> …lawyers picked apart Wright’s claims that some of his computer documents had been typed before 2008, using evidence from font designers. The witnesses testified that some fonts “hadn’t even been created until years after the alleged date of the document”…
Fun fact: A Microsoft font also helped expose corruption by Pakistan's former PM, Nawaz Sharif [1]. Apparently, documents dated to 2006 were typed up using Calibri, a font that only went into public distribution around 2007.
Still doesn't work, NSA has a backdoor agreement with "Big Font" to put little tags in fonts to pinpoint the time, data, and individual authoring the pdf or similar. Similar to how they watermark laser printers, the waterfont the fonts
> A legal notice on Wright’s website¹ now states that he is not Satoshi and that he has been ordered not to carry out any more legal proceedings based on these false claims.
I can see the notice, but how does that work? Did the court order that specific phrasing and page? Have they seized the domain? Are they going to run it indefinitely? Is there anything stopping Craig from purchasing a new domain and using that?
It doesn't look like a seized domain/website, then his own personal "logo" wouldn't be there, and it would be clear some agency was behind it, but seems that has been published by himself.
Skimmed through the linked court docs but didn't find anything about him being forced to publish something like this, although that would make sense if he was.
Seems weird to write in 3rd person though, but wouldn't be the weirdest thing that guy engaged in so who knows, diggan certainly doesn't.
Your first guess is precisely right: the court ordered him to post that notice on his Twitter accounts and website. It's for a limited time of a few months.
…to liars everywhere. He lied, he forged documents, he filed suits. Most people will never go to these lengths to back up their lies, no matter how big the potential windfall. You have to respect the dedication if nothing else.
‘Just out of interest,’ I said. ‘If you are a fraud ... How hard a fraud would it have been to perpetrate?’ ‘It would be the best one in human history,’ Craig said.
If he's not Satoshi and doesn't have Satoshi's keys the what is the point of saying he is Satoshi? Seems like a long way to go for some notoriety and no financial gain.
He attempted to sue Bitcoin core devs to alter the algorithm to hand over Satoshi's coins. On the basis that he lost the keys and that the maintainers have a duty to him to help him recover them.
Every part of the lawsuit was just batshit insane. The most insane part was that an UK court allowed the lawsuit to be heard, and forced dozens of people not living in UK to pay big money to defend themselves.
While the lawsuit was insane, it serves a good reminder that when Bitcoiners proudly proclaim that “governments have no power over them”, it’s not quite that simple in lots of ways.
If the governments of the world really started to believe their fiscal powers or national currencies were threatened by crypto, they have an extensive repertoire of tools to shut it down.
You misunderstand the point people saying this make. They know governments can suppress their freedoms ultimately but since Bitcoin is an open and public system, the measures governments have to use to "kill" it force them to limit very fundamental freedoms (like freedom of speech to restrict the publishing of its source code, freedom to consume the energy citizens purchase and/or produce how they want, neutral access to Internet, etc.).
These kind of measures are political suicide in Western democracies, hence why politicians are seen as powerless against Bitcoin in these places, why they "let" this market grow and why they just setup ways to tax it as best as they can (at the borders between fiat and crypto).
In places where preserving such freedoms is not a burden for governments you already see bans flourish when it is convenient for the people in power... but even then, it just marginally stops the actual access to Bitcoin as a network participant (which is not limited to mining). It doesn't actually kills Bitcoin.
But everyone knows that if governments around the world decided to install massive censorship, invade the privacy of all their citizen, and magically all were in agreement to do so at the same time, Bitcoin wouldn't survive... if you think this is a possible scenario, is Bitcoin really the thing your should worry about?
The one fundamental that you have to understand about all government is that it is essentially a monopoly on violence. That monopoly enables things like taxation and broad social consensus and consent.
But, it's there, and if Bitcoin began to chip away at the core of any state you can expect it to be used.
Some people say that they can't take my gold.
Some people say that they can't take my guns.
But history says that they can and will and have.
Sure, but as I said, if they come after Bitcoin, it's a good time to worry about a lot of freedoms your governments are supposed to protect/afford you... it could be seen as the canary in the mine in that regard.
China banned bitcoin mining and now there's hardly any bitcoin mining in China. Maybe the legal wrangling would be more involved in western countries, but I can't see why enforcement would be any harder.
ISPs already block bittorrent and blacklist domains. They could easily block bitcoin, too.
Actually, it's estimated that about a quarter of mining is in China. The largest players moved, the rest are lying low, so it's hard to get exact numbers.
> Maybe the legal wrangling would be more involved in western countries, but I can't see why enforcement would be any harder.
For the USA, computer source code is considered speech protected by the First Amendment, there's not much "legal wrangling" you can do around this when it has been confirmed by the Supreme Court. Short of drastically restricting this right/freedom... don't think the US population would welcome this "wrangling" with open arms.
You're also missing the point I've made, China's ban and various blocklists have not killed Bitcoin, it is still used a lot in China these days, it's simply illegal to mine it... for now, they've gone anti to pro Bitcoin many times over the years.
The fastest way to kill Bitcoin would be to use it to publish the torrent hashes of child porn. Since it is nearly impossible to erase information from the chain, this “taint” is forever. Any participant node processing the chain will be “distributing child pornography.”
That’s thoroughly illegal pretty much everywhere. Worse, it has a very powerful social stigma against it, which means you can’t even fight it in court.
It has already been done [1], the issue is that Bitcoin is not really made for large files storage, so you'd store hashes to a torrent as you suggested or you'd split parts of the illegal content that then would require some other protocol be recomposed... Historically that has not been enough to cause legal trouble for network participants, another reason is that this data can also be deleted from your own node once you are made aware of it. It's been an anti-Bitcoin talking point for many years, nobody really cares about it.
I disagree. This lawsuit was against a single individual. There is nothing here that is threatening to crypto as a whole.
One thing that will make it harder to regulate as time goes on is that more people will be financially involved. From traditional finance getting involved through funds, to the masses getting involved, the ecosystem has grown far beyond the fringe, and will continue to do so with each successive hype cycle. Hell, many governments themselves have skin in the game now.
I’m curious how you think serious crippling legislation or enforcement would play out.
EDIT: additional thought… this case protects the industry, not the other way around. The industry was being attacked by a fraudulent individual, and the government defended the industry.
This is a misunderstanding. The lawsuit was not one suit: it wrapped up one against Wright, but several that he instigated against others. This involved dozens of individuals and companies, sued by him for various ends such as control over the word "Bitcoin", control over bitcoins themselves, and forcible changes to the protocols.
It was absolutely a threat to Bitcoin and other crypto.
Ultimately I can memorise 12 words representing my private key. And when the dictatorship finally ends, or I manage to flee, no government can ever freeze my money.
No tax man, no dictator, and no other thief can distinguish someone who memorised 12 words from someone who didn't.
You might find it ever increasingly difficult to change bitcoins to real money if a country -- or multiple -- is against it. No such thing happens currently but there are constant efforts to bring KYC and so forth to exchanges.
> U.S. persons and entities – meaning anyone on American soil or any U.S. citizens abroad – are barred from transacting with the addresses or people added to the sanctions list.
Governments can shut down the core developers, or at least force them into hiding and force them to use nyms (like they should do, as cypherpunks anyways).
But stopping people from downloading and running some code… well on a closed eco system like Apple App Store, sure, you can pressure a company into compliance, but how are you going to stop determined people? Who download and share code over I2P and TOR?
It’s off course true that if it really came to this globally, the price of bitcoin would probably tumble and be more compatible to other currently more privacy forward coins like Monero .
Well, you make it a capital office, or less draconian... make it an offense punishable by 10 years of hard labour in a dire penal camp somewhere cold.
In addition you make it an offense to fail to disclose knowledge of the use of such capabilities, and you institute a system of rewards to positively encourage disclosure.
Perhaps you call it social credit.
You are correct that there are a few people who would defy such a system, a very few.
No need to extract keys, the Bitcoin devs could just change the code. Even lock up the original and mint new ones for Craig. It's just code in the end.
Similar to how Eth changed the code to nullify the DAO hack.
The Ethereum DAO rollback fork was (for better or worse) widely supported by the community. It's not likely that a court-ordered fork to reassign Satoshi's coins to Wright would have anywhere near the same level of support.
I was the one to bring up the DAO, but the situation is completely different when you get into the details.
The DAO was hugely hyped by early eth adopters. If you were into eth, you were into The DAO. For the DAO to be hacked was like eth being hacked. When vitalik and the eth devs supported it, it was easy for the community to fall in line.
Any Craig shenanigans would have absolute 0 support and be the exact opposite.
>The most insane part was that an UK court allowed the lawsuit to be heard, and forced dozens of people not living in UK to pay big money to defend themselves.
Minor correction: according to the wikipedia article on Wright, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance sued Wright, not the other way around.
However, IIUC Wright's attempts over many years to fraudulently extract patent licensing fees and other undeserved benefits from the industry drove industry leaders to spend money to sue Wright. Those attempts included Wright's suing many people.
I'm outraged by Wright and hope Wright is forced to stand trial in criminal court for perjury and forgery.
1. Wright defamation lawsuit against a podcaster. (UK)
2. Wright defamation lawsuit against a bitcoin fan. (UK)
3. Bitcoin fan's declaratory judgement claim over wright's threats of defamation litigation (the case above). (Norway)
4. Wright lawsuit against Bitcoin.org for copyright infringement for distributing the Bitcoin whitepaper (UK).
5. Wright lawsuit against a dozen current and former Bitcoin developers for failing to backdoor the Bitcoin system to enable Wright to "recover" billions of dollars of coins he says are his. Wright claimed he was owed billions of pounds of damages for this failure. (UK)
6. Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) declaratory judgement claim against Wright triggered by threats of copyright infringement claims for distributing the bitcoin whitepaper. (UK)
7. Wright's lawsuit against 14 current and former Bitcoin developers and a number of Bitcoin related companies for infringing his copyright in the "Bitcoin block file format", copyright in the Bitcoin whitepaper (because there is a copy in the blockchain), and his database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain. This case claimed damages in the hundreds of billions of pounds. (UK)
Here is how they've played out and interacted: 1. Podcaster was bankrupt, abandoned his defense, Wright won but was only awarded 1 pound in damages because he lied about how he was harmed. Podcaster left with utterly ruinous legal fees, health compromised, etc.
2. / 3. Norway case was intended to preempt UK case due to very bad UK defamation laws. But Brexit happened and the Norway case no longer preempted and the Bitcoin fan had to face litigation in both jurisdictions. Defeated Wright in Norway, but Wright was granted an appeal which due to how the law works in Norway would essentially be a retrial. UK version of the case case gets stayed on the Norway appeal (but only after huge costs. Wright's target, a school teacher, was forced to abandon his career due to the time imposition. Norway appeal gets held pending COPA case by mutual agreement.
4. Bitcoin.org owner is pseudonymous, Wright and associates made various violent threats. Credible fear that absurd lawsuit was just to determine his location in order to make threats more coercive. In the UK you cannot defend yourself against a claim without identifying yourself (unlike the US where anonymous speech is connected to your 1A rights), so he lost by default. Website operator is ordered to pay nearly a million dollars in "costs" for his unopposed default and is unable to appeal the costs for the same reason as caused the default. Appealed, lost, Appealed to the UK supreme court, but lost. Bitcoin whitepaper and software were restricted on bitcoin.org.
5. Wright defeated on jurisdiction grounds. Successful appeal. Case ordered to be split into a preliminary issue trial for him to prove he ever owned coins in question. Wright abandoned the case after three years and millions spend on both sides a day before his disclosure for the preliminary issue trial was due. Court made a followup ruling that his case was completely without merit.
6. 7. A preliminary issue trial in ordered for 7 on the question of Wright being Bitcoin's creator, since he couldn't own those rights without being. This is merged into the COPA declaratory judgement case which is over the same question. This merged trial is called the "identity trial" in much of the documentation.
So this is why there is why there is some confusion as to Wright being the claimant or the defendant in the recent trial: He was both, claimant with respect to 7 and defendant with respect to 6, and the trial was jointly a trial of both cases.
At the conclusion of the joint trial, which found Wright's claims to be fraudulent, 6,7 were lost. The court also acted to eradicate the outstanding costs in cases 1, 4. Wright abandoned cases 2 and 3.
Wright is appealing the identity trial currently. You can take a look at his new twitter account for an idea of how that's going: https://x.com/CsTominaga/with_replies
Unfortunately most developed nations are generally willing to domesticate the foreign judgements of other developed nations. There are exceptions, e.g. the SPEECH ACT makes many UK defamation claims largely unenforceable in the US... but even if you think you'd be able to block enforcement in your own jurisdiction, if you are wrong you likely forfeit being able defend the claim on its merits.
You also have to deal with any organizations you do business with who are exposed to the UK being ordered to take adverse actions like freeze or seize your accounts.
Because an outlaw in the UK is no joke either, you'd potentially have to spend the rest of your life at risk of being arrested if by happenstance you found yourself in that jurisdiction (e.g. due to a rerouted aircraft), face discrimination from future employers or potential business contacts because of the specter of a judgement hanging over you.
That said, had we not been able to secure funding for our defense we might well have defaulted anyways: if the defense would have bankrupted us, we'd be better off saving our funds and hoping to avoid enforcement of the judgement bankrupting us. But fortunately, Jack Dorsey and the chaincode founders stepped up.
> Unfortunately most developed nations are generally willing to domesticate the foreign judgements of other developed nations. There are exceptions, e.g. the SPEECH ACT makes many UK defamation claims largely unenforceable in the US... but even if you think you'd be able to block enforcement in your own jurisdiction, if you are wrong you likely forfeit being able defend the claim on its merits.
I don't think this is true at all for the US, right? Not just because of the first amendment, but in general I don't think UK judgements are enforceable at all in the US. I wouldn't even think it would be enforceable in commonwealth countries.
Do you have any examples of UK judgements such as those we are discussing being enforced in any of the five eyes countries aside from the UK?
There are mmmmmany such examples. The term, as I mentioned, is domesticating the judgement. In California the primary governing law is https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2009/ccp/1713-1724.h... (though there is similar/equivalent statute in most? all? other states) -- there are other laws for non-monetary damages though non-US non-monetary relief may be hard to domesticate because we generally don't do specific performance but many other jurisdictions do. Wikipedia on the subject is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcement_of_foreign_judgmen...
If you look at the CA law as an example you can see there are a number of reasons to fight the domestication of a judgement, some quite powerful. But they don't replace the value in fighting a case on its merits that ought to be a slam dunk on its merits.
In our case specifically not all of the defendants were in the US either, some were in locations where enforcement may be even harder to prevent.
Interesting, thanks very much for the links and info. It seems NY is notably a state that does not have an equivilant to that CA legilslation, I'm based in NY so I wonder if that's why I was less aware of this.
I'm honestly surprised at this because there could be so many complications, and laws in a foreign country could be so different as to be incompatible with US laws.
Although the wiki does say it's up to a judge if the foreign judgement will be enforced locally or not. The legislation is one thing, do you know how often a US judge does tend to enforce a foreign judgement? What percentage of attempts to do so are successful?
This exception listed on the wiki page "The judgment is repugnant to the public policy of the state where enforcement is sought" I imagine would invalidate a lot of attempts.
Also, another listed exception "In the case of jurisdiction based only on personal service, the foreign court was an inconvenient forum for the trial" - wouldn't that be sufficient to stop US residents from having to spend a lot of money to defend themselves in a country they might never go to?
If you're in the UK and I'm in the US and I sue you, it doesn't seem reasonable to expect you to have to travel here or to spend money on local representation to defend yourself.
I would think the way it would work is that I would et a summary judgement here, and then it would be on me to travel to the UK to try and get it enforced. That seems fairer to me, although I guess it doesn't work like that.
Assuming the foreign judgement passes various criteria (e.g. not being repugnant to the constution) it's essentially treated as a contract to make the payment-- as if you had some agreement to pay the other party, and enforced as such.
Feedback I've heard ranges from "almost always" to "typically", but I've never seen actual stats on it. It's going to be pretty fact specific, so unless your case maps well to a common fact pattern any statistic may not be too useful.
It's common enough in any case that several state's passed laws to deal with foreign (particularly UK) defamation lawsuits, and then a federal law. So a specific kind of abuse of this process was common enough for a federal law on the subject.
Sadly it seems we lacked the foresight to realize that to the extent that many of these were false and malicious cases that the parties can just cook up some other grounds. So when Wright sued critics in Norway, the UK, and Antigua he did so on the basis of defamation, but when his target list included US persons he didn't use a defamation claim.
> If you're in the UK and I'm in the US and I sue you, it doesn't seem reasonable to expect you to have to travel here or to spend money on local representation to defend yourself.
So one of the reasons to deny domestication is that the foreign court didn't properly have jurisdiction over the subject matter. If I had no connection to the US then there wouldn't be a reasonable basis to claim the US court had jurisdiction over me.
But if you and I had some interaction then on the basis of that interaction I might have subjected myself to your jurisdiction. The internet has made it easy to arguably be subject to any jurisdiction anywhere in the world. If you look at some of the arguments in English courts (for example) on jurisdiction they like to emphasize e.g. that someone publishes in English documents which are available and read in the UK. There is a bar for jurisdiction, it's a real bar, but it's not necessarily a particularly high bar.
To complicate matters, summary judgements and other pre-trial judgements like jurisdiction are generally decided on a basis of assuming the claimant's facts are all true. This is a real problem with litigating with an unashamed liar who is primarily interested in damaging you with the process, since they can just make up whatever facts they need to keep the case going.
You don't have to convince me that the existing process is not good. I think it made more sense decades ago when it was much harder for an ordinary person to be arguably subject to arbitrary jurisdictions.
Aside, NY does have domestication rules too, though it does sound like they're somewhat better than the more common version. (e.g. safer to take a default judgement)-- though I haven't really looked into them.
We were awarded our legal fees. However, these the legal fees are only a part of the total cost, which includes lost income from the time expended, disruption of our personal lives, alienation from our passions and professions, damage to our reputations from false claims spread by Wright in furtherance of his fraud, etc. At least one of Wright's targets were hospitalized over stress induced cardiac problems due to the litigation.
We can bring separate fraud charges for some of these damages, though they're not likely to be entirely recoverable. However, Wright appears to be a lifelong grifter with little to no personal means to pay any judgement and attaching his sponsors for this litigation would be an extra level of difficulty. Even ignoring the potential of non-recovery, doing so would mean years of additional mud wrestling with this pig ("and the pig likes it!"), and a further impact on our lives which we'd just like to continue. We might be forced to however, because he and his conspirators seem to be showing little sign of stopping and going on the offensive might be necessary because simply losing and paying costs may not be enough to stop them.
He also started and made himself CEO of at least 3 cryptocurrency startups. One of those startups (nChain) tried extract patent licensing fees from other cryptocurrency players.
And the story allowed him to setup a Advanced Fee Fraud (nigerian scammer) style gift where his sponsors (e.g. Calvin Ayre) financed Wright to live a million dollar a year spending lifestyle for the last decade.
Not to mention the constant pump and dumps based on knowledge and control of good and bad news regarding his claims.
There is a perennial debate in the community of enthusiasts that track these cases and Wright's escapades to what degree and at what times was Calvin Ayre bamboozled or, at least, the specific form of his bamboozle.
There is reasonable evidence that Ayre's most recent involvement is knowing-- in the form of leaked emails where Ayre discusses how his media outlet will spin Wright's faked documents. There is also leaked emails describing of witness bribing, and offers of payments to barristers of 100 million pounds which sound corrupt and not like the actions of someone who thought they were legitimately pursuing justice.
By "specific form" what I mean is that it's possible that Ayre doesn't believe (or even never believed) Wright was Satoshi and if so Ayre still could have been conned.
One of the most common form of large scale "Big con"'s is a pattern where you convince a mark that you intend to do some fraudulent thing to someone else, and you invite them to participate. This solves a lot of problems for the conman, like "If this is such a great deal, why hasn't someone else taken it? Why offer it to me?", "Why should I keep this a secret", "How could a deal this good be real?", etc.-- (answer: because it's illegal). In any case, the idea is that the mark thinks he's in on the con when he's really the target. "We're totally gonna rob this bank, we just need a minor advance of $20,000 to preload safe deposit boxes..."
So tying it back in, Ayre might have at one point believed the claim that Wright was Satoshi... but then Wright might have been forced to admit he wasn't and then invited Ayre to participate in the fraudulent "recovery" of Satoshi's coins. This 'recovery' isn't possible, of course, but Ayre doesn't know that and Wright has milked him for much of a decade on the basis of that ignorance.
When the facts are kinda fuzzy it can be hard to tell which explanation is the simplest that is consistent with the facts.
> In one instance, the lawyers set about trying to disprove the legitimacy of handwritten notes. ... Sherrell’s team tracked down the printer of the notepad in China, proving that the exact version of that notebook had not been released until years after Wright’s claims.
So, to recap, a large global industry is built on a foundation that the true identity of a particular currently-anonymous person must never be identified and certainly not posthumously.
In fairness, anyone trying to convince me of any given fact of authorship could do well by leaving the bright red shirt and braces combo in the wardrobe.
I just don't understand why the guy claiming he is the creator and main programmer of a cutting edge anti-establishment crypto asset, would present himself as a suit and tie wearing business man who drinks champagne.
He's trying to trigger some super-stimulus response in his targets based on being a rich supergenius entrepreneur. It's more effective than you might think.
The fact that his actions don't actually look much like the rich, a supergenuis, or an entrepreneur doesn't matter-- the target is people that don't actually know what that looks like.
It's the same reason that he claims to have earned more than 20 postgraduate degrees in the last three years alone. People with the relevant experience recognize that claim a lie or an admission of an unproductive mentally ill degree hoarding fake. But to his targets it signifies him as brilliant beyond any judgement or comparison, such that any red flag gets dismissed as an understandable quirk of a truly singular figure.
thank you for your insight. My only confusion is why is he targeting that strata of humans, surely he should be focusing on the impression he gives to the lawyers, rich, techies.
There is nothing odd about the fact that most people don't validate claims they receive most of the time, particularly if there appears to be a lot of other people adopting that view.
That’s a good point I was just thinking that whoever was behind or still mostly in control of BTC might have just been happy and accepting of this guy walking into the space. But then maybe not. Interesting thought exercise for me Atleast thanks for the banter
What if you insisted you had the key and would prove that you were possibly the owner that way, but when the time came you setup a cardboard door in front of the real one and opened it using a bump key?
That's essentially what has happened with Wright. There are various pieces of evidence that, while not definitive in isolation would be persuasive, which he has insisted he could use to prove himself-- but when the time came he has just been caught faking it over and over again.
It's remarkable that he's been able to continue so long.
Craig is still Satoshi, no matter what a court has (temporarily) ordered him to state. Craig has followed the legal process 100% for years at this point, paid every (massive) court-ordered payment. The majority of cases feature him as defendant because Bitcoin ultimately threatens the establishment and must be controlled at any cost. This is the true source of the negative sentiment and constant attacks.
He just today waived privilege on X and began outlining accusations against his previous legal representation for not following his explicit instructions, and instead followed orders from a man who has been recently convicted in a UK court, is facing bankruptcy in that country, and has fled as a fugitive from justice. The rabbit hole goes deep.
Craig and the BSV Association have worked together with AWS and Aerospike to conclusively prove the Bitcoin protocol is capable of scaling to at least 120GB sized blocks, at over 1 million P2PKH transactions per second. The BTC core team said this was impossible, yet BSVA has provided data from a public cloud provider, with geographically distributed nodes to prove it is. What's more, it's been stated that it does so at an initial cost that is drastically less than most anticipated. These costs are highly likely to be lowered through optimization.
The majority of opinions expressed in this thread will most certainly be abandoned in time when the full body of work can no longer be ignored. One only needs to perform a simple patent search to discover the depth of research and innovation established on blockchain, and then realize that the sheer number of applications and grants are not the work of someone attempting to pull a con. It is true innovation, the same way Bitcoin was and is.
https://craigwright.net/
Fascinating.