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Craig Wright's claim of inventing Bitcoin may get him arrested for perjury (arstechnica.com)
75 points by edent 8 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 36 comments



Good riddance is all I want to say. We really need fewer liars in this world.


it really is one of the great problems of today. this combined with what my grandpa called “blowhards”.


[flagged]


Factually and statistically speaking, both USA major parties' presidential candidates have a very long rap sheet of pathologically lying. One of the main differences is one started nonstop lying recently whereas the other was nonstop lying in previous decades.


Hopefully they do press forward and he is arrested. Abuse of the legal system should be punished.


When Wright first claimed to be the creator of Bitcoin, I didn't believe him only because the creator of Bitcoin was a very elusive person(s), and Wright is loud; I didn't need to look in to it further.

Welp, the courts did.

My best guess is Bitcoin was created by an Australian guy living in Japan and he no longer with us.


I like to think it was chris mallet who created autohotkey. He disappeared from autohotkey when bitcoin came out. And then disappeared from bitcoin when deep learning came out…


Its probably the person you most suspect https://youtu.be/XfcvX0P1b5g


Why do you say Aussie in Japan? What evidence do you have?


His speech in forums and emails sounds Aussie to me. And his slight distance from American culture rules out USA. Japan because of a handful of references to Japanese culture, and others have deduced the Pacific region from his correspondence timestamps. And no longer with us due to not moving original coins, and his extremely abrupt disappearance mid conversation, almost mid sentence.

I, personally, don't care though and respect their anonymity.


Good, this guy is totally evil and malicious. He has plenty of capacity to pay for the damage he has caused people who actually did contribute to bitcoin.



Funny, the title of his commandeered website is "Coming soon".

What's coming soon?

I wonder how the BSV guys are taking this... they were almost as cultish as Hexicans with Richard Heart (who confronted Craig Wright about this year ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQoyaguvGdQ )


Well deserved.

Hopefully more patent trolls get the same treatment.


Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy


His site now has a notice about the court case and denies he is Satoshi [0]. I've saved a copy for posterity at [1].

[0]: https://craigwright.net/

[1]: https://i.imgur.com/5yHiCLr.png


It's very funny, he's the only person on Earth who is 100% confirmed not to be Satoshi.


Well, plenty of people were born after that whitepaper came out.


You're awfully quick to rule out time travelers.


Well thats one hell of a homepage


Did the court force him to add this on his homepage? i don't really get it


Yes. Paragraph 182 of the judgment [2024] EWHC 1809 (Ch).

https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/COPA-v-W...


Paragraph 182:

> I do not consider a notice on his website on its own to be adequate, since his primary mode of communication to those interested appears to be via X / Twitter or via his Slack channels. So I will order the publication of an amended version of the notice sought by COPA (to reflect the injunctions I am granting) on the homepage of his website (i.e. not merely by way of a link) for a period of six months and of the same amended notice pinned on his X / Twitter feed and on all Slack channels for a period of 3 months.

First ever legally compelled pinned tweet? I guess this way there's no "tweeting through it". It doesn't appear he's complied with this yet.


Wow what a smack down. Has to be unbelievably hard for someone like this to admit they lied publicly. It's so weird because like, obviously he knows he's not Satoshi why did he push it so hard? Is it just straight up mental illness?


Being about to copyright claim a bunch of bitcoin related stuff and force people to pay you to use it is pretty valuable. Plus, theoretically I think he could use that get ahold of some of the early bitcoins somehow down the line, which would obviously be extremely valuable.


Either the court or his lawyers.


Well he got his butt out of the country as soon as the initial judgement came down and hasn't returned since.

More positive effects, https://x.com/CobraBitcoin/status/1813271585882505272

It's good to be here but its unfortunate that it required spending more than 10 million pounds and took several years of several people's lives to get here.

... and counting, considering that he's announced that he will appeal.


For a guy claiming to have invented bitcoin, is he at least an expert on crypto?


Not at all. He forked an altcoin that was already a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash was the name, and he forked it into Bitcoin SV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_Cash#2018_split_to_cre...

To understand why Bitcoin's entire goal is to maintain security of its ledger. Increasing the block size means less people can download the ledger and verify it, since it takes up more space. This is seen as a risk to the security of the ledger and any change to the block size should be avoided. Instead it is better to optimize for the space already available (Segwit is an example). Bitcoin Cash is a fork that disagrees with this opinion and has a bigger block size.

Craig Wright spun off Bitcoin Cash into Bitcoin SV with a massive (128mb per block) size. It is easy to monitor network performance and see both of these networks under preform against Bitcoin. These cryptocurrencies serve as a way for Craig and the other crypto grifters to pad their bags. If you held Bitcoin at the time, you got the same amount "airdropped" on the forked chains represented in their blockchains tokens. This means that once the crypto currency goes live on any exchange you can immediately dump for profit and no real risk.

All he is doing is finding a contentious issue, digging in and marketing his own solution without understanding any of the engineering philosophy in order to exploit and extract money from people in a loosely regulated market.

Hope it truly catches up to him some day.


> Instead it is better to optimize for the space already available (Segwit is an example).

Segwit doesn't optimize already available space, it bypasses the original 1 MB block size limit by moving the transaction signatures outside of the limit (which it does in a way that has some security advantages). Main difference is that it was done as a soft fork, not as a hard fork (which would split the chain). I don't think that you can optimize the size of blocks, as they contain mostly address hashes and signatures.

You can see here that the blocks are bigger than 1 MB: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/avg-block-size


It does optimize by removing unnecessary data from the block space yes. Witness data is instead stored outside of the block, but still bound by the same rules. Segwit also introduces the concept of measuring blocks in weight units. So witness data isn't actually calculated as data consuming the block space but is calculated in the total weight unit of the block. It is also important to note that witness data is also limited (4 million weight units per block)


A true example of making better use of available space would be the Mimblewimble protocol, which allows all spent outputs to be permanently erased from history. The integrity of the entire transaction history can be verified from the UTXO set and the history of transaction kernels (just ~100 bytes per tx).


There are a lot of false and exaggerated claims in the world. Why are we bothering to spend so much time on this in court?


Design flaw in civil courts. Wright was backed by billions of dollars of other people's money that he was willing to throw away, so he was able to drive up cost for others and consume court time.

Had he been just an ordinary unfunded kook, his loopy writings would have just been discarded by the courts.


A court that doesn't act on demonstrable perjury is just a stadium.


Perjury prosecution is relatively rare in both the US and the UK.

Take from that whatever you will.


He not only claimed to be the inventor of bitcoin, he also started registering copyright to the bitcoin whitepaper and code.




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