True, but possession of private keys does not prove identity. Having Gavin confirm that this is indeed the person he spoke with thoughout the years is also important. We'll just have to wait and see what happens next. Craig has certainly left us with a cliffhanger...
He really hasn't. His ordinary proof has already been debunked, repeatedly and in detail, so now he's spinning a bunch of bullshit to convince the foolishly credulous they should trust him in spite of the plain facts of the matter.
I'm not sure. Gavin has high reputation, and he has not yet revoked his support for Craig's claim. Maybe there will come irrefutable cryptographic proof around the next days. Or maybe not.
AAMOF, in yesterdays post, he talked about crypto, but he did not claim it to be proof for anything. Today he is announcing proof for the next days. We'll see...
I'm not sure why Andresen's reputation has anything to do with the presence or absence of irrefutable cryptographic proof.
In the event, such proof is not merely absent but has been shown to be falsified, which is both dispositive of bad faith on Wright's part, and totally in keeping with his own reputation. He's a con man. This is a con. What more do you need, a couple stone tablets and a mountaintop?
Do we have any explanation on why Gavin hasn't revoked his post yet? He seems to be tweeting supportive articles as well. Are we still going with the "account was hacked" theory?
People who get scammed are usually reluctant to admit it, even to themselves. I expect he'll come around in the next few days if and when there's no public proof forthcoming from Wright.
No, but possession is strong evidence that all scammers have avoided because they're fake. The parent's requirement is both obvious and simple for the real Satoshi. It should therefore be the minimum standard. More so given the layers and layers of bullshit that crop up around this particular claim.
Even if it doesn't prove identity, it's certainly significant. The ability to move around the genesis blocks is huge... whether or not he is the original Satoshi.
In his BBC interview he seemed to avoid directly saying that he was Satoshi or agreeing with the reporter that he was claiming to be him. When asked if he was Satoshi he skirted the issue by saying that he was one of the original people. So I'm not at all sure there is a single individual called Satoshi. We certainly know from his writing that Craig Wright is not the one who came up with the significant ideas behind bitcoin. He's not smart enough.
If the goal is to convince people that he is Satoshi, and he really was Satoshi, this would never be his best choice of action. Given that goal, what conceivable reason is there to delay this simple action?
The most probable conclusion is pretty simple. I'll cop to hedging a bit with "probable", but in the event that this claim turns out to be true, it would be fair to ask questions about why on Earth this was considered to be the correct way to prove the claim.
Maybe, just maybe, he's enjoying dragging it out and watching all these doubters post their reasons why it's not him. Imagining this whole story a year from now, with Craig Wright incontrovertibly proved to be Satoshi, the way he's done it would give him maximum PR value.
Or he could be a lying douchebag who's assuming that he will be associated with Satoshi in the general public consciousness after the media gets bored of the story and expects to profit from that.
> Maybe, just maybe, he's enjoying dragging it out and watching all these doubters post their reasons why it's not him.
I have to admit, it would be awesome to see this as an elaborate way to get send a "fuck you" to all the people that accused him of fraud initially, when he claims we was trying to just lay low and let it pass. It would be the most elaborate trolling ever carried out.
"he's enjoying dragging it out and watching all these doubters post their reasons why it's not him."
Then, as Satoshi, who is the founder of BitCoin and owner of quite a lot of them, who must be quite intelligent to be able to have created the system in the first place, he must also be quite colossally stupid and bereft of self-interest to not realize that proving the founder of BitCoin deliberately generated that much drama is likely to significantly negatively affect his substantial BitCoin holding by making a lot of people reassess the stability of BitCoin if the creator is suddenly proved to be this drama-prone.
We must also hypothesize a very rapid flip between someone who has successfully hidden the identity for this many years, the very definition of Minimum Drama, suddenly flipping to Maximum Drama.
It's not an impossible theory... which I mean, it's not impossible, and should it prove to be true, I won't apologize for this analysis because I think it'll still hold.... but it's an awfully precise one.
Watching this unfold is simply fascinating to me from a sociological point of view. The number of scammers, liars, and pure weirdos that have gravitated to Bitcoin is incredible. I am simultaneously entertained, and saddened that people like this are able to wield such power over the community.
It's reaching the point where you have to consider external motivations to damaging Bitcoin's credibility. The only thing keeping me out of full-on tinfoil hat mode is that this stuff just felt shady and douchebag riddled from day one.
The fact that coins could be "mined" was the problem from day 1. This created a pyramid scheme/gold rush system that tainted everything.
Of course, if you are holding a large chunk of the initial coins, this is exactly what you want. In addition, there are always lots of people willing to fall for pyramid schemes, so it's good to bootstrap adoption.
Once Bitcoin finishes being "mined out", we'll see if it has any value. I suspect that answer is "not".
It seems like this would settle it for most people. When people saw the claim "this is signed with Satoshi's key", they didn't say "that's not enough", they said "bullshit".
Moving the coin and giving an unambiguous explanation of his so-far confusing 'reveal' would do it for me.
I have the impression that basic goalposts are widely accepted.
If Wright can provide signatures or transactions for the original block, he will be accepted as someone special, if not necessarily Satoshi. If he can't, he certainly won't be accepted.
If he can do that, then it comes down to deciding how he came by those private keys. It's certainly good to pre-register standards, but it's also a really hard question; Wright gave no indication of what evidence types he'll be using, so it's hard to pre-judge every sort of evidence he might offer.
My one other expectation would be that he would explain why the "signature" that got him onto BBC wasn't what he claimed it was. If he is Satoshi, it's a damned odd thing to use a faked signature for his basic proof.
Anything less and I have to question it or call bullshit. Current state is complete bullshit.
Moving coin from early blocks is not nearly as good. Bitcoin was publicized early on a few mailing lists so it'd be entirely possible he's just an early user trying to game himself up as the creator. Statistical evidence combined with moving early coin could be semi-convincing, but still not as simple and absolute as a single signature using the pubkey in the genesis block. Proving this is dead easy and that signature is the on/off bit for me.
Well, if the key has been destroyed, to a first approximation there is no Satoshi in my book. Identity has a specific meaning here, control of the private key. If he had that, but lost it, he will only gain mere celebrity at best and at worst infamy with these histrionics.
If by some extremely small chance he is Satoshi And his identity was close to being revealed (I think his name was first lingering in the ether around August), this could be a truly beautiful sleight of hand.
Purposely release 'proof' you know could be quickly refuted. Get the papers covering you with lots of photos and unnecessary blurb about companies you have been involved in. Drag the whole ordeal out over a week or two. Would come across as a complete loony, attention seeker in the tech community no? Quickly forgotten about and dismissed as Satoshi for a long time.
Do note! I do not imagine this is the case, but wouldn't it be great if it was?
The only thing greater would be if he actually was both a complete loony and all his claims were true. It would be interesting to have something as important and useful as Bitcoin have an origin such as that.
If the intent is to escape the "15 minutes of fame", this doesn't work... because you still endure the 15 minutes of fame.
If the intent is to escape authorities and supervillains, this fails as well. They don't tend to discredit things without an actual investigation, which will reveal the ruse.
Another interesting scenario is that Satoshi is working directly with Craig in order to lend his authority on the little/big-blockian debate to Craig. This would explain the mountain of evidence as well as Craig's apparent incompetence.
Of course this conspiracy has a low prior probability due to it's complexity, but it does explain why the inventor of bitcoin would be 1) taking of screenshots of buggy code in notepad, 2) using factorial notation to enumerate combinatorics of bitstrings, and 3) being so generally dislikable.
> For some there is no burden of proof high enough, no evidence that cannot be dismissed as fabrication or manipulation. This is the nature of belief and swimming against this current would be futile.
Regardless of whether his claims are true or not, this portion seems self evident. People have too much invested emotionally in the outcome of this, for some reason, to allow this to be settled easily. One only needs to look at some of the discussions regarding this on HN to see people pointing at a single piece of evidence that can be interpreted multiple ways to make absolutist claims about this subject.
Given the context, a trustless cryptographic system, the phrases "self evident" and "the nature of belief" are really out of place. This could all be easily settled - no faith required.
Given that I was referring to the irrational behavior of the people involved in the discussion as a sociological event, and was not referring to the cryptographic system at all, I don't think they are out of place at all.
> This could all be easily settled - no faith required.
My point is that I think there will be some people, far more than we should be comfortable with, which at this point have invested themselves so much emotionally in the outcome, that no proof will be enough. There's always some possible explanation, no matter how outlandish.
> ...behavior of the people involved in the discussion...
It is the context of the "sociological event" that I refer to, not the discussion about the discussion that you seem to have in mind.
> There's always some possible explanation, no matter how outlandish.
You are describing the satisfiability problem, where a lot of contrived problems are obviously impossible to satisfy. That isn't emotionally driven goalpost moving, that is a strict adherence to reason.
> It is the context of the "sociological event" that I refer to, not the discussion about the discussion that you seem to have in mind.
Then let me clarify my intent. That "for some there is no burden of proof high enough, no evidence that cannot be dismissed as fabrication or manipulation." see,s self evident from my experience in seeing how people are treating this discussion, and the "evidence" being put out to support or discredit any specific claim, not just of Craig Wright, but of those just putting forth possible explanations for his reasoning for his actions, in cased presupposing him as both a fraud and as Satoshi. I think this has less to do with it being about a cryptographic system than it does with people really liking the mystery, and wanting to hold onto their belief in it.
> You are describing the satisfiability problem, where a lot of contrived problems are obviously impossible to satisfy. That isn't emotionally driven goalpost moving, that is a strict adherence to reason.
I wouldn't call the belief the moon landing was faked a strict adherence to reason, and I think the same underlying motivations are at play. This will play out, and the vast majority of people will come to the same belief, but I believe, through what I've witnessed so far, that there will be a core the refuses to let go of some of the more outlandish possibilities.
I'm sorry, but your clarifying statement left me even more uncertain about your message. I think we'll just have to leave it, the comparison of any party in a discussion to moon landing conspiracy theorists pretty much shuts down the conversation in a Godwin like fashion.
I think you really are misinterpreting me. I wasn't using belief of the moon landing hoax in a terribly disparaging way, and I wasn't comparing a single party of a discussion to people with that belief, but multiple people from both sides (if you think I was taking a side, I urge you to re-read my comments considering that I most definitely am not). That doesn't make them stupid, it just means they have a narrative that they believe, and are invested in, and that makes certain ideas that others would consider not worth considering much more likely to be true in their eyes. Everyone does this, some of us have a narrative that's more likely to match with reality in some instances than others, but by the nature of the problem it's very hard to know if that applies to yourself.
This thing stinks exactly like when those two guys claimed to have shot and killed a bigfoot, and "within a few days" they were going to "prove it" once and for all. They ended up of course having a rubber costume in a freezer. This post has totally hammered it home for me. I have everything I need to know that this guy is a scamming compulsive liar.
The guy is clearly an attention seeker, he has provided literally zero proof he’s anyone noteworthy so let’s move on. He will likely continue to trickle these convoluted and increasingly desperate blog posts as people gradually forget about him.
This is reminding me of watching a free energy scam unfold. Lots of big announcements, pending big announcements, some half ass attempts at validation, some more news of tinkering and delay, etc, etc. He still can't come up with the signature or the excess energy.
Exactly. Everything about the way this has been handled raises the classic red flags of a scam, pseudoscientific or otherwise. The evasiveness, the obfuscation, the private controlled circumstances under which "proof" is provided.
He has a claim that would take five minutes to conclusively prove, but he keeps spinning it out.
"I posted this detailed analysis describing a likely motivation for Craig needing to "prove" he is Satoshi.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w9xec/just_think_...
The short version is that he made fictional investments in a company by claiming to have transferred his personal "interest" in $29m of bitcoin to the target company. (I.e. no blockchain transfer, just a legal document claiming to transfer that amount of bitcoin.)
He then claimed substantial cash R&D credits from those transactions.
Australian taxation office (ATO) began investigating. He has paperwork showing the transactions, but knows that ATO might dig around and want to see verification that he truly owned $32m of bitcoin. To cover that, he claims he put all his bitcoin in a trust, where the trustee was another early bitcoiner. Unfortunately, that friend has now passed away, and the private keys are lost.
In order for the BS to be even vaguely plausible, he needs to show that he originally had access to $32m of bitcoin. This is why he pretends to be Satoshi."
If Dr. Wright is indeed taking us for a ride, he doesn't seem worried that the "real" Satoshi won't come out and expose him as a fraud (like he did a few years ago with Dorian Nakamoto). Although the circumstances were different then, the chances of this happening are absolutely non-zero, and it could happen at any time. Why continue pushing the issue and drawing attention, which only adds to the risk of this happening?
I'm not saying at all that this is indicative that Dr. Wright is Satoshi, but IMO it's definitely interesting.
which at one point (probably) belonged to Satoshi, but by September 2014 (almost certainly) belonged to someone else. The account was only used three times before that, in February 2009, to write a post about Bitcoin and two replies. It's certainly possible that if one non-Satoshi person gained access to the account between 2009 and 2014, multiple people could have, and that the person who sent the March 2014 message was just an unrelated kindhearted person who wanted the paparazzi to stop bothering Dorian Nakamoto.
> For some there is no burden of proof high enough
later:
> You should be sceptical. You should question. I would.
So he's saying people are being too skeptical, and then he says people should be skeptical. This guy really has no idea what he's talking about. There's no way he's Satoshi, he reads like a con-artist.
62 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 68.9 ms ] threadAAMOF, in yesterdays post, he talked about crypto, but he did not claim it to be proof for anything. Today he is announcing proof for the next days. We'll see...
In the event, such proof is not merely absent but has been shown to be falsified, which is both dispositive of bad faith on Wright's part, and totally in keeping with his own reputation. He's a con man. This is a con. What more do you need, a couple stone tablets and a mountaintop?
No he has appeared in person and confirmed the story.
If the goal is to convince people that he is Satoshi, and he really was Satoshi, this would never be his best choice of action. Given that goal, what conceivable reason is there to delay this simple action?
The most probable conclusion is pretty simple. I'll cop to hedging a bit with "probable", but in the event that this claim turns out to be true, it would be fair to ask questions about why on Earth this was considered to be the correct way to prove the claim.
Or he could be a lying douchebag who's assuming that he will be associated with Satoshi in the general public consciousness after the media gets bored of the story and expects to profit from that.
I have to admit, it would be awesome to see this as an elaborate way to get send a "fuck you" to all the people that accused him of fraud initially, when he claims we was trying to just lay low and let it pass. It would be the most elaborate trolling ever carried out.
Then, as Satoshi, who is the founder of BitCoin and owner of quite a lot of them, who must be quite intelligent to be able to have created the system in the first place, he must also be quite colossally stupid and bereft of self-interest to not realize that proving the founder of BitCoin deliberately generated that much drama is likely to significantly negatively affect his substantial BitCoin holding by making a lot of people reassess the stability of BitCoin if the creator is suddenly proved to be this drama-prone.
We must also hypothesize a very rapid flip between someone who has successfully hidden the identity for this many years, the very definition of Minimum Drama, suddenly flipping to Maximum Drama.
It's not an impossible theory... which I mean, it's not impossible, and should it prove to be true, I won't apologize for this analysis because I think it'll still hold.... but it's an awfully precise one.
Of course, if you are holding a large chunk of the initial coins, this is exactly what you want. In addition, there are always lots of people willing to fall for pyramid schemes, so it's good to bootstrap adoption.
Once Bitcoin finishes being "mined out", we'll see if it has any value. I suspect that answer is "not".
1) If Wright meets them, they will accept he is Satoshi 2) If Wright doesn't, then they will not
A great exercise in avoiding the moving of goalposts, by setting a clear expectation ahead of time.
Moving the coin and giving an unambiguous explanation of his so-far confusing 'reveal' would do it for me.
If Wright can provide signatures or transactions for the original block, he will be accepted as someone special, if not necessarily Satoshi. If he can't, he certainly won't be accepted.
If he can do that, then it comes down to deciding how he came by those private keys. It's certainly good to pre-register standards, but it's also a really hard question; Wright gave no indication of what evidence types he'll be using, so it's hard to pre-judge every sort of evidence he might offer.
My one other expectation would be that he would explain why the "signature" that got him onto BBC wasn't what he claimed it was. If he is Satoshi, it's a damned odd thing to use a faked signature for his basic proof.
Just like Charlie Lee did for Litecoin here: https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/727157971428331520 (he did it to show just how easy and provable it is)
Anything less and I have to question it or call bullshit. Current state is complete bullshit.
Moving coin from early blocks is not nearly as good. Bitcoin was publicized early on a few mailing lists so it'd be entirely possible he's just an early user trying to game himself up as the creator. Statistical evidence combined with moving early coin could be semi-convincing, but still not as simple and absolute as a single signature using the pubkey in the genesis block. Proving this is dead easy and that signature is the on/off bit for me.
Heck what if the real Satoshi lost that key, how would he make us believe him if he were to step out of the shadows?
"Satoshi's identity is unknowable" would be a more accurate description of that scenario that "Satoshi is dead".
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hnbli/did_someone...
a) A message identifying himself signed with a key from one of the original blocks.
b) Testimony of one of the early BTC people who interacted with him that he is the same person.
a alone would mean he could have otherwise acquired the keys, b makes this unlikely. b has been provided, but it is insufficient without a.
Purposely release 'proof' you know could be quickly refuted. Get the papers covering you with lots of photos and unnecessary blurb about companies you have been involved in. Drag the whole ordeal out over a week or two. Would come across as a complete loony, attention seeker in the tech community no? Quickly forgotten about and dismissed as Satoshi for a long time.
Do note! I do not imagine this is the case, but wouldn't it be great if it was?
If the intent is to escape authorities and supervillains, this fails as well. They don't tend to discredit things without an actual investigation, which will reveal the ruse.
Of course this conspiracy has a low prior probability due to it's complexity, but it does explain why the inventor of bitcoin would be 1) taking of screenshots of buggy code in notepad, 2) using factorial notation to enumerate combinatorics of bitstrings, and 3) being so generally dislikable.
Regardless of whether his claims are true or not, this portion seems self evident. People have too much invested emotionally in the outcome of this, for some reason, to allow this to be settled easily. One only needs to look at some of the discussions regarding this on HN to see people pointing at a single piece of evidence that can be interpreted multiple ways to make absolutist claims about this subject.
> This could all be easily settled - no faith required.
My point is that I think there will be some people, far more than we should be comfortable with, which at this point have invested themselves so much emotionally in the outcome, that no proof will be enough. There's always some possible explanation, no matter how outlandish.
It is the context of the "sociological event" that I refer to, not the discussion about the discussion that you seem to have in mind.
> There's always some possible explanation, no matter how outlandish.
You are describing the satisfiability problem, where a lot of contrived problems are obviously impossible to satisfy. That isn't emotionally driven goalpost moving, that is a strict adherence to reason.
Then let me clarify my intent. That "for some there is no burden of proof high enough, no evidence that cannot be dismissed as fabrication or manipulation." see,s self evident from my experience in seeing how people are treating this discussion, and the "evidence" being put out to support or discredit any specific claim, not just of Craig Wright, but of those just putting forth possible explanations for his reasoning for his actions, in cased presupposing him as both a fraud and as Satoshi. I think this has less to do with it being about a cryptographic system than it does with people really liking the mystery, and wanting to hold onto their belief in it.
> You are describing the satisfiability problem, where a lot of contrived problems are obviously impossible to satisfy. That isn't emotionally driven goalpost moving, that is a strict adherence to reason.
I wouldn't call the belief the moon landing was faked a strict adherence to reason, and I think the same underlying motivations are at play. This will play out, and the vast majority of people will come to the same belief, but I believe, through what I've witnessed so far, that there will be a core the refuses to let go of some of the more outlandish possibilities.
He has a claim that would take five minutes to conclusively prove, but he keeps spinning it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_lying
Having people think you invented bitcoin can be quite valuable.
"I posted this detailed analysis describing a likely motivation for Craig needing to "prove" he is Satoshi. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w9xec/just_think_... The short version is that he made fictional investments in a company by claiming to have transferred his personal "interest" in $29m of bitcoin to the target company. (I.e. no blockchain transfer, just a legal document claiming to transfer that amount of bitcoin.) He then claimed substantial cash R&D credits from those transactions. Australian taxation office (ATO) began investigating. He has paperwork showing the transactions, but knows that ATO might dig around and want to see verification that he truly owned $32m of bitcoin. To cover that, he claims he put all his bitcoin in a trust, where the trustee was another early bitcoiner. Unfortunately, that friend has now passed away, and the private keys are lost. In order for the BS to be even vaguely plausible, he needs to show that he originally had access to $32m of bitcoin. This is why he pretends to be Satoshi."
I'm not saying at all that this is indicative that Dr. Wright is Satoshi, but IMO it's definitely interesting.
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topic/listForContributor...
which at one point (probably) belonged to Satoshi, but by September 2014 (almost certainly) belonged to someone else. The account was only used three times before that, in February 2009, to write a post about Bitcoin and two replies. It's certainly possible that if one non-Satoshi person gained access to the account between 2009 and 2014, multiple people could have, and that the person who sent the March 2014 message was just an unrelated kindhearted person who wanted the paparazzi to stop bothering Dorian Nakamoto.
"Soon, I will provide proof" sounds religious, not factual.
later:
> You should be sceptical. You should question. I would.
So he's saying people are being too skeptical, and then he says people should be skeptical. This guy really has no idea what he's talking about. There's no way he's Satoshi, he reads like a con-artist.