"But, as the events of this week unfolded and I prepared to publish the proof of access to the earliest keys, I broke. I do not have the courage. I cannot."
Lol, he doesn't have the courage to do the one thing that will remove any doubt about him, but has enough courage to announce to the public that he's a coward and a broken man and likely a fraud on a planetary scale...
At this point his mental health is clearly not good. If he really believes what he writes, he has delusions on a clinical scale which should be addressed before he does something he might regret. If he doesn't believe it, he is a consummate fraudster, a danger to the community, and should probably go to jail.
No kidding. Unlike the Newsweek fiasco, this person publicly identified himself as Satoshi, so expectations of proof are reasonable. What courage is he talking about? He already announced.
Courage of admitting he lost control of his con game. The only way is to keep plowing forward with more lies and more diversion, no matter how childish and stupid.
At the end of the day every con artist is also a desperate, lonely and broken on some level. There is probably a tiny dose of truth in what he said at that level. In other words he is not sorry and broken for lying, he is sorry and broken for being caught red handed at his own game.
Suppose Craig just took a rational bet that did not pay off.
Craig, hoping Satoshi to be alive, provided an opportunity for Satoshi to move some of his own Bitcoin and have Craig become Satoshi in the public mind. But Satoshi, did not bite.
Even better if the coin is moved to a burn address that looks something like 1IWouldAnnounceMyselfThisWayJaNVN2.
Or just use the privkey from the genesis block to sign a message "In the very unlikely event that I ever decide to reveal myself, it will be through a message similar to this one" -- and then post it anonymously somewhere.
Some of the website is still in archive.org, but will probably disappear soon. Any snapshots before May have already disappeared. Might help for folks to download the old posts before they disappear from the web entirely.
Frustratingly, it appears the main screenshots from the Sartre post (showing his original 'proof') have already been removed from archive.org.
I entertained the possibility that he would not be able to weather what would come next from his claim, so I managed to save the 7 screenshots for the Jean-Paul Sartre, Signing and Significance blog post.
Dude's a liar. After everything else he has done this is the simplest step which requires no extra burden on him. He has already claimed to be SN, the only reason not to follow through is because he cannot and could never have. Therefore he is just another pretender to the throne.
And let us not forget that the doctorate degree that he's bragging about so much that he put it in his domain is completely made up, as discovered by Forbes when they asked the college about it.
There is no evidence to believe the post reflects upon his real emotions, and since the man is untrustworthy[0], the post cannot be taken as evidence about his emotional state.
[0]:Whether he is willfully or maliciously deceptive is irrelevant. Even if he has the best of intentions, his behavior is still untrustworthy.
I don't know, but based on the last line I err on the side of caution. People don't react well to world-wide humiliation. I agree that he is completely untrustworthy and can't be relied upon to give an accurate representation of his own mental well-being.
It is interesting to note that the only Satoshi-existence scenario whose probability improves with each passing day, is the scenario in which Satoshi / the "Satoshis" is/are dead (unless you think Bitcoin was the first great invention of hyper-advanced AI, of course).
Figuring out whether anyone actually knows who Satoshi is/was becomes more interesting than waiting for the person(s) to show up, because it will never happen in a death scenario. One thing we have gained from this bizarre circus is a sign that neither Gavin nor Jon know who Satoshi might be; who's left? Who might know?
If Satoshi is dead or not an individual person, then who owns his bitcoin? If Satoshi is dead, then his property would be subject to the probate laws of his home country. Can the bitcoin of a dead person be recovered if they don't make arrangements for it in their will? Or will blocks of bitcoin become inactive over time as their owners die?
Bitcoins can only be distributed if you have the private key for it. If satoshi dies and leaves the keys for his heirs, then its just a normal asset. If the keys are gone, then that money is unrecoverable, just like burning cash.
So Bitcoin could conceivably be 'burned' faster than new bitcoin can be made. That might be great for a collector's market, but sounds like a bad plan for a useful currency.
It is? I thought there was a minimum usable denomination, called a "satoshi", that was something like 0.0000001 BTC (I don't know the actual value). Or is this really just a convention enforced by the current clients that can be easily changed in the future?
You are absolutely correct. One bitcoin is 100,000,000 satoshis. Transactions are denominated in integer values of satoshis, so it's not possible to subdivide a satoshi.
One satoshi is currently worth about $0.0000045, though, so there's still plenty of room left for inflation.
It would require a hard fork to increase the data storage for the number field from an int64 to an int128, but doing so would be uncontroversial (way more so than the current debate over the block size). It could be programmed to take effect at a certain block # from several years out, by which point almost everyone would be using a version of the software that would support it.
We're not anywhere close to it mattering yet, though; it's several decades out.
These are some great questions. Given a long enough timeline, it's possible (probable?) that nearly all private keys will be lost. It's funny that Bitcoin seems to have built into it its own demise: mortal people.
I think, its more like version 0.1 of what's possible. I can foresee the existence of wills on the blockchain. e.g. 'move my coins to my inheritors public key, in 10 years, unless I overwrite this will, with something else'
In fact bitcoin's cousin, Ethereum, is all about digital contracts.
But there could be cases, where people lose their keys or die, without making a will. We can easily foresee, that in this case software could accommodate cases, as exceptions, where identity is otherwise attached to the public key.
Smart contracts may sound cool at first but like many things with bitcoin they are mostly a solution in search of a problem. In the case of wills, the blockchain doesn't address any of the real-world problems typically surrounding them. In most legal cases the problems are not the actual terms or recordation of the contract but in interpreting and executing the contract. Real world events are very rarely dictated by the types of simple binary conditions that can be represented in a smart contract, and the gap between the real world and the blockchain is wide enough to fit a skyscraper through.
I agree with you that there is a wide gap between Bitcoin/Blockchain tech and real world. Won't contest that.
But a will contract can be put on the blockchain, and its a step forward, IMHO. Just today I learnt about OverStock's t0[1] trading on the Blockchain using colored coins (which is supposed to bring down the settlement of stocks to T+0 from T+3. Just stating this example as a case of progress enabled (or made possible) by the blockchain.
Likewise, Blockchain will make wills better i.e. enforceable and crisp via a program hence more specific. But as of now, its not a replacement for judiciary definitely. That's why I said its like version 0.1 of what's possible.
I wonder about this. It's seems like the most likely scenario. But... from my understanding Satoshi made appropriate effort to pass on the Bitcoin project before he disappeared. So unless he was leaving to commit suicide, I don't think he _has_ to be dead. (he == she == they)
That would be an interesting play. It's the harder road. The man would have to do an awful lot of creative laundering to be able to use the btc without attracting the attention of revenue folks, though.
The two paths are:
1. Come out as Satoshi and be regarded as a genius. Deal with whatever the consequence of holding btc are, be they currency or assets.
2. Burn your own rep and be regarded as a nut, then struggle to live off your btc fortune.
Some people are weird. It's all fun to think about though.
My (non-provable) theory is that Satoshi is not a person but a team, now defunct, that was tasked with developing a crypto-currency. They are probably more scientists/mathematicians/economists than they are software developers, which would explain the very sound but not exactly elegant initial code.
It would also explain the silence - the project is over, the team is probably bound to secrecy because this stuff is classified.
The only time Satoshi spoke out (edit: and we don't even know that it was authentic, see discussion below) was to help the poor bloke who was mistaken to be Satoshi and his life was being ruined, and that was probably a collective decision by the former team members, it was the right thing to do.
This is a different case - Satoshi speaking out wouldn't help in this case, Craig sounds like someone in need of help from a professional psychiatrist or psychologist, http://www.drcraigwright.net/ almost sounds like a suicide note. I feel sorry and worried for the bloke.
> no, the forum account was hacked to make that claim. It wasn't by Satoshi.
Are you sure, I wasn't aware of that?
Edit: the "I am not Dorian Nakamoto" was on March 7 2014, the account hack on Sept 8 of same year. It doesn't prove it conclusively. In fact the hack may well have been done deliberately, for a (kind of) plausible deniability (i.e. now you can't tell whether it was the real "Satoshi" and thus there was no provable breach of secrecy).
The only sort of confirmation that I could find on that claim was that the original address was unused for over a year so was then available for registration by a new user, this was then used to allow a password reset on another account. I believe this was the gmx and vistomail accounts.
And the forum account hadn't posted for five years before that. There's certainly no conclusive evidence that it wasn't Satoshi, but there's also no conclusive evidence that it was, and strong reason to believe the account could have gotten hacked because it did indeed get hacked a few months later.
Good point. But on a second thought - signing it might have been in violation of whatever secrecy requirement, possibly a crime, under this theory we will never ever see anything signed from Satoshi.
I wouldn't be surprised if we never know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, and his coins remain forever out of reach. I bet they collectively decided to throw away the keys, so to speak.
If this is a classified government project of some sort (and again, I have zero proof of that, it just "seems" that way), then we _might_ know in, like, 100 years, perhaps. Depends on what country/agency is behind it.
This seems implausible to me to the point of absurdity. I don't mean that to be rude, just, it doesn't fit for me at all. Why are you so convinced it's a government / intelligence community project? What objective would it have? How would they benefit?
Satoshi at one point made a calculation on what each unit would be worth if the entirety of the world's money supply was bitcoin. I don't know if he believed that that would be possible, but it wasn't as if someone made this to settle up with friends after a pub crawl and it suddenly took off.
With that view of the big picture I would be surprised if someone would throw away what may be the most valuable numbers in history, let alone the only proof that they created it while purposefully remaining anonymous.
On the contrary, I think that they might have had enough insight to see how potentially disruptive it could be if one person claimed all of those coins after bitcoin had attained widespread adoption. It also keeps someone from being able to claim the Satoshi Nakamoto "persona," which I think could only be self-serving. I don't think Satoshi revealing himself could ever do the world much good. One of the tenets of bitcoin is the lack of a central authority or leader.
If being considered Satoshi ruined some other guy's life too, isn't Wright's claim that he is Satoshi but he just chickened out of irrefutably proving it semi-plausible?
One thing that gives me a little pause and makes me think maybe he is telling the truth (even though all other evidence and logic says he's a fraud) is that the real Satoshi has not put out a statement calling this guy out as a fraud.
When the Dorian Nakamoto stuff happened the real Satoshi put out a statement saying he's not Dorian. That wasn't that long ago.
If he did that you'd think he'd step up and say he's not Craig Wright either. But maybe he did the previous one because he felt Dorian was being victimized whereas Craig Wright has made a mess of his own design.
I'm sure the goal of such step is exactly this -- to leave some room for doubt. The conman was moved in a corner during last few days, it was the only logical step left. It's only few commands to prove that you really poses the original key, no need for drama, screenshots and buggy scripts.
> is that the real Satoshi has not put out a statement calling this guy out as a fraud
And what about the inverse? If he is Satoshi, why didn't he just put out a signed statement saying he is Craig? Satoshi seemed perfectly capable of producing valid signatures (and he could do it without a 25-page blog post).
Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. He couldn't produce a valid signature. He couldn't move old coins. He couldn't explain the blockchain with anything more than an amateur understanding of it (his article describing mining had at least 2 major factual errors I could pick out in the first 2 paragraphs). When he realized he couldn't keep the charade up, he gave up. It's really that simple.
Like I said all evidence and logic leads to the conclusion he's a fraud, but it is a bit strange that the real Satoshi has not commented on this when he did on the Dorian Nakamoto stuff.
Tin-foil, but if I were Satoshi and wanted to remain anonymous, and some journalists started snooping around, one way to shut them down would be to publicly post a "proof" that seems technical enough to get the reporters to run out screaming "we got him!" but falls apart once more technical people start investigating...
If you treat the "proof" falling apart under scrutiny as evidence that he is Satoshi, then to remain consistent you must treat a strong proof which holds up under scrutiny as evidence against him being Satoshi.
To be clear, I don't believe my tin-foil conspiracy is true, and honestly it doesn't matter one bit to me if Craig Wright is the inventor of Bitcoin.
That said, I never said that his "absence of evidence that he is Satoshi" is actually "evidence that he is Satoshi". In fact, no one has provided any real evidence either that he is or is not Satoshi.
Again, assuming that the real Satoshi wishes to remain anonymous, but is on the verge of discovery anyway, he may have a difficult time "proving" that he isn't Satoshi, so his next best bet might be to sidestep proof entirely and instead play a kind of mind game to throw off the investigation. So conservation of expected evidence doesn't factor in, because he hasn't "proven" anything one way or the other, he's basically gambled that internet ridicule will achieve a desired goal.
Well, this tinfoil theory is assuming that the leaks several months ago putting him on the map were actually legitimate and he didn't have a choice about it.
> if I were Satoshi and wanted to remain anonymous,
That discounts the fact that nobody would be able to figure it out. You did though, and I've heard that theory before as well.
Then also unless real Satoshi issues a statement saying "I am not this guy", people will always keep an eye on this clown. Always watching his moves and suspecting him.
Now, maybe if he was the real Satoshi as your are claiming he should then issue a statement that he isn't. That'll surely misdirect things a bit. "We've heard right from Satoshi that this isn't Satoshi, so ok, just a crazy guy". But then again, same trap, that is what Satoshi might be experted to do if he was hiding and trying to misdirect the public. And we got another twist in the spiral and so on...
Okay seriously, is anyone contacting the authorities to see if this man is still alive? I do not know who to contact or what his location is. His "blog" post sounds like a suicide note - I've had the misfortune of reading others, and there are telltale signs - and it doesn't appear that anyone is taking steps to see if he's okay.
Maybe he is a liar, maybe he's Satoshi, who gives a shit at this point when the jaded comments make it sound like we've been invaded by 4chan.
I understand this, but there's also the dimension where his actions, whether true or not, are also damaging other people (Gavin's reputation is on the line).
We'd all be more worried for him if he wasn't so blatantly causing harm to other people's reputation.
Obviously he could suffer from severe mental illness, which combines elements of harming others and self harm, but as a society I think we should worry more about the person being harmed (ex. Gavin).
@bwilliams, yep, and that's why I said "I understand this". We should help him. But we should also help, if not more, Gavin and the others who's reputation is on the line without much fault of their own.
Why not handle the the thing that seems to be pretty pressing right now instead? Reputation can wait until someone can confirm one thing or another. It's just kind of calloused otherwise and I'm sure someone whose reputation on the line would agree.
Gavin said that he expected Wright to immediately post public proof equivalent to what he'd seen in private. When that didn't happen, he started expressing doubts. I don't think he ever intended his post alone to be treated as authoritative proof.
Yeah he made a mistake. But smart, even skeptical people get conned into making those kind of mistakes all the time. In the end, it's a lot of drama with no real harm done.
Gavin's reputation is on the line because he is a security researcher, and he was duped by a not-very-convincing crypto scam. It's not a big deal to me; I wouldn't hold it against him much in, say, hiring. But whatever damage done to Gavin was done by his own choices. I'm not going to rush to feel sorry for him, either.
Side note, but I've thought about this and wondered the same thing. Where do you keep 500M? In your house on an offline hard disk that can be stolen? In a safe deposit box? This is a true data backup scenario where too few copies and you're in trouble and too many and you're in trouble. Especially since a copy that was found without your knowledge could ruin things before you knew.
In your head. Or rather, you encrypt all your super secret private data with a good password that you never write down, and copy the encrypted archive everywhere.
This assumes your encryption scheme is perfect and will be for the life of the secret. With 500MM it would take you a minute to move or spend it so you have to protect against someone getting the secret and being able to break it in 10 years or whatever.
Its an interesting problem. Paper wallets can be encrypted with a password, which is one step. Using multi-sig is another. Having canary addresses is yet another way. Of course in this case not all of those are an option since the goal seems to be to not move them at all.
But have too few redundant copies and you lost access to it forever. Or travel to various countries opening bank vault accounts is sure to put you on CIA/NSA/othersuchagencies' radar. $500M is interesting enough for them to poke around I bet.
Or of you loose access to a country for some other reason you're screwed as well. Also, if you're otherwise not well of spending 10+ thousand to land the secrets in several countries is not an option either
I saw the post within a minute of two of it going up and also read it as a suicide note. I reached out to everyone I knew and heard back indirectly through someone else that he's ok.
He's also updated his homepage in the last few minutes.
Despite knowing just how much of a manipulator Craig is I think it's worth erring on the side of caution here.
Thank you for letting us know. Whether he's a lying asshole or not, I've learned the hard way to take someone seriously when they seem to be threatening self-harm, even if they've been insincere in the past. Someone who feels the need to lie so much isn't exactly neurotypical, and depressive thoughts with suicidal ideations often go along with such a compulsion. Better safe than sorry.
Sadly, this type of behavior is also the hallmark of a master manipulator. Given his track record of deceit upon deceit (lied about PhD as confirmed by university, lied about supercomputer as confirmed by SGI, got caught backdating PGP key, multiple acquaintances in Australia on record about his sketchy business practices, etc. etc), I'd guess that the emotion here is significantly less than genuine.
That said, I agree that if I knew the man, or had any idea where he is then I'd feel compelled to check in on him. But it sounds like people have checked in on him and he's OK [1].
But I'm guessing it's just more showmanship and more attempts to distract from the fact that he has no proof he's who he's claiming to be.
Yes, certainly we should sympathize with this person who is behaving in a confusing way.
Even if he made a calculated decision to manipulate the news media here, the blame must be shared by the journalists who promoted the story, and to an extent, the portion of the audience that was simply looking for an easy answer and a satisfying resolution.
At the end of the day, the whole lot of us should be responsible for being skeptical enough to prevent a destructive person from turning their personal issues into a global crisis.
Many people stepped up to debunk this story quite readily. It was the mainstream media that was really exacerbating the situation.
Why is there even an argument? It is not rocket science to produce a signed message with a key, the reference software can do this trivially. Until that is provided I don't see why anyone should entertain the possibility. Anything else is just theatrics.
.. or an attempt to bolster the flames of a dying media spectacle that keeps your name up at the top of the news feeds.
I hope I'm right, I hate the idea of a guy being driven to suicide; even more than I hate the idea of him social engineering media outlets en masse to self-promote.
The subsequent modifications to the website lead me to believe that the chances of this being a suicide note are really low. But everything leading up to this leaves me confident that he will continue to "do something dumb", just not suicide.
What you're trying to do here is to project your hatred for Bitcoin using fraud as somehow representative of the ideas embedded into Bitcoin, which have nothing to do with that fraud.
I'm sorry, but only the people that feel the need to follow something as some kind of religion or philosophy really need to attribute the adjectives "hatred" or "love" to some kind of technology.
The rest of the world at large (EDIT: that knows about bitcoin as sub intended by the rest of the sentence) that is not part of the bitcoin cult, looks at the thing for its technological prowess - or lack of it - and mostly sees it as a cryptographic experiment gone right and a financial experiment gone very wrong.
Don't speak for most people. Most people know nothing about Bitcoin just yet. Can you be more specific about where the financial experiment of Bitcoin has gone wrong and why?
It's quite telling that you don't want me to speak for other people but just in your answer before projected your irrational feelings about bitcoin on me and on what I feel or don't feel for bitcoin (so that we get straight, I don't "feel" anything for a technology, that doesn't make sense).
When I referred the world at large, I referred the world at large that already knows bitcoin, not the world population. And from those, most of them obviously didn't get in bitcoin (in fact the ones that did get in bitcoin are pulling out as can be clearly seen in the volume of bitcoin transactions since 2014).
And it is a clearly failed financial experiment because:
5 - Complete unregulation keeps meaning high scale theft and complete unreliability of bitcoin markets (MtGox and many others)
All in all, the world at large - in this case not only the ones that know bitcoin - clearly understands that the financial system needs more regulation not less, and yet, you put bitcoin in the table with is utter lack of regulation and try to claim its a great thing that will solve the world's financial problems but you don't give absolutely no sane argument or metrics about how it is doing that. And that was exactly my original point.
The top ten results of "bitcoin purpose" on Google concur that in it's current implementation, in how the community and business world view and use it, Bitcoin is meant to be an electronic currency.
The FTC recognizes it as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In it's current incarnation, it is the equivalent of bartering with baseball cards in lieu of cash.
If your point is true, then the purpose has been abandoned for the popular and current realization of Bitcoin as a means of electronic monetary value transfer.
I personally followed development and the community from the time it was introduced. It was always pitched as an 'anonymous' electronic currency.
>The FTC recognizes it as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In it's current incarnation, it is the equivalent of bartering with baseball cards in lieu of cash.
The US government has a stake in the failure of non-state-controlled currencies, though, so this isn't really evidence of anything.
It's evidence that it is popularly interpreted as something that has value and can be traded. So is money. I really can't care any less than I already don't if Bitcoin is or isn't a legal currency.
The point is it isn't commonly purported to be a 'settlement layer' but something else entirely.
I don't disagree with anything you've said. It's just that the government classification doesn't support (or refute) the point because the government isn't a disinterested party.
So when you say that for a "fact" the system is constrained to 7TPS, you are intentionally ignoring most bitcoin transactions, which are off-chain transactions at exchanges. That's not just oversight that's deceit.
You are telling us is that there is no problem with the bitcoin protocol because the problems with the bitcoin protocol can be solved by not using the bitcoin protocol.
Weird, I don't see side chains in specified in the protocol or implemented in the source. It's almost as if side chains are an ad hoc attempt at a solution to a problem inherent to Bitcoin.
Too bad it only works for transactions, not users.
LN is one of the better side-chain ideas to date, but it's still a bunch of I.O.U.s that have the bitcoin bottleneck. With LN, two people can reasonably send hundreds of thousands of transactions to each other, but hundreds of thousands of people cannot reasonably send two transactions.
And then there's centralization, off-network volatility, etc. issues as well. Side-chains are still not a viable fix for the blocksize issue.
7 transactions per second is just a tuning parameter though, it's not a fundamental flaw in Bitcoin. The problem is being attacked from two angles right now: The release of segregated witness and increasing the block size.
The real question is, what is the maximum real throughput of the system if we could adjust the tuning parameters to be as high as possible? It's well north of 7 but I bet also well south of, say, 1,000.
You're demonstrating confirmation bias by trying to redefine a payment network flaw as a "tuning parameter", so if you want to actually discuss something, make a case rather than spinning it as something else.
A clip from The Simpsons is not a very compelling argument.
Setting the number of blocks at 2,016 per two weeks is completely arbitrary, as is setting the block size at 1 MB. None of these are "fundamental flaws" because they can be changed. They're hard-coded constants that can be changed in code in a trivial amount of time. The hardest part about changing them is getting consensus on the change and the time it takes the change to roll out to most of the clients on the network before cutting over. The existence of altcoins that have changed these parameters is proof that it's not a technological flaw.
A technological flaw would be some kind of vulnerability in ECDSA or SHA256 that would allow people to spend other's Bitcoins. Now that would be a fundamental flaw that would destroy Bitcoin over night. But coding constants that can be changed, and as time goes on, most likely will be? You are seriously over-dramatizing things.
All I'm getting from you is flippancy, Simpsons references, and strawman arguments. You have failed to make your case at all. If what we are talking about is a fundamental flaw, then every program you have ever written is fundamentally flawed, because I'm sure they've all initially had bugs in them that were much worse than what could be changed by adjusting the values of constants.
The simpson clip is an explanation why I find your comments hilarious, not a claim or basis for an argument. Serious question: is English your first language?
The block size can't be changed because a small number of miners control it, and they stand to profit from the increased transactions fees resulting from the increased competition on smaller blocks. It's tragedy of the commons.
This is a fundamental flaw with Bitcoin- that the people who control the software can also benefit from inhibiting transactions per second. For a payments network, it's not going to get more than 7 tx/s, until someone else is in control. Other enthusiasts have reconciled this by looking to bitcoin as smart contracts, or to side-chains.
But you can continue to spin this as good for bitcoin or as "payments tuning parameter" propaganda if you like, just understand that I'm going to laugh at you for it, cydeweys.
It took you three comments to finally say something coherent. Bduerst, you need to work on your communication skills. There is much room for improvement. HN is not reddit. Do not make low value comments here.
You argument that miners will always want small block sizes is flawed. Miners stand to benefit a lot more from a widely-used functioning currency than one that fails because it is incapable of scaling. They want Bitcoin to succeed in the long run, because a lot of them hold a lot of Bitcoin. Particularly, there is little reason to keep block sizes small for this reason because while the average transaction fee might go down, the total number of transactions in a block will go up, with an overall neutral effect on total transaction fee. Additionally, the vast majority of a miner's reward still comes from the block reward, so miners don't care too much about transaction fees yet.
Segwit is already close to rolling out and block size increases could happen in the medium term. Or, if all else fails, there's always side-chains and altcoins. The fundamental technology (blockchain) is fine, even if a particular implementation of it with a specific set of tuning parameter values happens to stagnate. I don't foresee that happening though, as the incentives for everyone in the ecosystem are aligned for Bitcoin not to fail, and if limited transaction volume truly starts changing that, then changes (beyond what's already on the current roadmap) will be made.
You still didn't answer the question. If English isn't your first language, then it would explain why what I wrote isn't coherent to you.
You're making the same fallacious assumptions about miners that people do about individuals in tragedy of the commons. You think that the individual cares more about the system rather than their own rational goals, but they don't.
The same resource economics that apply to international fishing also apply to bitcoin - both the fisherman and the miners care more about personal gains than they do about the system as a whole. They don't restrain their profit because you project your idealism onto them.
And it doesn't matter who promises what - there needs to be a consensus for the change to happen, and that's why bitcoin is flawed. The previous four forks to fix this block size failed, four times, which is evidence to back this up.
You can keep spinning the flaw as a speed hole though, it's pretty entertaining :)
I'm absolutely fine if the world at large doesn't use Bitcoin. People who understand the value of it will continue using it. And the fact that bitcoin is used for illegal purposes marks it as a success, rather than a failure. You see value in governments, regulations and monetary systems controlled by central banks. I see value in the absence of those. I think Bitcoin is an enormous success in that it gave people who value the latter an instrument to actually exercise their beliefs. No one is forcing you to use Bitcoin and no one ever will and that is the best thing about it.
Your prejudice against "Bitcoin community" is quite telling, given the fact that it took the Bitcoin community less than 2 hours to disprove the supposed proof and very few in the "Bitcoin community" would consider Wright one of their own.
Gavin appears to most likely be a victim here, not a fraud. He made an enormous mistake in not requiring public proof before he posted, which he has since admitted.
It seems to me like the community's reaction to a fraudster was remarkably productive, outside of Gavin / Matonis getting suckered.
It's hard for me to believe that he's backing out of his promise to provide stronger evidence because the pressure is too much, because the pressure of being known as a fraud is a lot worse than being known as an inventor.
This whole "controversy" is incredibly boring. The real Satoshi would be able to prove it easily. Prove it, or STFU and we can move on from the who is Satoshi mystery?
The only blamable thing in this story is that the so called mainstream media are not technically knowledgeable enough to "scientifically" check their news sources. Good thing, all the nerds around have exposed the scheme in such a short time, I like this era !!
My ex did the same thing and it's pretty shitty, but it still deserves serious attention. The best route is to call the cops and ensure they get proper medical attention if nothing else for a strong jolt to reality.
I don't think she would be alive now if I hadn't made that call.
Once you know it's a tactic you can't allow yourself to fall for it anymore or you'll end up trapped, regardless of what the final outcome is.
However it's not right to go around guessing that someone like this guy is using that tactic and ignoring what could be a serious cry for help when you have no idea if he's an abusive person.
At this point he's had a week of having everyone he knows hounded by the media. It might have just been a slip of the tongue/party joke he just rolled with and didn't expect to get this big.
When your every action gets a Guardian article it can be a scary time for anyone. Especially those who've not experienced it before.
How does flying two prominent bitcoin devs to a 1:1 meeting you constitute a "slip of the tongue"? He has experienced it before -- last year when he tried the same thing.
290 comments
[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 549 ms ] threadThis guys is so full of crap its amusing
At this point his mental health is clearly not good. If he really believes what he writes, he has delusions on a clinical scale which should be addressed before he does something he might regret. If he doesn't believe it, he is a consummate fraudster, a danger to the community, and should probably go to jail.
Courage of admitting he lost control of his con game. The only way is to keep plowing forward with more lies and more diversion, no matter how childish and stupid.
At the end of the day every con artist is also a desperate, lonely and broken on some level. There is probably a tiny dose of truth in what he said at that level. In other words he is not sorry and broken for lying, he is sorry and broken for being caught red handed at his own game.
Craig, hoping Satoshi to be alive, provided an opportunity for Satoshi to move some of his own Bitcoin and have Craig become Satoshi in the public mind. But Satoshi, did not bite.
He's a criminal.
Or just use the privkey from the genesis block to sign a message "In the very unlikely event that I ever decide to reveal myself, it will be through a message similar to this one" -- and then post it anonymously somewhere.
Asides the conversation, the whole source code of this website is: <img src="homepage.jpg">
This man is really not caring.
EDIT: site is updated now, with proper html+css coding.
You're kidding right ?
EDIT : no he isn't .
Frustratingly, it appears the main screenshots from the Sartre post (showing his original 'proof') have already been removed from archive.org.
You can fetch them from here: http://imgur.com/a/ppGI9
(Warning: Adblock dection) http://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/12/11/bitcoi...
There is no evidence to believe the post reflects upon his real emotions, and since the man is untrustworthy[0], the post cannot be taken as evidence about his emotional state.
[0]:Whether he is willfully or maliciously deceptive is irrelevant. Even if he has the best of intentions, his behavior is still untrustworthy.
Figuring out whether anyone actually knows who Satoshi is/was becomes more interesting than waiting for the person(s) to show up, because it will never happen in a death scenario. One thing we have gained from this bizarre circus is a sign that neither Gavin nor Jon know who Satoshi might be; who's left? Who might know?
One satoshi is currently worth about $0.0000045, though, so there's still plenty of room left for inflation.
We're not anywhere close to it mattering yet, though; it's several decades out.
In fact bitcoin's cousin, Ethereum, is all about digital contracts.
But there could be cases, where people lose their keys or die, without making a will. We can easily foresee, that in this case software could accommodate cases, as exceptions, where identity is otherwise attached to the public key.
But a will contract can be put on the blockchain, and its a step forward, IMHO. Just today I learnt about OverStock's t0[1] trading on the Blockchain using colored coins (which is supposed to bring down the settlement of stocks to T+0 from T+3. Just stating this example as a case of progress enabled (or made possible) by the blockchain.
Likewise, Blockchain will make wills better i.e. enforceable and crisp via a program hence more specific. But as of now, its not a replacement for judiciary definitely. That's why I said its like version 0.1 of what's possible.
[1] https://t0.com/
Edit: The link to t0
The two paths are:
1. Come out as Satoshi and be regarded as a genius. Deal with whatever the consequence of holding btc are, be they currency or assets.
2. Burn your own rep and be regarded as a nut, then struggle to live off your btc fortune.
Some people are weird. It's all fun to think about though.
It would also explain the silence - the project is over, the team is probably bound to secrecy because this stuff is classified.
The only time Satoshi spoke out (edit: and we don't even know that it was authentic, see discussion below) was to help the poor bloke who was mistaken to be Satoshi and his life was being ruined, and that was probably a collective decision by the former team members, it was the right thing to do.
This is a different case - Satoshi speaking out wouldn't help in this case, Craig sounds like someone in need of help from a professional psychiatrist or psychologist, http://www.drcraigwright.net/ almost sounds like a suicide note. I feel sorry and worried for the bloke.
no, the forum account was hacked to make that claim. It wasn't by Satoshi.
Are you sure, I wasn't aware of that?
Edit: the "I am not Dorian Nakamoto" was on March 7 2014, the account hack on Sept 8 of same year. It doesn't prove it conclusively. In fact the hack may well have been done deliberately, for a (kind of) plausible deniability (i.e. now you can't tell whether it was the real "Satoshi" and thus there was no provable breach of secrecy).
Discussion at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zrshb/real_satosh...
The consensus is that it was not from the real Satoshi.
In fact the reaction to that forum post are the same as the reaction to CSW's claims: Sign it or it's worthless.
Good point. But on a second thought - signing it might have been in violation of whatever secrecy requirement, possibly a crime, under this theory we will never ever see anything signed from Satoshi.
With that view of the big picture I would be surprised if someone would throw away what may be the most valuable numbers in history, let alone the only proof that they created it while purposefully remaining anonymous.
Mr. Wright made his claims but now is unable to prove them beyond a reasonable doubt.
When the Dorian Nakamoto stuff happened the real Satoshi put out a statement saying he's not Dorian. That wasn't that long ago.
If he did that you'd think he'd step up and say he's not Craig Wright either. But maybe he did the previous one because he felt Dorian was being victimized whereas Craig Wright has made a mess of his own design.
It's hard to say for sure.
My read on that is that Satoshi felt sorry for the hapless Japanese-American guy with tech media showing up at his house.
In contrast, Craig Wright asked for this.
And what about the inverse? If he is Satoshi, why didn't he just put out a signed statement saying he is Craig? Satoshi seemed perfectly capable of producing valid signatures (and he could do it without a 25-page blog post).
Stop giving him the benefit of the doubt. He couldn't produce a valid signature. He couldn't move old coins. He couldn't explain the blockchain with anything more than an amateur understanding of it (his article describing mining had at least 2 major factual errors I could pick out in the first 2 paragraphs). When he realized he couldn't keep the charade up, he gave up. It's really that simple.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11635818
Why would he? He felt sorry for Dorian, why would he step into this mess and get tangled in this story.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/ii/conservation_of_expected_evidence
That said, I never said that his "absence of evidence that he is Satoshi" is actually "evidence that he is Satoshi". In fact, no one has provided any real evidence either that he is or is not Satoshi.
Again, assuming that the real Satoshi wishes to remain anonymous, but is on the verge of discovery anyway, he may have a difficult time "proving" that he isn't Satoshi, so his next best bet might be to sidestep proof entirely and instead play a kind of mind game to throw off the investigation. So conservation of expected evidence doesn't factor in, because he hasn't "proven" anything one way or the other, he's basically gambled that internet ridicule will achieve a desired goal.
That discounts the fact that nobody would be able to figure it out. You did though, and I've heard that theory before as well.
Then also unless real Satoshi issues a statement saying "I am not this guy", people will always keep an eye on this clown. Always watching his moves and suspecting him.
Now, maybe if he was the real Satoshi as your are claiming he should then issue a statement that he isn't. That'll surely misdirect things a bit. "We've heard right from Satoshi that this isn't Satoshi, so ok, just a crazy guy". But then again, same trap, that is what Satoshi might be experted to do if he was hiding and trying to misdirect the public. And we got another twist in the spiral and so on...
Maybe he is a liar, maybe he's Satoshi, who gives a shit at this point when the jaded comments make it sound like we've been invaded by 4chan.
I believe someone (healthy) close to him should take some care of him for a while. Regardless of his online identity.
We'd all be more worried for him if he wasn't so blatantly causing harm to other people's reputation.
Obviously he could suffer from severe mental illness, which combines elements of harming others and self harm, but as a society I think we should worry more about the person being harmed (ex. Gavin).
Yeah he made a mistake. But smart, even skeptical people get conned into making those kind of mistakes all the time. In the end, it's a lot of drama with no real harm done.
It would take less than 5 minutes, which leaves the question, why drag it on like this?
(I'm not actually claiming that's what's actually going on, for what it's worth. Just that the behavior has a familiar feel.)
I wouldn't keep the keys to US$ 500 million on my laptop's hard drive.
EDIT: this is presupposing he's not a con-artist, which is still my hypothesis
He's also updated his homepage in the last few minutes.
Despite knowing just how much of a manipulator Craig is I think it's worth erring on the side of caution here.
Thanks again for checking in.
That said, I agree that if I knew the man, or had any idea where he is then I'd feel compelled to check in on him. But it sounds like people have checked in on him and he's OK [1].
But I'm guessing it's just more showmanship and more attempts to distract from the fact that he has no proof he's who he's claiming to be.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11636144
Even if he made a calculated decision to manipulate the news media here, the blame must be shared by the journalists who promoted the story, and to an extent, the portion of the audience that was simply looking for an easy answer and a satisfying resolution.
At the end of the day, the whole lot of us should be responsible for being skeptical enough to prevent a destructive person from turning their personal issues into a global crisis.
Many people stepped up to debunk this story quite readily. It was the mainstream media that was really exacerbating the situation.
.. or an attempt to bolster the flames of a dying media spectacle that keeps your name up at the top of the news feeds.
I hope I'm right, I hate the idea of a guy being driven to suicide; even more than I hate the idea of him social engineering media outlets en masse to self-promote.
1 - Propose flawed argument.
2 - Insert pink unicorns.
3 - When asked for proof, don't give it and instead claim this is exactly what's best for the world but that we are too short minded to understand it.
you're an idiot.
The rest of the world at large (EDIT: that knows about bitcoin as sub intended by the rest of the sentence) that is not part of the bitcoin cult, looks at the thing for its technological prowess - or lack of it - and mostly sees it as a cryptographic experiment gone right and a financial experiment gone very wrong.
When I referred the world at large, I referred the world at large that already knows bitcoin, not the world population. And from those, most of them obviously didn't get in bitcoin (in fact the ones that did get in bitcoin are pulling out as can be clearly seen in the volume of bitcoin transactions since 2014).
And it is a clearly failed financial experiment because:
1 - It concentrated all the wealth in the hands and very few people in only a couple of years (http://www.bitcoinrichlist.com/top100)
2 - The majority of bitcoin transactions are used for ilegal purposes (http://www.coindesk.com/dark-web-markets-processed-more-bitc...)
3 - It's more inconvenient than existing payment systems to use so people don't use it (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitcoin-is-dead-says-prominent...)
4 - People are so uninterested and suspicious of bitcoin that you actually loose money if you present bitcoin as a payment/donation method (http://bitcoinist.net/mozilla-study-shows-bitcoin-negative-i...)
5 - Complete unregulation keeps meaning high scale theft and complete unreliability of bitcoin markets (MtGox and many others)
All in all, the world at large - in this case not only the ones that know bitcoin - clearly understands that the financial system needs more regulation not less, and yet, you put bitcoin in the table with is utter lack of regulation and try to claim its a great thing that will solve the world's financial problems but you don't give absolutely no sane argument or metrics about how it is doing that. And that was exactly my original point.
You cannot have a functioning financial system that is constrained to seven transactions per second.
The FTC recognizes it as a commodity, something that can be bought and sold. In it's current incarnation, it is the equivalent of bartering with baseball cards in lieu of cash.
If your point is true, then the purpose has been abandoned for the popular and current realization of Bitcoin as a means of electronic monetary value transfer.
I personally followed development and the community from the time it was introduced. It was always pitched as an 'anonymous' electronic currency.
The US government has a stake in the failure of non-state-controlled currencies, though, so this isn't really evidence of anything.
The point is it isn't commonly purported to be a 'settlement layer' but something else entirely.
That's quite a confidently presumptuous tone for an opinion that is clearly controversial at best.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/49c7ij/so_consens_...
That's why it makes the front page of HackerNews when some random company starts accepting Bitcoin payments?
LN is one of the better side-chain ideas to date, but it's still a bunch of I.O.U.s that have the bitcoin bottleneck. With LN, two people can reasonably send hundreds of thousands of transactions to each other, but hundreds of thousands of people cannot reasonably send two transactions.
And then there's centralization, off-network volatility, etc. issues as well. Side-chains are still not a viable fix for the blocksize issue.
The real question is, what is the maximum real throughput of the system if we could adjust the tuning parameters to be as high as possible? It's well north of 7 but I bet also well south of, say, 1,000.
Lol, that's the best "it's a feature, not a bug" spin I've seen on the blocksize issue to date.
I find your comment funny because it reminds me of this: https://youtu.be/whnms4CLJys?t=44s
Setting the number of blocks at 2,016 per two weeks is completely arbitrary, as is setting the block size at 1 MB. None of these are "fundamental flaws" because they can be changed. They're hard-coded constants that can be changed in code in a trivial amount of time. The hardest part about changing them is getting consensus on the change and the time it takes the change to roll out to most of the clients on the network before cutting over. The existence of altcoins that have changed these parameters is proof that it's not a technological flaw.
A technological flaw would be some kind of vulnerability in ECDSA or SHA256 that would allow people to spend other's Bitcoins. Now that would be a fundamental flaw that would destroy Bitcoin over night. But coding constants that can be changed, and as time goes on, most likely will be? You are seriously over-dramatizing things.
All I'm getting from you is flippancy, Simpsons references, and strawman arguments. You have failed to make your case at all. If what we are talking about is a fundamental flaw, then every program you have ever written is fundamentally flawed, because I'm sure they've all initially had bugs in them that were much worse than what could be changed by adjusting the values of constants.
The block size can't be changed because a small number of miners control it, and they stand to profit from the increased transactions fees resulting from the increased competition on smaller blocks. It's tragedy of the commons.
This is a fundamental flaw with Bitcoin- that the people who control the software can also benefit from inhibiting transactions per second. For a payments network, it's not going to get more than 7 tx/s, until someone else is in control. Other enthusiasts have reconciled this by looking to bitcoin as smart contracts, or to side-chains.
But you can continue to spin this as good for bitcoin or as "payments tuning parameter" propaganda if you like, just understand that I'm going to laugh at you for it, cydeweys.
You argument that miners will always want small block sizes is flawed. Miners stand to benefit a lot more from a widely-used functioning currency than one that fails because it is incapable of scaling. They want Bitcoin to succeed in the long run, because a lot of them hold a lot of Bitcoin. Particularly, there is little reason to keep block sizes small for this reason because while the average transaction fee might go down, the total number of transactions in a block will go up, with an overall neutral effect on total transaction fee. Additionally, the vast majority of a miner's reward still comes from the block reward, so miners don't care too much about transaction fees yet.
Segwit is already close to rolling out and block size increases could happen in the medium term. Or, if all else fails, there's always side-chains and altcoins. The fundamental technology (blockchain) is fine, even if a particular implementation of it with a specific set of tuning parameter values happens to stagnate. I don't foresee that happening though, as the incentives for everyone in the ecosystem are aligned for Bitcoin not to fail, and if limited transaction volume truly starts changing that, then changes (beyond what's already on the current roadmap) will be made.
You're making the same fallacious assumptions about miners that people do about individuals in tragedy of the commons. You think that the individual cares more about the system rather than their own rational goals, but they don't.
The same resource economics that apply to international fishing also apply to bitcoin - both the fisherman and the miners care more about personal gains than they do about the system as a whole. They don't restrain their profit because you project your idealism onto them.
And it doesn't matter who promises what - there needs to be a consensus for the change to happen, and that's why bitcoin is flawed. The previous four forks to fix this block size failed, four times, which is evidence to back this up.
You can keep spinning the flaw as a speed hole though, it's pretty entertaining :)
Which begs the question, exactly what what means being "one of their own", and if they have any kind of plans to re-instate the Spanish Inquisition.
It seems to me like the community's reaction to a fraudster was remarkably productive, outside of Gavin / Matonis getting suckered.
At worst, it's an interesting discussion of a con man running into a technical wall.
I don't think she would be alive now if I hadn't made that call.
However it's not right to go around guessing that someone like this guy is using that tactic and ignoring what could be a serious cry for help when you have no idea if he's an abusive person.
When your every action gets a Guardian article it can be a scary time for anyone. Especially those who've not experienced it before.