Craig S. Wright claimed in 2015 and 2016 to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. I discussed his claims in chapter 6 of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain:
In late June 2017 he spoke at the Future of Bitcoin Conference (where he was introduced as “Bitcoin Dundee”) and threatened legal action against those who had called him a “fraud;”186 this led to a burst of people, including Bitcoin core developer Peter Todd,187 calling him a fraud. He refused to be drawn on his previous claims to be Satoshi.
Dr. Wright has started sending legal threat letters to people who claimed he is not Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright is demanding recipients publicise the following text:
APOLOGY TO DR CRAIG WRIGHT
I was wrong to have alleged that Craig Wright fraudulently claimed to be Satoshi. I accept he is Satoshi. I am sorry Dr Wright. I will not repeat this libel.
The first letter went to Hodlonaut on Twitter — and Wright even put out a $5,000 bounty (payable in Bitcoin SV, his personal Bitcoin fork) for anyone who could doxx Hodlonaut. Preston Byrne is assisting Holdlonaut pro bono (Preston is a solicitor in England as well as an attorney in the US), and they’re accepting crypto donations for expenses.
Other threat recipients include Peter McCormack of the What Bitcoin Did podcast — who has responded. And Adam Back, inventor of Bitcoin predecessor Hashcash. And Vitalik Buterin, care of the Ethereum Foundation. If someone were suing me for defamation, the tweet from Calvin Ayre, Wright’s backer, about Buterin is the sort of thing I’ve previously put in counterclaims. Vitalik’s pretty chill about it so far, though.
The Bitcoin community is outraged — and that includes the exchanges. CZ from Binance threatened to delist Bitcoin SV, and is following through. Same for ShapeShift, and Blockchain Wallet. Gemini gently pointed out that they hadn’t listed BSV in the first place. I loved Kraken’s quote: “In this case, it is a unique case for us, we haven’t delisted any other coins because the founders, people who are promoting it turned out to be total assholes.”
Calvin Ayre previously got an apology from CoinRivet with similar wording to the apologies demanded in the present cases.
Bloomberg interviewed Wright over the matter, which they called a “cartoon cat fight.”
All of this is, of course, good news for Bitcoin SV.
If fraud from the chief promoters is sufficient reason for a delisting from Binance… almost everything should be delisted
— nic carter (@nic__carter) April 15, 2019
Who could have guessed that a Build Your Own Financial Conflicts of Interest sub-community could get so nasty
— Kyle S. Gibson (@KyleSGibson) April 14, 2019
Craig Wright was also deposed on 4 April in the lawsuit brought against him by the Estate of Dave Kleiman, who he claimed to have invented Bitcoin with — Kleiman’s brother Ira is suing Wright for the coins he claimed to have mined with Kleiman. Wright declined to answer several questions on grounds of “national security.”
At some point, you’d think that Bitcoin seasteaders would realise that the idea of declaring yourself a sovereign country has literally never worked. Particularly as it comes out Chad Elwartowski and his girlfriend are only renting their “country” from a company trying to market a seastead franchise. I’m surprised to see talk of the death penalty just for declaring your box floating off the coast of Thailand a sovereign casket … there’s got to be more to this story. I have been told rumours that drugs were found, which, of course, would be a completely shocking thing for Bitcoin libertarians to be involved in.
Bittrex responds to its rejection for a BitLicense: the NY Department of Financial Services “sent four people who didn’t know anything about blockchain.” Or not enough to know that “Donald Duck,” “Elvis Presley” and “Give me my money” are definitely 100% legitimate trader names.
Satoshi’s Treasure is a contest to win $1 million worth of Bitcoin — you go to the web page and try to guess the next key. Cryptocurrency people are the sort of cryptographers who do verification client-side, so the contest’s creator left the first three keys … in the web page JavaScript.
Functional centralisation is good news for EOS — the EOS block producers just decided to throw out the EOS Constitution and write a new one. A completely trustworthy platform!
Quadriga updates — Gerald Cotten’s yacht is for sale. Today’s hearing in what is still technically a CCAA, but headed towards being a bankruptcy, extends the stay on creditors to 28 June. Bankruptcy trustee Ernst & Young is still arguing with POSConnect, one of the payment processors still holding Quadriga funds.
The IMF and the World Bank are totally getting into crypto! Or they’ll “explore crypto merits” with a blockchain project — “‘Learning Coin’ will be inaccessible outside the World Bank and the IMF and have no monetary value whatsoever, and is therefore not a real cryptocurrency, like bitcoin.”
The true star of Crypto the Movie is apparently the tugboat. (Crypto really missed its trick given the hero’s a Bank Compliance Officer — the natural predator for the crypto bro.)
I went on CoinTelegraph’s Hodlers’ Digest again — this time explaining what an economic bubble is, and how that fits into Bitcoin. I’m on from 9:50 or so. I basically recommended people read the Wikipedia article on bubbles. I also recorded an interview with the lovely Nako Mbelle from Around The Coin.
Apparently, everybody missed this little gem on Tether scam website.
Tether actually removed "backed by actual assets" for their so-called reserves. They're literally telling you it's a scam.
At this point, they must be thinking "How much more obvious can we make this scam?" pic.twitter.com/TF2J0WNKI0
— Bitfinex'ed 🔥 (@Bitfinexed) April 12, 2019
Cryptocurrencies have I think probably been a net negative for the world, but I will say one thing: it's hived off some of the real cranks from regular finance & macro into their own universe and I get a lot less exposure to them.
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) December 19, 2018
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