Seems to me like there are two possible scenarios here:
1. Craig Wright is telling the truth, but has released a bad proof to misdirect everyone into believing he is not Satoshi. Maybe he's just having a laugh.
2. Craig Wright is lying.
Even if he's not Satoshi, he seems smart enough to know he wouldn't get away with releasing shoddy proofs. Perhaps he thought the mainstream media would say "Craig Wright invented Bitcoin" and anyone that disagreed would be called a conspiracy nut.
Perhaps this was a kind of pump-and-dump where he expected the price to change significantly and make a killing out of doing it. He doesn't care what people think of him if he's just made $20 million. Could it have anything to do with his ongoing legal troubles with the tax authorities in Australia?
At this stage, I'm seeing plenty of people saying "Here's why Craig Wright isn't Satoshi" and that's interesting and useful. But I haven't seen anyone establish why Craig Wright would be lying.
Also, it's interesting that "The Real Satoshi" has not posted something saying he's not Craig Wright, as we have seen with previous "exposés".
> Also, it's interesting that "The Real Satoshi" has not posted something saying he's not Craig Wright, as we have seen with previous "exposés".
AFAIK that's only happened once, in the Dorian case. In that case, the media and papparazzos were hounding a frail old man who was clearly very uncomfortable with the whole thing.
Craig Wright seems to just love being in the spotlight. So there's no reason to deny the claims for empathic reasons. It would suck for the real Satoshi to create an expectation that he'll have to individually refute all these claims, I imagine he has other things to do.
Can you also see how useless such a claim is to someone like me? How can I cite you in conversations or decisions in the future? If no one can use the information you provide in any meaningful way, what is the point of sharing the information in the first place?
>Can you also see how useless such a claim is to someone like me?
If despite a preponderance of supporting public evidence(both of satoshi hack and the GMX direct object reference bug), you assume that everyone is lying, you'll have a very hard time in life.
> How can I cite you in conversations or decisions in the future?
I don't know, nor do I particularly care. Evaluating the information and fact checking is something that you need to do, I can't possibly fact check myself for you.
>If no one can use the information you provide in any meaningful way, what is the point of sharing the information in the first place?
If you actually cared about the information, I'd imagine that you'd be trying to verify it instead of writing this post.
Literally nothing you said in this comment is true.
1. There is not a preponderance of public evidence supporting your claim.
2. I am not assuming you're lying, I'm simply pointing out what you've said is useless.
3. You can fact check yourself, in fact many people do it to themselves every day.
4. Probing the source of information for verification is precisely what I am doing right now.
If you don't care about people believing what you wrote, then you didn't write it to convey information. Maybe you wrote it to feel good about yourself?
>1. There is not a preponderance of public evidence supporting your claim.
There is unquestionably a preponderance of public evidence regarding satoshis email compromise.
>2. I am not assuming you're lying, I'm simply pointing out what you've said is useless.
If you assume that I am lying, it is.
>3. You can fact check yourself, in fact many people do it to themselves every day.
I think you should read that part of my comment again.
>4. Probing the source of information for verification is precisely what I am doing right now.
That's fair, but I think you're taking the wrong approach. There's just not much I could realistically do to prove this.
However, I'd suggest contacting Roger Ver. They may be able to shed some light on the topic, and probably (unlike me) wouldn't have a problem with incriminating others.
> If you don't care about people believing what you wrote, then you didn't write it to convey information
I do care about people believing what I wrote, but if you assume that I am being intentionally deceitful there's not much I can do to convince you. What proof could I possibly post that couldn't be forged? My entire life isn't recorded in a blockchain.
I honestly don't believe your reaction here is particularly reasonable, it would be if my comment had contained something that was difficult to believe for one reason or the other, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
>Maybe you wrote it to feel good about yourself?
I wrote it to confirm what TazeTSchnitzel seemed to be implying.
OK that's fair enough, and no offense intended. If I see someone with <10K karma, no name or link in their profile, and I don't recognise the handle, then I take everything they say with a pinch of salt.
> I haven't seen anyone establish why Craig Wright would be lying.
If you don't understand, I'm actually in possession of 400 million dollars bound to a trust, not available to me until 2020, but if you send me your bank details and help me in current affairs I promise I'll compensate you with the 10 percent of the whole sum.
I'm also famous, maybe they'll even get me a Nobel prize, I'm playing I'm hard to get, anyway, and you can be too if you confirm that I proved to you too I'm the one who I claim to be. Think about it, there will be even a Hollywood movie about us. For the start, see I've already agreed for more exclusives.
And oh, I can help your case for introducing bigger blocks to Bitcoin. There's going to be this nice conference in NY where you can present your argument exactly on the first day of my "big announcement."
Yeah I get the generalities of "so he can be rich". What can he do with the reputation of "the guy who claimed to be Satoshi"? He's smart enough to know people wouldn't have believed him with the proof he's released.
He just expected for uncertainty to last a little longer. Even now he has the chance to sell the book and movie rights. "How I made BBC believe me."
From the Economist's article:
"About six months ago, before he was publicly outed in the technology press, he approached Andrew O’Hagan, a Scottish novelist who wrote an “unauthorised autobiography” of Julian Assange, the founder of the whistle-blower site WikiLeaks. Since then the author, whose most recent novel, “The Illuminations”, was longlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize, has had complete access to Mr Wright and his family, as well as to his research and business colleagues. Mr O’Hagan is writing a long article for the London Review of Books on Mr Wright and “his journey towards revealing his work.” (Mr O’Hagan, too, has come to be convinced that Mr Wright is Mr Nakamoto.)"
"Online exclusive · 1 May 2016: The full, long-form account will be published here later this month." "In a world exclusive for the London Review of Books, Andrew O’Hagan spent many months with Craig Wright, the man responsible for what Bill Gates has called ‘the technical tour de force of this generation’."
As I've already said in another comment, I can't wait reading O’Hagan's story. He should publish it even if he understands that he'll thus show how credulous he was.
Even days or even hours count: he already broke some nice records. His first "outing" and his PGP trick was found and discredited in December, and yet he still managed to do it the second time, even bigger, better and shinier! He is already much more famous than he was in December. I can imagine Leonardo di Caprio to play him in a new variation on the "Catch me if you can" subject. Note there's already a book author who "spent many months" with this fake Satoshi.
Also read about big-blockians, the conference in NY that started exactly yesterday etc.
"What can he do with the reputation of "the guy who claimed to be Satoshi"?"
The guy in question apparently makes a living creating faux companies and filling fraudulent tax returns in Australia, it doesn't sound like he cares of his reputation that much.
Well, for his sake I hope he has some sort of direct price manipulation scam going, or at the very least is about to issue some sort of "it was all a test lol!" message -- he has committed reputation suicide regarding his quest to "remove the fear surrounding bitcoin and the blockchain"[1] in every other case.
This is where I'm coming from. It's not like this is some attention-seeking teenager on Reddit.
My best guess is that he thought 99% of people would take what he said at face value, and the other 1% would be ignored as nutters, but he judged it wrong.
I guess another alternative is that this is some kind of long-play by the Bitcoin Foundation. They need to establish who Satoshi is for the general public in order for Bitcoin to gain further credibility, but since the real Satoshi won't come forward, they have agreed to put up Craig Wright. They can't put forward the real proof everyone is demanding, but they're hoping that enough good PR will make it widely believed. However, even then, it would only take one bit of evidence from the real Satoshi to prove it wasn't Craig Wright so even this theory doesn't seem very good.
> It's not like this is some attention-seeking teenager
He is just not a teenager but he is absolutely attention-seeking. Hint: don't believe the statements he gave, do your own research. He has a history of doing exactly the kind of tricks he did this time again.
Edit (I can't post new posts):
An answer to your next comment where you write "he was clearly making good money out of being an IT consultant:"
As far as I understand, the biggest money he tried to make was to get millions from Australia as tax returns for the bitcoin transactions between the companies he made.
Far from having a history of a "clean IT consultant."
> the details of how he convinced some of the leading Bitcoin devs and major journalists will be fascinating.
The expectation of fascination can also be nicely sold.
One nice detail is already for all of us to see, on his page and Dan Kaminsky explains it in the title post.
I also need less than a minute to send to you anything you want "from the e-mail" "satoshi@vistamail.com" I don't understand why you'd refer to such an e-mail as an argument for anything.
So let's say he's assuming the real Satoshi will never come forward or otherwise be proved, so he's taking advantage of the vacuum. He gets lots of attention, and along with that attention comes more cash than he would ever have earned as an IT consultant. He couldn't care less whether the majority of people on Reddit and HN actually believe he is the real Satoshi.
When I asked "why would he do this?" it was a genuine question, and I think you've given some good answers.
So how did he manage to fool Gavin Andresen and Jon Matonis? Again, serious question.
> how did he manage to fool Gavin Andresen and Jon Matonis?
Neither from them claims to be in possession of any digital proof, which would be a trivial and the only reasonable way to show that somebody actually has an access to any of Satoshi's keys.
And we, the general public, even have an access to two examples of something that was supposed to be a digital proof but it surely isn't, and that something was presented in a way to make the chance for verification as small (or the process slow) as possible (first example: the fake "Satoshi" PGP message, second case: the Sartre blog post). We see that the author is quite capable of presenting something as something that it isn't.
Yeah, I've read all of that stuff, the fake PhD and your comment above about the PGP key.
But, still, he was clearly making good money out of being an IT consultant. How's he going to do that now? I believe more people thought he was Satoshi after the Wired article than believe it today. So he has a lot to lose.
I'm not saying he is Satoshi, but I am being sceptical of the sceptics claims. A lot about Craig Wright doesn't add up. Perhaps he is just the Frank Abagnale Jr of our age, but even then, the details of how he convinced some of the leading Bitcoin devs and major journalists will be fascinating.
The sceptics claim one thing - he didn't provide any proof. The information he provided is intentionally misleading. (and this is something you can verify yourself)
Why should we waste any time to consider whether he is or isn't the right person? The situation did not change from 2 days ago apart from him being more of an ass.
If I want to waste my time, then it's my time to waste. If you don't want to waste your time, then don't.
I believe it's worth wasting my time because two of the leading people involved in Bitcoin, as well as two leading news organisations, have all reported on this so it's interesting.
Leading news orgs still report on Trump, so that's a low bar ;) I'd recommend looking at people who actually tried to dissect and reproduce the proof instead.
My best guess is that he thought 99% of people would take what he said at face value, and the other 1% would be ignored as nutters, but he judged it wrong.
This is close to my theory. He thought he would get the media on his side, to write articles about how he is Satoshi, and then it would go into Wikipedia. Because Wikipedia cares about what journalists say, not some bitcoin basement guy who can mathematically prove he's lying.
...and then he can say to the Australian tax authorities "see I mined these Bitcoins legally, I didn't get them through money laundering". That's a suggestion on a BBC article (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36191165). But even then, he could have said "I mined them" without saying "I'm Satoshi".
Maybe his big mouth got the better of him, and/or, like many compulsive liars, suffers from strong denial. He spent so much time pretending to be SN to impress investors he believes his own BS.
All I'm saying is people are looking for some rational master plan, perhaps there isn't one. Maybe this lie just snowballed out of control.
Truth, facts, reality, don't matter. Only the media narrative is relevant. He doesn't need to trick a single computer scientist, he just needs to provide a story that the media can sell, and magically the rationalists become conspiracy theorists. See: the current POTUS front-runner according to yesterday's Rasmussen poll.
EDIT: I didn't attempt to explain why the establishment/media would like to enshrine his narrative. They really like having a face to their enemies, someone they can ad-hominem and quote out of context to support the global finance agenda.
> Also, it's interesting that "The Real Satoshi" has not posted something saying he's not Craig Wright, as we have seen with previous "exposés".
Perhaps Wright is gambling that Satoshi is dead (for whatever reason, foul play or not). The purpose of his previous (original) Satoshi scam was to ascertain that nobody has access to Satoshi's private keys.
Wright can't get Satoshi's bitcoins, but presumably if people think he is Satoshi, this would help him with his other tax evasion scams he seems to be involved in. Perhaps it doesn't even matter if the tech community immediately realised that he is lying, all he needs is some reasonable belief in the other laypeople he is scamming.
Gavin might have been bought, or Gavin knows that Satoshi is dead, and Wright threatened Gavin, pretending he was the one who killed Satoshi.
Satoshi and Wright were involved on Bitcoin from the beginning. Satoshi did the tech, Wright did the marketing. It starts off as just another of Wright's wacky business scams, but actually takes off. Satoshi dies, Wright takes advantage by telling everyone he's Satoshi, but can't actually get Satoshi's coins.
We'll probably never know, but god, these story lines are getting a bit ridiculous.
We have stories of Wright orchestrating complex staged technology theatre which involves hijacking DNS on a wifi network he controls and forcing an unaltered Electrum client on a clean laptop to connect to bitcoin nodes that he controls to fake the signature verification for Gavin. We're talking about 2 or 3 different MITM attacks necessary to pull off such a stunt, in front of people who obviously understand Bitcoin and are skeptical because of the December story.
I just think the speculation on possible stories for what really happened is getting a little out of hand.
But kind of fun! With Bitcoin, even the things we know for certain are ridiculous.
Somebody develops a brand new technology which has wide-ranging implications, from drug enforcement to currency control (and well beyond). Within a few years it's worth billions. But it's developed by somebody with a Japanese pseudonym. Multiple people are unmasked and then debunked as the inventor. Then a serial dodgy geezer, who was previously unasked and debunked, says they are in fact the inventor - but it turns out their evidence is meaningless.
It's the closest thing we have in real life to "Who is Batman?" so of course we're all fascinated.
Yes. The simplest explanation is that Gavin was not tricked, Wright is really Nakamoto, but he's intentionally not releasing real proof to the community yet (despite providing it in person to Gavin).
I think it probably serves his interests pretty well to have his name plastered all over the Google results for "Satoshi Nakamoto" and vice versa.
Hell, right now he's the only person in any of the page title results for q=bitcoin.
He presumably doesn't care about scamming the inner circle of Bitcoin, but does care about building up the façade of a reputation in order to scam other people.
> except if there is another move in the works that we don't know yet
Exactly. He has promised to release more evidence, and for all we know, by this time next week there will be incontrovertible evidence that he is Satoshi beyond all reasonable doubt.
Maybe he's releasing the evidence in a trickle because he's loving the attention, and he has some PR team advising him this is the best way to get it. Maybe he's doing it because he doesn't give a f* and enjoys reading about how "he's not the real Satoshi" and then he says "here you go, it's me". Of course, maybe he's not the real Satoshi.
The other satoshi was outed against his will and had to prove a negative ie that he was not SN. The real SN helped out. This claim was of being the real SN which can be proved so the real SN did not need to get involved.
There's a third possibility not many seem to want to consider; he's telling the truth and it turns out the real Satoshi isn't the benevolent genius everyone imagined him to be. He's a fuck up con man.
I totally agree with you. The community doesn't want to believe there's even the possibility that Bitcoin was invented by a scammer, because by implication, it would mean we were scammed. It could just be this is the tech community's version of crop circles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_circle) or tree fairies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies). Very smart people fell for those hoaxes at the time, and put a lot of effort into explaining why it wasn't a hoax - even when the original hoaxers revealed themselves.
Perhaps Wright paid somebody to develop the Blockchain technology. Perhaps he developed it himself and then lost the original key, assuming the project was worth nothing. Perhaps he was one of a group of people, and that group has now decided to nominate him as the frontman for the technology, perceiving that the whole Satoshi thing is holding back its development.
This cannot be proven, but I am inclined to think that "Satoshi" was a team of people, a covert (and now defunct) project of some sort, NSA or whatever. So far the way Satoshi has acted would conform to that.
what exactly is the evidence for number 1? occam's razor seems to suggest it's false. it doesn't make any sense why he would double cross us. he clearly doesn't care that we know he's satoshi if 1 is true.
For me at least, it doesn't make any sense that Satoshi wouldn't reveal his own identity in the first place. Almost nothing about this story makes sense, and we have to deal with a lot of conjecture and misinformation. For someone as dumb as me when it comes to Bitcoin and blockchain technology, it's hard to tell fact from unfounded assertion in just about every post I read.
some people are just secretive. I liken Satoshi's disappearance to that of _why and as such I find it very odd that they would go to all this trouble into tricking us into thinking they're not Satoshi Nakamoto when they could have just never revealed themselves in the first place.
In short, if you are Satoshi, what's the point of deceiving everyone into thinking you aren't when the only reason people think you are is because you chose to say so?
> it doesn't make any sense that Satoshi wouldn't reveal his own identity in the first place
If I were disrupting the banking industry, I wouldn't be too eager to forgo anonymity either. That's a lot of money that stands to be lost for some already very rich people.
I see where you're coming from, but I doubt the finance industry is worried that they're going to be put out of business - if anything, right now they view Bitcoin as another source of revenue. There have been a lot of inventors that have killed off much bigger businesses, and I can't think of any that wanted to stay anonymous.
Oh, I don't think the entire industry will be. There's a large class of necessary & billable activities that the blockchain doesn't impact. But transaction / settling fees aren't zero revenue either.
The more immediate explanation was probably "he or she or they knew the first use was going to be facilitating illegal transactions and didn't want to be associated."
Bitcoin is way, way too small to disrupt banking. The total value of the M2 money supply of USD is $12,500 billion. Bitcoin's total value is only around ~$40 billion. That may seem large, but it is puny compared to the banking industry.
Not that I think Craig Wright has presented any evidence that he is Satoshi, but if the anonymous creator of Truecrypt can be an international drug lord and weapons dealer, why can't the anonymous creator of a cryptocurrency be a serial fraud and tax evader?
Well, when people say Craig Wright is a fraud they mean "he's not the real Satoshi". So obviously, he can't be a fraud in this context and also be the creator of Bitcoin. People really aren't caring at all wether he's been evading taxes or not, as that's something for the Australian government to worry about.
Turns out a tax evader is a fraud. That is a conman. So it does actually turn out to be relevant here. If he lies about other things (taxes, degrees, etc.) why wouldn't he lie about this? If someone was really blackmailing him to come out because he is the real Satoshi (as he said in the BBC video) then wouldn't they want him to show true undeniable proof?
It's not about that. Paul Le Roux never claimed to be the creator of TrueCrypt, what we have are clues that connect him to working on E4M, then working on SecurStar, porting encryption algorithms from SecurStar to E4M and getting fired due to that. And then a project named TrueCrypt and claiming to be based on E4M started to surface.
I am not expecting Le Roux to be the true creator of TrueCrypt but this seems to be a pretty solid link between Le Roux and TrueCrypt.
Now about Wright, he can't even write a proper blog post with proper working scripts about cryptography...
As already stated I don't believe Wright's claims at all, and I find the whole thing pretty silly as we already have quite a few viable candidates/teams for Satoshi in the public record. I simply stated an interesting observation linking two related technologies and circumstances surrounding them :)
Yes, especially if he's been accused of being Satoshi previously and doesn't want the world to know that. What better way for the real Satoshi to throw people off his trail than to claim to be Satoshi and offer up proof that you know will eventually be debunked?
If your goal is to eventually start spending the large quantity of initially-mined Bitcoins, it seems like the first step would be to ensure that they're never traced back to you, especially if you don't want to pay taxes on the proceeds. And getting crossed off the list of potential Satoshis is a good first step.
If the convoluted hilarious title didn't give it away then the 1991 quote (given by Churchill) here attributed to Albert Einstein (who died in 1955) should do it.
Yeah, probably I didn't notice subtleties at first (because I'm not a native speaker), but still satire is usually published at designated places. Imagine finding a ridiculous column under your own name on TechCrunch in Security section.
The UK press likes to sprinkle its satire around fairly liberally & TheRegister goes for the full bore approach: Every article there is partially satire.
I'm no crypto guy, but what's all this about different versions of OpenSSL succeeding or failing to validate a signature? That sounds like it should be interesting in its own right...
The bash command line given by Wright had a bug (or an intentional error, e.g. to slow down the verification attempts, or confuse o whatever) (& instead of &&). Kaminsky missed to recognize that.
1. Craig Wright is telling the truth, but has released a bad proof to misdirect everyone into believing he is not Satoshi. Maybe he's just having a laugh.
2. Craig Wright is lying.
Even if he's not Satoshi, he seems smart enough to know he wouldn't get away with releasing shoddy proofs. Perhaps he thought the mainstream media would say "Craig Wright invented Bitcoin" and anyone that disagreed would be called a conspiracy nut.
Perhaps this was a kind of pump-and-dump where he expected the price to change significantly and make a killing out of doing it. He doesn't care what people think of him if he's just made $20 million. Could it have anything to do with his ongoing legal troubles with the tax authorities in Australia?
At this stage, I'm seeing plenty of people saying "Here's why Craig Wright isn't Satoshi" and that's interesting and useful. But I haven't seen anyone establish why Craig Wright would be lying.
Also, it's interesting that "The Real Satoshi" has not posted something saying he's not Craig Wright, as we have seen with previous "exposés".