing his identity publicly would be just painting a massive target on his back. - If Satoshi ever did want to reveal themselves, they would do it in a cryptographically undeniable way (moving coins from their wallet or signing a message with a known keypair of theirs). Also, given they dedicated at least a huge chunk of their life to giving birth to Bitcoin, which unified a bunch of cryptographic primitives and Austrian-economics type theories into a system that found the right balance of technology and economic incentives to be viable, they wouldn't be issuing frivolous lawsuits and trying to get their (anonymously distributed, freely released) whitepaper pulled from websites. - The fact that Bitcoin Core would even consider taking the whitepaper down is lunacy. Note: There's a (mostly) unrelated whole dramatic history of the great Bitcoin fork, where Bitcoin split into BTC and BCH. Supporters of BTC believe it's the one true bitcoin, and likewise for BCH. Personally, since I actually have used bitcoin as a currency, I'm team BCH because BCH is the fork that increased the blocksize limit, which was arbitrarily limiting the global transaction rate to a level so small that it led to fees in the $20-80 range at its worst (and the way BTC works is the fees are related to the bytes in the blockchain, not the amount of bitcoin itself transferred, so you'd pay an $80 fee on a $5 tx just as much as a $500 one). That transaction fee insanity was also necessary for Blockstream (a private company supporting the BTC side of the fork) to be able to profit off the delta between an idealized $0 tx fee and the actual $80+ fees, by creating systems like the lightning network which basically reinvents the whole credit card system in Bitcoin and moves transactions off chain, which as far as I'm concerned misses the point and destroys the value completely. I'm only mentioning all this because at least at one point, CSW threw his support behind BCH, which was unfortunate because now you have an actual fraud backing the coin which was actually the better coin, but made it appear like a total joke. Lastly, it's worth mentioning that even though this guy is a charlatan and fraud, he has some ideas that aren't bunk. He had a fairly compelling paper that argued that Bitcoin's proof-of-work model was not some inefficient, climate-change-inducing wasteful system, but rather was a system that incentivized private firms to invest in the security of the network (resistance to double-spend, etc). I believe that paper was this one for the curious: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2993312

aftbit 6y ago

If Craig Wright was Satoshi, he would be able to sign a statement proving that with the keys from the genesis block. Otherwise, he's just an obvious fraud.

arcticbull 6y ago
Unless satoshi lost his keys lol like virtually everyone else of that cohort.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private key? You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Sure why not! It was utterly worthless at the time (and today in my opinion) and we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins. All it takes is spilling some coffee on your laptop.
    - ogogmad 6y ago
      Everything you say is true*, but there's plenty of other evidence that Craig Wright is a fraud, independent of whether he's in possession of Satoshi's private keys: https://craigwright.online/ https://craigwright.online/ * - Except where you point out that it's your opinion
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      > Sure why not! For multiple reasons > It was utterly worthless at the time If you read what Satoshi wrote, he didn't think it would be worthless in the future at all. > (and today in my opinion) Your opinion is contradicted by reality > we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins. They weren't the creators

deleted 6y ago

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sneak 6y ago

Note that the canonical Bitcoin whitepaper url (which appears on tshirts and stickers and the like) is still just fine: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf That URL's been up since the beginning, and AFAIK isn't going anywhere. I didn't even know bitcoincore.org was a thing until today.

thedudeabides5 6y ago

Wouldn’t it be great if Satoshi’s true identity was left ambiguous...because Satoshi forgot their password and couldn’t log in again to prove it.

StreamBright 6y ago

And the bitcoin circus continues with the most bizarre turn of events.

Bellamy 6y ago

Why would "real" Satoshi first add the paper and now want to take it away?

cwkoss 6y ago

Craig Wright has done enough to hurt Bitcoin over the years that I effectively think of him as a canary: the fact that he is still walking around is evidence that there are no darkweb assassination markets that are not just scams or honeypots.

DonHopkins 6y ago
It just goes to show that effective assassination markets need to be centralized and corporate, not distributed and anonymous.
- ruined 6y ago
  Unfortunately the operating space is monopolized in every jurisdiction with strong barriers against new entrants. Regulatory capture is so thorough at this point it will probably take an unforeseen externality to generate any disruption.
  - DonHopkins 6y ago
    Uber Offs!

nightowl_games 6y ago

I think Craig is a pawn who's handler's goal is to reveal Satoshi's true identity.

throwaway4good 6y ago

I am the only one who thinks Craig Wright is the writer of the Bitcoin whitepaper and the original developer? I understand why it is controversial and doesn't fit the bitcoin myth. And I don't find him particular symphatic. But he convinced Gavin Andresen and in general has the background of someone who could build this and do the writing that followed on various mailing lists and discussion forums.

chabes 6y ago
There’s a simple way to verify his claim, yet he has yet to do so. Why, if he could, would he not? And why would the opinion of a single person (Gavin, or anyone) be relevant to wether or not Craig’s claim is factual?
- jonathanaird 6y ago
  He’s stated his reasoning many, many times. Legally speaking, keys do not prove identity. They prove access to keys which can be stolen. He’s making an intentional point to prove it in a court of law as a part of his bigger point that Bitcoin exists within existing legal frameworks and was not created to evade the law. Quite the opposite, it was created as a system to provide immutable evidentiary trails.
  - smitj 6y ago
    Craig worded this nicely 2 weeks ago here https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=2133 https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=2133
throwaway4good 6y ago
And if you read the whitepaper it is pretty obvious that the author did not intent bitcoin to be a "digital gold" secondary settlement layer. And the low transaction fee "BSV" version is a lot closer to the original idea than the current "BTC" version.
garmaine 6y ago
Yes. There is strait up clear evidence of his fraud. The tricks he used to convince Gavin were revealed later and shown to be fraud—he used slight of hand to reuse a historical block chain signature rather than produce one.

tehjoker 6y ago

TF even if he is Satoshi, scientific papers belong in the public domain.

iso8859-1 6y ago
What makes it qualify as a scientific paper? It has only 8 references, less than papers published around the same time It was self-published, not subject to peer review It has no proofs It has errors: https://gist.github.com/harding/dabea3d83c695e6b937bf090eddf2bb3 https://gist.github.com/harding/dabea3d83c695e6b937bf090eddf...
- tehjoker 6y ago
  The content is scientific in nature and it spawned an entire field of research. The quality of the paper is of course debatable as are the ideas contained within.
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    Haha this whole exchange is such a good metaphor for classic academic gatekeeping. Satoshi gave birth to an idea that spawned an entire new type of financial system, with revolutionary implications for the world, and the GP is spending his time arguing that it didn't go through peer review and wasn't published by a real journal and therefore it's not real science :P
    - tehjoker 6y ago
      This kind of thing drives me crazy. Peer review is very valuable, but it was basically instituted to make sure government science grants were not being wasted. It also has a function of keeping crackpots out of the public information stream and increasing paper quality. However, Newton (and "Satoshi", though not at the same level as Newton by a long shot) didn't use such mechanisms but their ideas were eventually accepted (in some fashion) through wide ranging debate.

jonny_eh 6y ago

Is it even legal to claim copyright on a pseudonymously published work?

SilasX 6y ago
I'm more worried about whether a pseudonym can (with legal credibility) place their work under an MIT or other Free license.
- Vespasian 6y ago
  I don't see a reason why not. If it's an original copyrightable work one would assume that the author can grant rights to others or the public. IANAL and the legal system is sometimes strange, but there is no obligation to register yourself as a copyright holder.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    Right but I was thinking more in terms of there being no legal person to say, should it go to court, “Nah, I totes licensed that for anyone to use.”
detaro 6y ago
Sure, just because you used a pseudonym you don't lose the rights associated with being the author. Getting people and the legal system to believe you that you are the author is your problem though.

scarmig 6y ago

There is this constant thread of seediness to the point of absurdity running through Bitcoin that makes it look like a joke that everyone is in on except the suckers buying into it. Which makes it hilarious for an observer... though I guess I don't get to laugh all the way to the bank, which is a fitting punchline.

MattGaiser 6y ago
I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money laundering. Were there seriously billions of dollars worth of gullible people buying ICOs and every random alt coin a few years ago? On Reddit, there are tons of spammers selling "copy trading" services. Are there actually customers for that?
- notretarded 6y ago
  Yes
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gruez 6y ago
  >I have to wonder if a lot of this is straight up money laundering Because the best way to clean your dirty money is to sell tokens (which are "totally not securities") and get investigated by the SEC.
- Stevvo 6y ago
  In the ICO boom, I worked on many of their products. For the most part, everyone from the CTO to contractors like myself knew the business plan was terrible and the founders were as deluded as the investors. We were just trying to extract as much money as possible from these companies before they went under. It worked. I was earning anywhere from $400 to $5000 an hour.

superpanic 6y ago

Would be interesting to run linguistic analysis on written text by CSW and Satoshi.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

Huh? You can't claim authorship of anonymous publication. Neither the author, nor anybody else, it's the whole point, anonymous once anonymous forever.

bidirectional 6y ago
There are multiple ways one could prove themselves to be Satoshi. He has known public keys, bitcoin wallets, email accounts etc.
aeturnum 6y ago
As they point out, the paper is not anonymous. It is pseudonymous. "Satoshi" is a person or persons whose communications are validated through a public key (Qanon folks take note). Anyone claiming to be Satoshi can simply sign something with the associated private key and prove they were involved with the identity.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  What is the reason to believe that the key belongs to Satoshi? Did he post a proof?
FabHK 6y ago
That is not only false in this case, but also in general. As another refutation, consider A Warning, by Anonymous, subsequently revealed to be Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  You can personally believe such revelations, but they aren't binding.

Thorentis 6y ago

He seems like somebody who is very concerned with taking credit for things. And not just in a "hey, I made that!" kind of way, but in a "I will sue people who say I didn't make it. " [0] kind of way. This alone is enough for me dismiss his claims. Satoshi clearly intentionally wanted to remain unknown. It might be a real name, but it likely isn't. There was plenty of opportunity to reveal himself. Now that BTC is suddenly valuable and Blockchain has taken off, it is inevitable that there will be opportunists who want to personally gain from it. CSW is just one of many. Not to mention that CSW has made other false claims, such as claiming to hold a PhD when he actually doesn't [1]. There is a lawsuit where his name is titled as "Dr.". Again, alarm bells should be going off for anybody that sees that. And of course, there is a very simple way to prove he is Satoshi, which is to prove he holds the private key for a known Satoshi public key. But he can't do that, and almost certainly forged multiple keys he claims are Satoshi's [2]. [0] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bitcoin-craig-wright-20190620-story.html https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-bitcoin-craig-wright-... [1] https://twitter.com/mashable/status/675193059408265216?s=20 https://twitter.com/mashable/status/675193059408265216?s=20 [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-are-probably-backdated-and-point-to-a-hoax https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpgq3y/satoshis-pgp-keys-are...

louloulou 6y ago
Also here are a bunch of signed messages calling him a fraud using the keys to addresses HE CLAIMED TO OWN IN COURT -_- https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/ https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/ Edit: Explanation/thoughts from Wladimir regarding the removal & future of Bitcoin Core - https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html https://laanwj.github.io/2021/01/21/decentralize.html
imaginenore 6y ago
If CSW wanted to prove he is Satoshi, he could easily do it by signing a message with the private keys of one of the early blocks. A simple message "CSW is Satoshi" would be enough for me. But he absolutely is not Satoshi. And neither is Adam Back.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
A real Satoshi could have lost his key, like many people lost their Bitcoin wallets. A fake Satoshi could possess the keys, by stealing or by receiving them in gift etc.

randomopining 6y ago

Bitcoin slow descent to zero? Or buying opportunity before the next moonshot?

whoisjohnkid 6y ago
no way to tell for sure, but the stock to flow model has been pretty accurate over the years and it projects around $90k+ by year end ... institutions like PayPal are buying directly from miners, others are applying with SEC to buy BTC for their funds ... price looks shaky, but the big players seem confident in the fundamentals ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- randomopining 6y ago
  Or are they just getting in to be the ones selling the axes during the gold rush?
  - whoisjohnkid 6y ago
    There’s definitely multiple ways to make money as an institution and yeah this is a possibility as well.

yawniek 6y ago

wouldn't he need to pay taxes?

upofadown 6y ago

>Furthermore, Satoshi Nakamoto has a known PGP public key, therefore it is cryptographically possible for someone to verify themselves to be Satoshi Nakamoto. I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't exist 50 years ago. They are a completely new discovery. The long term implications are not yet clear. They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time. This is a great example of that.

IncRnd 6y ago
> They are fundamentally different from the paper and ink signatures they are named after in that they can give an entirely anonymous person a consistent voice over a long period of time. The fundamental difference is the medium not the properties. People can sign papers with false signatures and be erroneously identified as the actual party. That is why there are notaries, to authenticate the identity of the signer, subject to trust in third party documentation. For example, people steal houses by signing false quit-claim deeds. Signatures on paper do not have any positives properties over cryptographic signatures.
aaron695 6y ago
> I find cryptographic signatures fascinating in that they didn't exist 50 years ago. Very new, I think you could even say almost all of computer science pre-dates them.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 6y ago
In 1655 an astronomer discovered Saturn's moon Titan. He wasn't sure of his observation but wanted to preserve his priority. So he scrambled text of his discovery in an order only he knew (a private key) and published the resulting gibberish. In this way he made it possible to verify himself later as an author of the discovery. Maybe not a very strong encryption by today's standards, but good enough for the time.

smitj 6y ago

Craig discussing the very website 2 weeks ago https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=4328 https://youtu.be/_E7iuVM4CIA?t=4328

ur-whale 6y ago

Buterin & Poon on Wright: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglmWKJBTec&feature=emb_logo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TglmWKJBTec&feature=emb_logo

fogof 6y ago

I always thought bitcoin core and bitcoin.org were run by the same people. Who controls bitcoin.org?

haakon 6y ago
A pseudonymous individual called C0bra controls bitcoin.org.

nolim1t 6y ago

That clown is still around? Surprised no-one has put a hit on him yet.