12 ms·

Self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor largely prevails in $54B Bitcoin trial

49 points by avonmach 5y ago

detaro 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29465005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29465005
cosmojg 5y ago
Someone else ought to also claim to be Satoshi and sue Craig for fraud. That'd be fun to watch.
- wmf 5y ago
  So they could burn a ton of legal fees and encourage the media to teach the controversy even more?
- nullc 5y ago
  There are a couple other Satoshi impersonating scammers. None of them are anywhere near as capable at Craig at it, partially because Craig landed such a large source of funding. So if you've got a few tens of millions you'd like to blow there are some scammers you could throw it at that would probably provide the entertainment that you're looking for.
bhouston 5y ago
I wonder if we never find the original keys for this crypto, if he is declared the legal owner he will be able to somehow force ownership of this crypto via some type of forced code change in the Bitcoin blockchain? Given that $50B are at stake, I could see things getting weird.
- jstx1 5y ago
  You don't get to make a forced change to Bitcoin's code unilaterally, the rest of the network has to accept the change.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Uncle Sam: “Accept this change” Node: “No” Sam: *ICBM rolls out* (I’m not saying they would, I’m saying they could).
    - jstx1 5y ago
      There isn't a single node to point to, it's a globally distributed network.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        And?
        gizdan 5y ago
        So you think they'll send ballistic missiles throughout the whole world? Including China, Russia, UK, Germany, France? All of whom have nukes? Good luck with that.
        ben_w 5y ago
        I very explicitly didn’t say they would. I’m saying they could, and implicitly that if America was so inclined it can menace basically anyone and any nation just by pointing at their massive collection of pointy things that hurt.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      Hopefully the next step is that those coins were in another nation with their own ICBM stockpile so that we can end the whole humanity experiment once and for all.
    - karaterobot 5y ago
      > (I’m not saying they would, I’m saying they could). I'm not a lawyer, but I'm skeptical that a judge's ruling could force Congress or the President to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles. I don't think that's ever happened, and (as you say) this won't be the time it does.
- ben_w 5y ago
  I wonder how that would shake out in practice. Everyone in US required to use one fork with such a change, everyone else in the world ignoring it?
  - adventured 5y ago
    It would never arrive at practice.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  I'd bet he sings a different tune if the UK ever institutes a wealth tax.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    What? Why? Even if the wealth tax is 90%, 10% of $50B is a lot better than 0% of $50B.
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      Unless you think he's actually Satoshi, he doesn't actually have access to the $50B, so even a 1% wealth tax would require him to pay $500M... which he doesn't have.
      - kristjansson 5y ago
        This verdict already requires he pay $1e8, which presumably he doesn't have?
        ceejayoz 5y ago
        I'd rather be dodging a private creditor than a nation-state with the power to revoke my passport, though.
        nullc 5y ago
        Wright is already prepped for further flight. After fleeing from AU he obtained an antiguan passport.
- thebean11 5y ago
  A court would have to force Bitcoin users and miners to run a patched version of the software that unlocks those coins. Not likely to work; it's in literally every other Bitcoin user's best interest that those 1.1M coins don't move.
  - gizdan 5y ago
    > A court would have to force Bitcoin users and miners In case it's not clear, even if the court did this and was able to enforce it, they would still need to enforce it outside of the country too, where, if I'm not mistaken, the majority of miners are.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      I'd actually love to see CW win this case, because it would prove definitively that bitcoin cannot be regulated.
      - nullc 5y ago
        So you're okay with a dozen of Bitcoin's longest standing developers being personally bankrupted?
        betwixthewires 5y ago
        No, I'm not. When I say "I'd love to see" I'm of course being facetious. Of course I don't want these individuals (including yourself) to be held liable personally to him. But if he did win, he wouldn't get the coins, and it would demonstrate that bitcoin cannot be forcibly regulated.
        nullc 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm with you. Sorry for the defensive response! I confess I replied something through a lens of personal irritation: For years the Bitcoin ecosystem has treated wright like a troll "he just wants attention, ignore him" -- but in doing so it's really enabled his fraud to grow and become a big problem. So you triggered thought of people switching to a "oh it's good if he obliterates these people, it'll prove Bitcoin is anti-fragile!" ... well, sorry for being cynical. :) Bitcoin absolutely would survive his attack here, whatever happens. Though it may be a setback, e.g. if it creates a big incentive against people of high capability, integrity, and experience to contributing to maintaining the software.
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  There is $0 at stake, because CSW is not Satoshi. A hard fork to steal coins was his goal all along, with forking Bcash into BSV. CSW knew he would never convince Bitcoin, so he decided to use the State to force the return of coins that do not belong to him. Only his sycophants in BSV would agree to such treachery. Which in itself should be more evidence that this man is not Satoshi.
  - lawn 5y ago
    > forking Bcash https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bitcoin-cash-bcash-this-will-be-shocking-to-new-readers-956558da12fb https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...
    - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      Sep 18, 2017 BCash price, $471.09 (approx 0.12 BTC) Dec 7, 2021 Bcash price, $481.53 (approx 0.00944385 BTC) Today, it has 0.74% of the Bitcoin hashrate. Since its creation, it has lost 92% of its value in Bitcoin. So yes, bcash is awful. Don't touch the affinity scams.
- delusional 5y ago
  Apparently he sued for that back in May https://www.reuters.com/technology/australias-wright-launches-lawsuit-over-57-bln-bitcoin-haul-2021-05-12/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/australias-wright-launche...
- lawn 5y ago
  There's already signed proof on the blockchain saying that Craig Wright is a fraud, from blocks that Craig Wright claimed to have mined: https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/ https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/
- Geee 5y ago
  They could force exchanges to hand over funds from those addresses, if they're ever deposited there. Forcing a hard fork is not practically possible.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  He might be able to compel contributors to fork the code on his behalf, but he can't force the miners to use that codebase. He cannot compel a fork of the chain, only of the codebase. What would happen, worst case scenario, is that the "official" codebase gets code included to give him his rightfully owned monies, but an unmolested "fork" would be adopted by the network and continue on as the widely used codebase, probably contributed to by the same people, possibly under pseudonyms to prevent this horse shit in the future.
  - nullc 5y ago
    > He might be able to compel contributors to fork the code on his behalf The US frowns on compelled speech and compelled labor. :) > but he can't force the miners to use that codebase. Miners aren't the relevant party of interest-- users are. He can't force users to adopt a version of Bitcoin that allows blocks which steal coins. > What would happen, worst case scenario, is that the "official" codebase gets code included to give him his rightfully owned monies Nah, that wouldn't happen. That repository would be shut off before that would happen, not only for ethical reasons but because anyone who distributed such maliciously backdoored software would be exposed to litigation by everyone else, especially if Wright established that in practice open source developers could be found civilly liable even though their license has a hard bar against that kind of liability. > but an unmolested "fork" would be adopted by the network and continue on as the widely used codebase Indeed, there are already many forks and alternative versions. > probably contributed to by the same people, possibly under pseudonyms to prevent this horse shit in the future That I doubt. It's not worth it to take the risk of millions of dollars of legal fees to contribute to a volunteer open source project.
cmer 5y ago
Let's clarify. This does NOT mean that a judge said he was Satoshi. We all know CW is a fraud.
iamben 5y ago
Can someone with a bit more background or understanding give me an ELI5 as to what Wright is doing / gets from this? I'm assuming the 1.1m bitcoin refers to whatever Satoshi was meant to have mined? Which I assumed was 'lost'? Not really a crypto person, just very curious and the article is lacking detail! Thanks!
- thebean11 5y ago
  My understanding is that he's claiming he lost billions of dollars in Bitcoin to get a massive tax deduction. Most people think he's lying.
  - AustinDev 5y ago
    That's not how this would work... I lost ~1,000 BTC and ~10,000 LTC in ~2011. I couldn't write it off at even the current value at the time if I wanted to write it off I would have to write it off at my cost basis which is the value when I mined them which was barely 50 dollars iirc. That's what my tax guy said at least if this is wrong let me know because I won't ever be paying capital gains tax again if I can write it off at current value.
    - cosmojg 5y ago
      > I won't ever be paying capital gains tax again if I can write it off at current value. I'm in a similar boat. I honestly can't wait until the tax rules around cryptocurrencies are finally fully hashed out, clarified, and published.
    - 3np 5y ago
      CW is not a US tax resident afaik
    - nullc 5y ago
      Wright's past tax scam is a bit more subtle than what you and (probably) the prior poster imagine. AU has a program where if you spend money on R&D you can get a refundable tax credit-- not just a deduction, but like EITC in the US they'll actually cut you a check. Wright spun up a collection of companies that engaged in no business (or research) except claiming these tax credits. According to his own companies documentation, all in all he claimed to have performed $200m in research and requested $65m in credits. The first year he attempted this he did it with smaller values and they paid out, but in later years he tripped audit alarm bells. The AU tax office immediately started asking where he got the $200 million that he claims he spent on research. This is the origin of Wright claiming to have invented Bitcoin: he claimed he had some enormous trove of bitcoin's held overseas and that his companies were funded by taking out loans against them. Wright made a massive amount of forgeries to support his claims across a couple years of fighting with the ATO. The tax office thoroughly debunked and discredited wright's lies and forgeries and found against him, ordering him to repay the money. At that point Wright took the show on the road, literally: He fled AU while the police were raiding his offices, and started selling shares of his fictional fortune and fictional intellectual property to others in order to cover the AU clawback and finance his lifestyle. Since then his life has been a series of forced moves, lie after lie in a growing snowball to delay the collapse of his con. For example, for a while he held off his "investors" (victims) by claiming that the Bitcoins were in trust and would be delivered by a bonded courier in Jan 2020 (like that scene in back to the future 2) -- but after that date came and went he claimed that the coins were delivered by were stolen from him by hackers that hid a wifi pineapple in his home and that now he's going to get them back by suing Bitcoin developers to backdoor the system to return them to him.
endisneigh 5y ago
I thought Bitcoin was impervious to legal matters and reality in general?
- Traster 5y ago
  I actually think in this case it basically is. The court can say those bitcoin are his, but if he doesn't have the wallet he doesn't have the wallet. The only way to get the coins would be to introduce a hard fork that moves those bitcoins, but good luck trying to get a court to mandate every bitcoin miner across the entire world move to a specific peice of software, and then good luck enforcing it. Especially since unlocking those coins would represent about 5% of all the bitcoins ever made.
  - ansible 5y ago
    If whoever "owns" the BTC gets the fork as desired, and then tries to sell the BTC, that will massively decrease the conversion rate to fiat money (like USD). So for everyone in the current network, it is in their best interests for those BTC to remain unspendable in a lost wallet. The only way a fork would work if the "owner" were to promise most of it to at least 51% of the current miners. Is all that correct?
    - squeaky-clean 5y ago
      I think any fork of this nature would erode the trust in bitcoin and destroy the value immediately regardless of what happens to the coins themselves.
      - nullc 5y ago
        I suspect it would just go unnoticed, other than to whatever extent he managed to disrupt the Bitcoin Core software project. Wright already has a fork "Bitcoin SV" that most people have just ignored.
    - betwixthewires 5y ago
      It is correct, but I'd add that the adversarial environment means that if 51% of miners were to collude to take some portion of the money, they'd rather collude to take all the money, which takes away the incentive for anyone to arrange a fork to do this, and if that were going to happen it would be happening all the time. What would probably actually happen is that such a fork would be obviously illegitimate to users, exchanges, etc and people would use the unforked chain deliberately, and after some hash rate adjustment and delayed block times, the forked chain, even with 51% of the hash rate, would be close to valueless. Miners don't like mining valueless chuck e cheese tokens, so their hash power would return to the broadly accepted network. This BTW demonstrates a security property of PoW that you don't get with PoS: you can't mine two networks with the same hash power, you have to pick one or the other. If bitcoin were a PoS system, validators could just stake both chains and make a riskless bet on the winning one, and even benefit from both.
ice_futures 5y ago
This clown sued the bitcoin developers in May for the coins he cannot access. Anyone know what happened to that?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- nullc 5y ago
  It's still ongoing. We have a hearing scheduled for March to challenge the jurisdiction of the UK courts and move to strike out his claims. Background: Wright has sued a dozen former and current Bitcoin developers, demanding that they publish backdoored Bitcoin software to allow him to take coins which are unambiguously not his, and failing that he demands they pay him roughly $7 billion USD in damages. Obviously the case isn't even intended to be successful, it's intended to take a long time so that Wright can continue selling shares in Bitcoin he doesn't own and will never have access too, and to harass people who wouldn't aid his fraud in the process.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I think he's doing an interesting attack on the network: the concept is that if you can't sign a transaction then the coins aren't yours. If he can use the legal system to get around that restriction, and actually compel a fork of the bitcoin software and bitcoin network to take possession of them, he's demonstrated a security vulnerability. Of course, this attack vector would be moot if all miners were anonymous and all contributors to code were anonymous, or if all amounts and addresses were private. Maybe Craig Wright deliberately made the bitcoin blockchain transparent so he could perform this attack later (/s if it's not obvious).
    - nullc 5y ago
      Anyone can create a fork at any time whenever they want. What they can't do is get users to use their fork and call it Bitcoin. Wright has already attempted this: He has a fork of Bitcoin called "Bitcoin SV" (satoshi's vision) which he claims is the real Bitcoin and that Bitcoin is an imposter. Today it has well under 1% of Bitcoin's hashpower, well under 1$ of Bitcoin's price (and has fallen a LOT relative to Bitcoin), and it's now down to less than 40 reachable nodes. Most of the few exchanges that have ever had it have dropped it, and it has recently had suffered some extremely severe reorg attacks -- causing millions of dollars in losses to at least one exchange. For the purpose of Wright's backdoor demands miners are irrelevant. If contributors were all anonymous you'd have the problem that they might actually be wright. He's even suing former developers like me, who haven't contributed for a couple years (or more!) ... really the targets of the lawsuit don't have much connection to reality. And the more obscure you make it to get the software the more ability he'd have to just setup impersonation sites to get people to run his malicious version instead. Also, anonymity hasn't helped that much in the case of the owner of Bitcoin.org-- being anonymous just caused him to lose in a default judgement when Wright sued him because the UK will not allow an anonymous party to defend themselves. Ultimately they'll likely have to deanonymize to prevent Wright from seizing Bitcoin.org. Addresses being private wouldn't really change anything about Wright's attack. He'd still demand to be given coins just the same. In fact, as of the moment Bitcoin is anonymous enough to severely frustrate his efforts: He claims to "own" 1.1M BTC but right now he's only suing developers for a backdoor to acces 0.111M of it, because whenever he'd claimed specific addresses for more he's gotten nailed by the true owners signing messages. So right now he's only going after a smaller portion where he can be confident the current controlling party won't speak up (the bulk of those coins were stolen from MTGox and haven't moved since).
maximedupre 5y ago
How did I just learn about this guy haha
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Probably because he's one of the least credible people on the planet, and even faked his own PGP key in a desperate attempt to get people to care about his sham.
smoldesu 5y ago
What a complete and total fraud. This guy has so many Bitcoin-related publications wrapped around his finger that it's frankly dizzying. I have no idea what he did to get this far, but the fact that he actually got them to settle in his favor is another testament to how utterly broken the US legal system is.
- nullc 5y ago
  > but the fact that he actually got them to settle in his favor is another testament to how utterly broken the US legal system is. He didn't. The jury found him civilly liable for $100 million USD in damages. They didn't find that he had to hand over half the fictional bitcoins he claimed to have, -- presumably because they rightfully realized it was all a bunch of bullshit. The fact that both industry and mainstream media articles are all just paraphrases of Wright's press releases is an example of how broken human journalism is these days.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    That actually makes the article make more sense to me. He didn't win shit, this is optics spin.
    - nullc 5y ago
      Yep. I think this is close the worst possible ruling for Wright. If they'd found against him on the other claims at least he'd be able to say that the jury certainly bought into his claim of owning a ton of early Bitcoin. There would have been much more damages, but $100 million or $25 billion will bankrupt him equally either way.
exdsq 5y ago
What a tosser - I feel bad for the software developers being dragged into this and having to put up a legal defence because he's let his ego trump truth
joelbondurant 5y ago
Craig is a degenerate scammer.
foobarbecue 5y ago
I recently read The Greatest Hoax on Earth and my takeaway was the incredible extent to which bumbling pathological liars like Frank Abagnale or CW can build credibility through sheer persistence.
- nullc 5y ago
  It's really super fascinating. Also many people are never taken and see that it's fake all along, even blowing the whistle but it just gets ignored. It often seems to take a long time for scams like this to really collapse. Or, I should say I'd find it fascinating if I weren't a target and a victim of it. :( being forced to live it is less than fun.
andruby 5y ago
I wonder if we'll ever figure out who Satoshi is/was. I'd love to know. On the other hand, I do want to respect their wish to stay anonymous. Whomever that person is, it must feel very weird. They either still have access to the private keys and are, on paper at least, in the top 10 richest people in the world. Or they no longer have access to the keys and must feel some form of "loss". Or it was never a person and always an organisation. So many unknowns :-) There must have been countless investigations into this. Journalists, governments, shady organisations. It's hard to imagine no-one has uncovered Satoshi yet.
- tim333 5y ago
  I don't think it's that had to figure if you look into it but people don't like to say as the guy obviously wants a bit of anonymity. It's not that no one's uncovered Satoshi so much as they have uncovered about a dozen possible ones.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  If anyone knows, it's US intelligence. They're so good at fingerprinting it's crazy. I highly doubt that they wouldn't be able to identify the person / people behind Satoshi.
- moritonal 5y ago
  It's an interesting dilemma. Satoshi has billions in Bitcoin, but moving any of it would shock its value. They either haven't cashed out because they truly believe in Bitcoins principles, or they cannot. My belief is that they've sadly passed and were either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist... or another relatively quiet engineer.
  - ryandvm 5y ago
    It's Schrödinger's Investment. Theoretically worth billions, but interacting with it would cause its value to collapse.
betwixthewires 5y ago
> Wright claimed in 2016 that he was Nakamoto, which was a pseudonym. The claim has been disputed. It's beyond disputed; the man can literally sign a message at any point in time that he likes that would definitively prove his claim, and he refuses. This to me is proof positive that he is lying. Someone who built a cryptosystem for artificial digital scarcity, who relied entirely on digital signatures to prove pseudonymous identity would absolutely 100% prove their claim using these methods. Craig Wright is an obvious fraud. The article is not very informative about the case, I'd love to know more about why some bitcoin mined by satoshi nakamoto, supposedly owned by a man claiming to be satoshi nakamoto, was under the possession of someone else and needed a trial to return possession to him.
- nullc 5y ago
  It's beyond beyond disputed: Wright was forced by the court to provide a sworn list of his bitcoin holdings as of 2013, and when he provided a list, immediately people owning thousands of Bitcoins came out of the woodwork signing messages with addresses Wright claimed to own calling Wright a fraud. https://cswarchive.info/csw-filed#145-Signings https://cswarchive.info/csw-filed#145-Signings So it isn't just that if it were true he could trivially prove it with a digital signature-- but that the true owners of many coins he claimed to control have stepped up and provided signatures saying that they're not Wright! Unfortunately, Wright and his conspirators are spending millions to support and prolong their fraud and so it's no great difficulty for them to more or less control the media presentation of the situation.
  - tim333 5y ago
    So given he doesn't own much I wonder how he's going to pay the $100m settlement?
    - nullc 5y ago
      $100m judgement, he may settle it (vs deal with appeals) for a different amount. Wright has scored some extremely wealthy sponsors who have been loaning wright money in exchange for a share in his fictional treasure. So I think it's possible that he'll actually be able to pay for a settlement in this case using their money. It's an astronomical amount of money, but the amounts of money being pumped into wrights con have been astronomical for a long time. $100m wouldn't even be particularly disproportionate compared to what's gone into propping up TAAL, for example. It's also possible-- even likely-- that he just won't pay it. I believe he still owes $60k-ish for a judgement for legal fees in an action in Norway, which he's owed for well over a year. He went over a year before paying legal fees he owed Adam Back for an aborted defamation lawsuit against Back. Civil recovery can be spotty at the best of times, and in this case we're talking about someone whos already fled one country to escape his legal problems and has established citizenship in a location known to block extraditions for criminals (including Wright's business partner / primary victim, Calvin Ayre who spent a decade on DHS's most wanted list).
bloak 5y ago
That's Craig Yeah Wright, as he was referred to in TheRegister.
cs702 5y ago
Here we have someone claiming to be the creator of a cryptocurrency and the owner of a large balance in a distributed ledger in a court of law (!), in front of a judge and a jury., while journalists at a reputable organization reporting on the trial are trying to figure out whether this person is being truthful or not. And of course, there isn't even a single mention of "private key" in the article. Yikes. We live in a world in which the vast majority of people -- including the vast majority of judges and journalists -- lack the education necessary for understanding the fundamental building blocks of modern computer security. They do not understand, cannot explain, and cannot reason about public-key cryptography. The notion of "proving ownership publicly by signing a sequence of bits with a private key" is utterly foreign to them. Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education.
- nullc 5y ago
  It's far worse than that... because the journalism falls down well before it gets into the hightech stuff. This case wasn't even over Wright being Satoshi or anything like that. And the outcome of the case was that the jury apparently didn't believe wright's claims of creating or mining bitcoin. They found Wright civilly liable for $100 million in damages for raiding his dead friends business by impersonating it in AU court, which he essentially admitted to in court (though obfuscated by claiming it was normal business practices to engage in sham lawsuits against yourself). So all this stuff about Satoshi this and that are pretty much entirely incidental to the court, and to the extent it came up at all the jury didn't fall for it. This is entirely the opposite view you'd get from the mass media articles because they're all parroting lightly "balanced" press releases from Wright.
  - cs702 5y ago
    > ...because they're all parroting lightly "balanced" press releases from Wright. Double-yikes :-(
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  > Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education. Not so fast. A trial with this large an amount at stake goes to a pretty senior judge. Blaming the public educational system of, say, 1975 for not teaching private key is... a bit misguided. (If they came out of the public school system in 2010, I could see your case. But I'd bet the judge of this case didn't...)
gvv 5y ago
Imagine going through all of this instead of just signing one tx...really makes you think.

49 points by avonmach 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29466773 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29465005 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29465005

cosmojg 5y ago

Someone else ought to also claim to be Satoshi and sue Craig for fraud. That'd be fun to watch.

wmf 5y ago
So they could burn a ton of legal fees and encourage the media to teach the controversy even more?
nullc 5y ago
There are a couple other Satoshi impersonating scammers. None of them are anywhere near as capable at Craig at it, partially because Craig landed such a large source of funding. So if you've got a few tens of millions you'd like to blow there are some scammers you could throw it at that would probably provide the entertainment that you're looking for.

bhouston 5y ago

I wonder if we never find the original keys for this crypto, if he is declared the legal owner he will be able to somehow force ownership of this crypto via some type of forced code change in the Bitcoin blockchain? Given that $50B are at stake, I could see things getting weird.

jstx1 5y ago
You don't get to make a forced change to Bitcoin's code unilaterally, the rest of the network has to accept the change.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Uncle Sam: “Accept this change” Node: “No” Sam: *ICBM rolls out* (I’m not saying they would, I’m saying they could).
  - jstx1 5y ago
    There isn't a single node to point to, it's a globally distributed network.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      And?
      - gizdan 5y ago
        So you think they'll send ballistic missiles throughout the whole world? Including China, Russia, UK, Germany, France? All of whom have nukes? Good luck with that.
        ben_w 5y ago
        I very explicitly didn’t say they would. I’m saying they could, and implicitly that if America was so inclined it can menace basically anyone and any nation just by pointing at their massive collection of pointy things that hurt.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    Hopefully the next step is that those coins were in another nation with their own ICBM stockpile so that we can end the whole humanity experiment once and for all.
  - karaterobot 5y ago
    > (I’m not saying they would, I’m saying they could). I'm not a lawyer, but I'm skeptical that a judge's ruling could force Congress or the President to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles. I don't think that's ever happened, and (as you say) this won't be the time it does.
ben_w 5y ago
I wonder how that would shake out in practice. Everyone in US required to use one fork with such a change, everyone else in the world ignoring it?
- adventured 5y ago
  It would never arrive at practice.
ceejayoz 5y ago
I'd bet he sings a different tune if the UK ever institutes a wealth tax.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  What? Why? Even if the wealth tax is 90%, 10% of $50B is a lot better than 0% of $50B.
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    Unless you think he's actually Satoshi, he doesn't actually have access to the $50B, so even a 1% wealth tax would require him to pay $500M... which he doesn't have.
    - kristjansson 5y ago
      This verdict already requires he pay $1e8, which presumably he doesn't have?
      - ceejayoz 5y ago
        I'd rather be dodging a private creditor than a nation-state with the power to revoke my passport, though.
        nullc 5y ago
        Wright is already prepped for further flight. After fleeing from AU he obtained an antiguan passport.
thebean11 5y ago
A court would have to force Bitcoin users and miners to run a patched version of the software that unlocks those coins. Not likely to work; it's in literally every other Bitcoin user's best interest that those 1.1M coins don't move.
- gizdan 5y ago
  > A court would have to force Bitcoin users and miners In case it's not clear, even if the court did this and was able to enforce it, they would still need to enforce it outside of the country too, where, if I'm not mistaken, the majority of miners are.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    I'd actually love to see CW win this case, because it would prove definitively that bitcoin cannot be regulated.
    - nullc 5y ago
      So you're okay with a dozen of Bitcoin's longest standing developers being personally bankrupted?
      - betwixthewires 5y ago
        No, I'm not. When I say "I'd love to see" I'm of course being facetious. Of course I don't want these individuals (including yourself) to be held liable personally to him. But if he did win, he wouldn't get the coins, and it would demonstrate that bitcoin cannot be forcibly regulated.
        nullc 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm with you. Sorry for the defensive response! I confess I replied something through a lens of personal irritation: For years the Bitcoin ecosystem has treated wright like a troll "he just wants attention, ignore him" -- but in doing so it's really enabled his fraud to grow and become a big problem. So you triggered thought of people switching to a "oh it's good if he obliterates these people, it'll prove Bitcoin is anti-fragile!" ... well, sorry for being cynical. :) Bitcoin absolutely would survive his attack here, whatever happens. Though it may be a setback, e.g. if it creates a big incentive against people of high capability, integrity, and experience to contributing to maintaining the software.
rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
There is $0 at stake, because CSW is not Satoshi. A hard fork to steal coins was his goal all along, with forking Bcash into BSV. CSW knew he would never convince Bitcoin, so he decided to use the State to force the return of coins that do not belong to him. Only his sycophants in BSV would agree to such treachery. Which in itself should be more evidence that this man is not Satoshi.
- lawn 5y ago
  > forking Bcash https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bitcoin-cash-bcash-this-will-be-shocking-to-new-readers-956558da12fb https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    Sep 18, 2017 BCash price, $471.09 (approx 0.12 BTC) Dec 7, 2021 Bcash price, $481.53 (approx 0.00944385 BTC) Today, it has 0.74% of the Bitcoin hashrate. Since its creation, it has lost 92% of its value in Bitcoin. So yes, bcash is awful. Don't touch the affinity scams.
delusional 5y ago
Apparently he sued for that back in May https://www.reuters.com/technology/australias-wright-launches-lawsuit-over-57-bln-bitcoin-haul-2021-05-12/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/australias-wright-launche...
lawn 5y ago
There's already signed proof on the blockchain saying that Craig Wright is a fraud, from blocks that Craig Wright claimed to have mined: https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/ https://craigwrightisnotsatoshi.com/
Geee 5y ago
They could force exchanges to hand over funds from those addresses, if they're ever deposited there. Forcing a hard fork is not practically possible.
betwixthewires 5y ago
He might be able to compel contributors to fork the code on his behalf, but he can't force the miners to use that codebase. He cannot compel a fork of the chain, only of the codebase. What would happen, worst case scenario, is that the "official" codebase gets code included to give him his rightfully owned monies, but an unmolested "fork" would be adopted by the network and continue on as the widely used codebase, probably contributed to by the same people, possibly under pseudonyms to prevent this horse shit in the future.
- nullc 5y ago
  > He might be able to compel contributors to fork the code on his behalf The US frowns on compelled speech and compelled labor. :) > but he can't force the miners to use that codebase. Miners aren't the relevant party of interest-- users are. He can't force users to adopt a version of Bitcoin that allows blocks which steal coins. > What would happen, worst case scenario, is that the "official" codebase gets code included to give him his rightfully owned monies Nah, that wouldn't happen. That repository would be shut off before that would happen, not only for ethical reasons but because anyone who distributed such maliciously backdoored software would be exposed to litigation by everyone else, especially if Wright established that in practice open source developers could be found civilly liable even though their license has a hard bar against that kind of liability. > but an unmolested "fork" would be adopted by the network and continue on as the widely used codebase Indeed, there are already many forks and alternative versions. > probably contributed to by the same people, possibly under pseudonyms to prevent this horse shit in the future That I doubt. It's not worth it to take the risk of millions of dollars of legal fees to contribute to a volunteer open source project.

cmer 5y ago

Let's clarify. This does NOT mean that a judge said he was Satoshi. We all know CW is a fraud.

iamben 5y ago

Can someone with a bit more background or understanding give me an ELI5 as to what Wright is doing / gets from this? I'm assuming the 1.1m bitcoin refers to whatever Satoshi was meant to have mined? Which I assumed was 'lost'? Not really a crypto person, just very curious and the article is lacking detail! Thanks!

thebean11 5y ago
My understanding is that he's claiming he lost billions of dollars in Bitcoin to get a massive tax deduction. Most people think he's lying.
- AustinDev 5y ago
  That's not how this would work... I lost ~1,000 BTC and ~10,000 LTC in ~2011. I couldn't write it off at even the current value at the time if I wanted to write it off I would have to write it off at my cost basis which is the value when I mined them which was barely 50 dollars iirc. That's what my tax guy said at least if this is wrong let me know because I won't ever be paying capital gains tax again if I can write it off at current value.
  - cosmojg 5y ago
    > I won't ever be paying capital gains tax again if I can write it off at current value. I'm in a similar boat. I honestly can't wait until the tax rules around cryptocurrencies are finally fully hashed out, clarified, and published.
  - 3np 5y ago
    CW is not a US tax resident afaik
  - nullc 5y ago
    Wright's past tax scam is a bit more subtle than what you and (probably) the prior poster imagine. AU has a program where if you spend money on R&D you can get a refundable tax credit-- not just a deduction, but like EITC in the US they'll actually cut you a check. Wright spun up a collection of companies that engaged in no business (or research) except claiming these tax credits. According to his own companies documentation, all in all he claimed to have performed $200m in research and requested $65m in credits. The first year he attempted this he did it with smaller values and they paid out, but in later years he tripped audit alarm bells. The AU tax office immediately started asking where he got the $200 million that he claims he spent on research. This is the origin of Wright claiming to have invented Bitcoin: he claimed he had some enormous trove of bitcoin's held overseas and that his companies were funded by taking out loans against them. Wright made a massive amount of forgeries to support his claims across a couple years of fighting with the ATO. The tax office thoroughly debunked and discredited wright's lies and forgeries and found against him, ordering him to repay the money. At that point Wright took the show on the road, literally: He fled AU while the police were raiding his offices, and started selling shares of his fictional fortune and fictional intellectual property to others in order to cover the AU clawback and finance his lifestyle. Since then his life has been a series of forced moves, lie after lie in a growing snowball to delay the collapse of his con. For example, for a while he held off his "investors" (victims) by claiming that the Bitcoins were in trust and would be delivered by a bonded courier in Jan 2020 (like that scene in back to the future 2) -- but after that date came and went he claimed that the coins were delivered by were stolen from him by hackers that hid a wifi pineapple in his home and that now he's going to get them back by suing Bitcoin developers to backdoor the system to return them to him.

endisneigh 5y ago

I thought Bitcoin was impervious to legal matters and reality in general?

Traster 5y ago
I actually think in this case it basically is. The court can say those bitcoin are his, but if he doesn't have the wallet he doesn't have the wallet. The only way to get the coins would be to introduce a hard fork that moves those bitcoins, but good luck trying to get a court to mandate every bitcoin miner across the entire world move to a specific peice of software, and then good luck enforcing it. Especially since unlocking those coins would represent about 5% of all the bitcoins ever made.
- ansible 5y ago
  If whoever "owns" the BTC gets the fork as desired, and then tries to sell the BTC, that will massively decrease the conversion rate to fiat money (like USD). So for everyone in the current network, it is in their best interests for those BTC to remain unspendable in a lost wallet. The only way a fork would work if the "owner" were to promise most of it to at least 51% of the current miners. Is all that correct?
  - squeaky-clean 5y ago
    I think any fork of this nature would erode the trust in bitcoin and destroy the value immediately regardless of what happens to the coins themselves.
    - nullc 5y ago
      I suspect it would just go unnoticed, other than to whatever extent he managed to disrupt the Bitcoin Core software project. Wright already has a fork "Bitcoin SV" that most people have just ignored.
  - betwixthewires 5y ago
    It is correct, but I'd add that the adversarial environment means that if 51% of miners were to collude to take some portion of the money, they'd rather collude to take all the money, which takes away the incentive for anyone to arrange a fork to do this, and if that were going to happen it would be happening all the time. What would probably actually happen is that such a fork would be obviously illegitimate to users, exchanges, etc and people would use the unforked chain deliberately, and after some hash rate adjustment and delayed block times, the forked chain, even with 51% of the hash rate, would be close to valueless. Miners don't like mining valueless chuck e cheese tokens, so their hash power would return to the broadly accepted network. This BTW demonstrates a security property of PoW that you don't get with PoS: you can't mine two networks with the same hash power, you have to pick one or the other. If bitcoin were a PoS system, validators could just stake both chains and make a riskless bet on the winning one, and even benefit from both.

ice_futures 5y ago

This clown sued the bitcoin developers in May for the coins he cannot access. Anyone know what happened to that?

deleted 5y ago
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nullc 5y ago
It's still ongoing. We have a hearing scheduled for March to challenge the jurisdiction of the UK courts and move to strike out his claims. Background: Wright has sued a dozen former and current Bitcoin developers, demanding that they publish backdoored Bitcoin software to allow him to take coins which are unambiguously not his, and failing that he demands they pay him roughly $7 billion USD in damages. Obviously the case isn't even intended to be successful, it's intended to take a long time so that Wright can continue selling shares in Bitcoin he doesn't own and will never have access too, and to harass people who wouldn't aid his fraud in the process.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  I think he's doing an interesting attack on the network: the concept is that if you can't sign a transaction then the coins aren't yours. If he can use the legal system to get around that restriction, and actually compel a fork of the bitcoin software and bitcoin network to take possession of them, he's demonstrated a security vulnerability. Of course, this attack vector would be moot if all miners were anonymous and all contributors to code were anonymous, or if all amounts and addresses were private. Maybe Craig Wright deliberately made the bitcoin blockchain transparent so he could perform this attack later (/s if it's not obvious).
  - nullc 5y ago
    Anyone can create a fork at any time whenever they want. What they can't do is get users to use their fork and call it Bitcoin. Wright has already attempted this: He has a fork of Bitcoin called "Bitcoin SV" (satoshi's vision) which he claims is the real Bitcoin and that Bitcoin is an imposter. Today it has well under 1% of Bitcoin's hashpower, well under 1$ of Bitcoin's price (and has fallen a LOT relative to Bitcoin), and it's now down to less than 40 reachable nodes. Most of the few exchanges that have ever had it have dropped it, and it has recently had suffered some extremely severe reorg attacks -- causing millions of dollars in losses to at least one exchange. For the purpose of Wright's backdoor demands miners are irrelevant. If contributors were all anonymous you'd have the problem that they might actually be wright. He's even suing former developers like me, who haven't contributed for a couple years (or more!) ... really the targets of the lawsuit don't have much connection to reality. And the more obscure you make it to get the software the more ability he'd have to just setup impersonation sites to get people to run his malicious version instead. Also, anonymity hasn't helped that much in the case of the owner of Bitcoin.org-- being anonymous just caused him to lose in a default judgement when Wright sued him because the UK will not allow an anonymous party to defend themselves. Ultimately they'll likely have to deanonymize to prevent Wright from seizing Bitcoin.org. Addresses being private wouldn't really change anything about Wright's attack. He'd still demand to be given coins just the same. In fact, as of the moment Bitcoin is anonymous enough to severely frustrate his efforts: He claims to "own" 1.1M BTC but right now he's only suing developers for a backdoor to acces 0.111M of it, because whenever he'd claimed specific addresses for more he's gotten nailed by the true owners signing messages. So right now he's only going after a smaller portion where he can be confident the current controlling party won't speak up (the bulk of those coins were stolen from MTGox and haven't moved since).

maximedupre 5y ago

How did I just learn about this guy haha

smoldesu 5y ago
Probably because he's one of the least credible people on the planet, and even faked his own PGP key in a desperate attempt to get people to care about his sham.

smoldesu 5y ago

What a complete and total fraud. This guy has so many Bitcoin-related publications wrapped around his finger that it's frankly dizzying. I have no idea what he did to get this far, but the fact that he actually got them to settle in his favor is another testament to how utterly broken the US legal system is.

nullc 5y ago
> but the fact that he actually got them to settle in his favor is another testament to how utterly broken the US legal system is. He didn't. The jury found him civilly liable for $100 million USD in damages. They didn't find that he had to hand over half the fictional bitcoins he claimed to have, -- presumably because they rightfully realized it was all a bunch of bullshit. The fact that both industry and mainstream media articles are all just paraphrases of Wright's press releases is an example of how broken human journalism is these days.
- betwixthewires 5y ago
  That actually makes the article make more sense to me. He didn't win shit, this is optics spin.
  - nullc 5y ago
    Yep. I think this is close the worst possible ruling for Wright. If they'd found against him on the other claims at least he'd be able to say that the jury certainly bought into his claim of owning a ton of early Bitcoin. There would have been much more damages, but $100 million or $25 billion will bankrupt him equally either way.

exdsq 5y ago

What a tosser - I feel bad for the software developers being dragged into this and having to put up a legal defence because he's let his ego trump truth

joelbondurant 5y ago

Craig is a degenerate scammer.

foobarbecue 5y ago

I recently read The Greatest Hoax on Earth and my takeaway was the incredible extent to which bumbling pathological liars like Frank Abagnale or CW can build credibility through sheer persistence.

nullc 5y ago
It's really super fascinating. Also many people are never taken and see that it's fake all along, even blowing the whistle but it just gets ignored. It often seems to take a long time for scams like this to really collapse. Or, I should say I'd find it fascinating if I weren't a target and a victim of it. :( being forced to live it is less than fun.

andruby 5y ago

I wonder if we'll ever figure out who Satoshi is/was. I'd love to know. On the other hand, I do want to respect their wish to stay anonymous. Whomever that person is, it must feel very weird. They either still have access to the private keys and are, on paper at least, in the top 10 richest people in the world. Or they no longer have access to the keys and must feel some form of "loss". Or it was never a person and always an organisation. So many unknowns :-) There must have been countless investigations into this. Journalists, governments, shady organisations. It's hard to imagine no-one has uncovered Satoshi yet.

tim333 5y ago
I don't think it's that had to figure if you look into it but people don't like to say as the guy obviously wants a bit of anonymity. It's not that no one's uncovered Satoshi so much as they have uncovered about a dozen possible ones.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
3pt14159 5y ago
If anyone knows, it's US intelligence. They're so good at fingerprinting it's crazy. I highly doubt that they wouldn't be able to identify the person / people behind Satoshi.
moritonal 5y ago
It's an interesting dilemma. Satoshi has billions in Bitcoin, but moving any of it would shock its value. They either haven't cashed out because they truly believe in Bitcoins principles, or they cannot. My belief is that they've sadly passed and were either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist... or another relatively quiet engineer.
- ryandvm 5y ago
  It's Schrödinger's Investment. Theoretically worth billions, but interacting with it would cause its value to collapse.

betwixthewires 5y ago

> Wright claimed in 2016 that he was Nakamoto, which was a pseudonym. The claim has been disputed. It's beyond disputed; the man can literally sign a message at any point in time that he likes that would definitively prove his claim, and he refuses. This to me is proof positive that he is lying. Someone who built a cryptosystem for artificial digital scarcity, who relied entirely on digital signatures to prove pseudonymous identity would absolutely 100% prove their claim using these methods. Craig Wright is an obvious fraud. The article is not very informative about the case, I'd love to know more about why some bitcoin mined by satoshi nakamoto, supposedly owned by a man claiming to be satoshi nakamoto, was under the possession of someone else and needed a trial to return possession to him.

nullc 5y ago
It's beyond beyond disputed: Wright was forced by the court to provide a sworn list of his bitcoin holdings as of 2013, and when he provided a list, immediately people owning thousands of Bitcoins came out of the woodwork signing messages with addresses Wright claimed to own calling Wright a fraud. https://cswarchive.info/csw-filed#145-Signings https://cswarchive.info/csw-filed#145-Signings So it isn't just that if it were true he could trivially prove it with a digital signature-- but that the true owners of many coins he claimed to control have stepped up and provided signatures saying that they're not Wright! Unfortunately, Wright and his conspirators are spending millions to support and prolong their fraud and so it's no great difficulty for them to more or less control the media presentation of the situation.
- tim333 5y ago
  So given he doesn't own much I wonder how he's going to pay the $100m settlement?
  - nullc 5y ago
    $100m judgement, he may settle it (vs deal with appeals) for a different amount. Wright has scored some extremely wealthy sponsors who have been loaning wright money in exchange for a share in his fictional treasure. So I think it's possible that he'll actually be able to pay for a settlement in this case using their money. It's an astronomical amount of money, but the amounts of money being pumped into wrights con have been astronomical for a long time. $100m wouldn't even be particularly disproportionate compared to what's gone into propping up TAAL, for example. It's also possible-- even likely-- that he just won't pay it. I believe he still owes $60k-ish for a judgement for legal fees in an action in Norway, which he's owed for well over a year. He went over a year before paying legal fees he owed Adam Back for an aborted defamation lawsuit against Back. Civil recovery can be spotty at the best of times, and in this case we're talking about someone whos already fled one country to escape his legal problems and has established citizenship in a location known to block extraditions for criminals (including Wright's business partner / primary victim, Calvin Ayre who spent a decade on DHS's most wanted list).

bloak 5y ago

That's Craig Yeah Wright, as he was referred to in TheRegister.

cs702 5y ago

Here we have someone claiming to be the creator of a cryptocurrency and the owner of a large balance in a distributed ledger in a court of law (!), in front of a judge and a jury., while journalists at a reputable organization reporting on the trial are trying to figure out whether this person is being truthful or not. And of course, there isn't even a single mention of "private key" in the article. Yikes. We live in a world in which the vast majority of people -- including the vast majority of judges and journalists -- lack the education necessary for understanding the fundamental building blocks of modern computer security. They do not understand, cannot explain, and cannot reason about public-key cryptography. The notion of "proving ownership publicly by signing a sequence of bits with a private key" is utterly foreign to them. Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education.

nullc 5y ago
It's far worse than that... because the journalism falls down well before it gets into the hightech stuff. This case wasn't even over Wright being Satoshi or anything like that. And the outcome of the case was that the jury apparently didn't believe wright's claims of creating or mining bitcoin. They found Wright civilly liable for $100 million in damages for raiding his dead friends business by impersonating it in AU court, which he essentially admitted to in court (though obfuscated by claiming it was normal business practices to engage in sham lawsuits against yourself). So all this stuff about Satoshi this and that are pretty much entirely incidental to the court, and to the extent it came up at all the jury didn't fall for it. This is entirely the opposite view you'd get from the mass media articles because they're all parroting lightly "balanced" press releases from Wright.
- cs702 5y ago
  > ...because they're all parroting lightly "balanced" press releases from Wright. Double-yikes :-(
AnimalMuppet 5y ago
> Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education. Not so fast. A trial with this large an amount at stake goes to a pretty senior judge. Blaming the public educational system of, say, 1975 for not teaching private key is... a bit misguided. (If they came out of the public school system in 2010, I could see your case. But I'd bet the judge of this case didn't...)

gvv 5y ago

Imagine going through all of this instead of just signing one tx...really makes you think.