shocked to hear in 231 pages of detail that Prof Dr Dr Craig Wright might not in fact be Satoshi Nakamoto and instead may be some sort of, dare I say, perjuring fraud (PDF)
(d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net)
from dgerard@awful.systems to buttcoin@awful.systems on 21 May 2024 12:32
https://awful.systems/post/1560448
from dgerard@awful.systems to buttcoin@awful.systems on 21 May 2024 12:32
https://awful.systems/post/1560448
threaded - newest
FT summary
and here’s another 150pp on just his document fraud
in advance of asking this I’ll cop to not actually having followed Wright’s insane arc in detail much the last few years on account of life yaks, but
why the hell is he even trying? is there a big pile of seized bitcoins that he believes he can get access to if only he managed to dupe people?
like I’m not trying to legitimate any views or valuations here, but it’s just so … wat
I think he just started lying and then continued lying to cover up his previous lies. And he had a deep-pocketed backer in the form of Calvin Ayre.
yep
I wonder if at any point anyone involved (no matter how tangentially) in this process ever went “uh… guys…” and got (metaphorically) defenestrated for trying to pull the eject handle
Stefan Matthews apparently sorta tried, but
From what I gathered it was about “since I invented blockchain now I own a percentage of every crypto project ever because intellectual property/patent law/vibes”.
I think he was also selling something? So clout and publicity.
Wright was unable to accurately and succinctly explain what an unsigned integer was on the stand!
Unsigned integer means an integer that hasn’t been cryptographically signed by the chain of blocks right?The verdict quotes this exchange (page 163):
Unsigned integers are larger because… Because the containing variables don’t have a signature that crypto-statically constrains it to the lower set! (Yes that must be it)
“my computer’s so secure! it does mean I can only use 32-bit applications on this 64-bit cpu, but alas. all for security!”
(even typing that made me wince. I hope anyone who had to deal with 32->64 in any capacity some years ago doesn’t get hurt reading this)
one of the things that I really love about this is that, while there are indeed some nuances you can get into (platforms/archs, number theory, internal representations, …), it’s one of the rare computerwords in english that you could viably reason about on first principles without knowing much and get a sortacorrect answer
and yet
it’s important to note, btw - and I didn’t know this until a couple of days ago - that Justice Mellor was an engineer before he went back to law school. Engineering degree from Cambridge. He is a technical guy and understood every tech detail in the trial. Can you imagine sitting through Craig Wright’s arrogant technobabble, knowing immediately what utter charlatanry this is and not being able to say so until the end.
wake up babe, new level of steelmanning just dropped
Just curious, now that crypto seems to be nearing the end of its destructive bubble life, is their any good ideas on who or what (if group, not suggesting aliens) Satoshi Nakamoto is or were?
nope. a standard pile of guesses, no more evidence for any of them (except that Craig isn’t)
<Scene from Spartacus>
“I am not Natoshi Sakamoto!” <crowd takes up the phrase and repeats it>
“his name was Natoshi Paulmoto”
the len hypothesis is one of the most coherent one I’ve heard, I think. there is a certain weight behind it in the form of “and that’s why the original coins never got transacted”
but even that entire is essentially unprovable barring a couple of extremely unlikely events happening (original drives of person still existing, the passwords being acquired from some deaddrop somewhere, etc etc)