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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

by 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 Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education.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 Our hopelessly outdated educational system deserves the blame for this widespread lack of education.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...)
- cs702 5y ago
  That's a fair criticism of my comment. Touché!

by cs702 5y ago

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...)

cs702 5y ago
That's a fair criticism of my comment. Touché!