Craig Wright Tells Court He 'Stomped on the Hard Drive' Containing Satoshi Wallet Keys (coindesk.com) 94
Craig Wright told a Norwegian court on Wednesday that he "stomped on the hard drive" that contained the "key slices" required to grant him access to Satoshi Nakamoto's private keys, making it "incredibly difficult" to cryptographically prove he is the creator of Bitcoin -- a title he has claimed but failed to prove since 2016. From a report: Wright's inability to back up his claims with acceptable evidence is the issue at the center of his trial in Norway, one of two simultaneous legal battles between Wright and crypto Twitter personality Hodlonaut (real name Magnus Granath) over a series of tweets Hodlonaut -- then, a public school teacher with roughly 8,000 Twitter followers -- wrote in March 2019, deeming Wright a pretender and calling him a "scammer" and a "fraud."
Wright previously attempted to prove he was Satoshi in 2016 by demonstrating "proof" that he controlled Satoshi's private keys -- first, in private "signing sessions" with Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen and former Bitcoin Foundation Director Jon Matonis (Andresen later said he'd been "bamboozled" by Wright and Matonis went on to work for a company owned by Wright), and later, in a public blog post offering "proof" that was thoroughly debunked by several well-known cryptography experts. In Norway, however, Wright is no longer attempting to convince the court he is Satoshi with cryptographic evidence -- partly because he claims to have intentionally destroyed his only proof shortly after attempting suicide in May 2016, following his signing session with Andresen, and partly because he now claims cryptographic proof is inconclusive and that "identity is not related to keys."
Wright previously attempted to prove he was Satoshi in 2016 by demonstrating "proof" that he controlled Satoshi's private keys -- first, in private "signing sessions" with Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen and former Bitcoin Foundation Director Jon Matonis (Andresen later said he'd been "bamboozled" by Wright and Matonis went on to work for a company owned by Wright), and later, in a public blog post offering "proof" that was thoroughly debunked by several well-known cryptography experts. In Norway, however, Wright is no longer attempting to convince the court he is Satoshi with cryptographic evidence -- partly because he claims to have intentionally destroyed his only proof shortly after attempting suicide in May 2016, following his signing session with Andresen, and partly because he now claims cryptographic proof is inconclusive and that "identity is not related to keys."
Identity not related to keys (Score:5, Insightful)
Person who doesn't understand cryptography inadvertently gives away that he's not the creator of a unique cryptographic system.
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I assume it is a poor reference to quantum computing... but tend to agree.
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Re:Identity not related to keys (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought he meant being in possession of a sequence of bits is not the same concept as your identity as a human being including whether you once wrote a particular piece of code. But, who knows.
Wright also told the court that he could control Satoshi's coins without the keys and that the blockchain could be corrected going back in time. So . . . Yeah.
Re:Identity not related to keys (Score:5, Interesting)
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Technically he's correct, the Bitcoin code can be modified any way we want to.
All he as to do is convince the rest of the bitcoin hosts to accept his "changes" and update their servers to his preferred version.
lied about education (Score:5, Interesting)
Craig Wright a serial fraudster making lies about his background his whole life.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/t... [forbes.com]
Re:lied about education (Score:4, Interesting)
Fits. As a holder of a genuine CS PhD, I also have very little respect for anybody claiming to have one without ever getting one, i.e. proving to be smart enough, putting in the time and having done some contributions to the field. Fortunately, were I live it is actually a crime to claim a PhD without having one and for a "PhD" from a non-accredited university (i.e. a bought one) you always need to use the full title and may not abbreviate it as simply "Dr.".
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"proving to be smart enough"
have you not noticed the idiots with PHDs then?
Fortunately, I have a PhD, not a PHD....
But sure, a PhD is an _indicator_ that somebody may be smart, it is not reliable proof. On the other hand, you can usually get their thesis and learn a bit more about how they think. The two times that failed when I tried, it turned out they did not actually have that PhD. One got sacked, the other chose to leave the country. Not my doing though.
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Ah PHD, post hole diggers. Most people operate their PHD correctly, though it is possible to shove one through a copper gas line or TV cable. Remember to always dial your town's excavation number before any digging project!
Now PhD's on the other hand, normally take a lot of effort from real accredited universities. In the case of this fraudster claiming to invent bitcoin, he's claimed multiple PhD in various fields but actual verification of them by journalists always seemst o come up empty. Of course,
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Yep, pretty much. I make less, but I do not nearly work full-time.
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Hahahaha, no. You cannot afford my hourly rate. Also happens to actually be an engineering PhD in the CS field and taking the university I got it from into account it does not get more valuable than that.
Identity (Score:4, Funny)
My preferred pronouns are Satoshi and Nakamoto.
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OFF WITH XIS HEAD!
>China has entered the chat
Another con artist (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who was as intimately involved in this would have mountains of evidence to prove so. Or, at the very least, a low lying hill. They would be able to demonstrate this or that without hesitation.
Instead, all we keep hearing are excuses.
It's like someone claiming they are totally innocent then pleading the 5th 400 times during a deposition.
Re:Another con artist (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Another con artist (Score:5, Insightful)
At a certain point it's hard for compulsive liars to keep their alternative histories in their minds.
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They planted those documents on me and I want them back because they're mine.
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Too good, I'm stealing this
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It's like someone claiming they are totally innocent then pleading the 5th 400 times during a deposition.
To be fair there are some particular pieces of crap that did exactly this and continue doing it. And some of them even seem to get away with it.
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To be fair there are some particular pieces of crap that did exactly this and continue doing it. And some of them even seem to get away with it.
And some of them even get the authorities to "refuse to prosecute" them.
Let's face it; the law is for plebes. Those in positions of sufficient power face no consequences for their actions regardless of political affiliation.
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Yep. Deep-set corruption. Eventually kills everything.
Ha! (Score:2)
Sure, he just stepped on the keys to tens of billions of dollars. Anyone with the Satoshi keys is either dead or has the world's best self control. How would you own that much wealth and never touch it? Like who hasn't needed a new roof or car repair and thought "Maybe I could dip into those 66,000 bitcoins? Nah".
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Re:Ha! (Score:5, Funny)
the market would collapse overnight ... and there would be great uncertainty
So... basically any random Wednesday. :-)
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The Satoshi keys probably were destroyed soon after the generation of the initial bitcoins. It would be the best way to avoid the temptation to ever claim them.
Whomever Satoshi Nakamoto was, they were not trying to get rich and wanted anonymity.
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> Whomever Satoshi Nakamoto was, they were not trying to get rich and wanted anonymity.
Yep, anybody for whom more money was useful is off the table. And the bankers were ruled out in block 0.
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Technically he could still be arrested for making an alternate currency (like the creators of e-gold).
Is he actually this deluded? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know what a "private signing session" was supposed to be, and it doesn't matter. All he had to do was transfer some trivial amount from the Satoshi wallet to anywhere - the whole world would be able to see the transaction, and all doubt would have been removed.
So, of course, he now (finally) admits that he doesn't have the keys. Truth is, he never did.
Wright told the court a little thing like not having Satoshi’s keys wouldn’t stop him from accessing Satoshi’s coins, if a judge such as herself was amenable.
What a clueless dweeb. You'd think by now he would have at least studied the basics of cryptocurrencies. Does he expect her to command the entire network to agree to gift him with a million coins? I suppose that's theoretically possible in a couple of different ways, but it just ain't gonna happen. Not even if some random judge says so.
Where is he getting the money to continue this nonsense? After repeating his assertion for so many years, has he actually deluded himself into believing that he is Satoshi?
Re:Is he actually this deluded? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what a "private signing session" was supposed to be, and it doesn't matter. All he had to do was transfer some trivial amount from the Satoshi wallet to anywhere - the whole world would be able to see the transaction, and all doubt would have been removed.
People get this wrong. The minimum he has to do is cryptographically sign a message with one of Satoshi's keys. There is no need to move any amount of Bitcoin. In the Kleiman vs Wright case, Wright claimed he owned a particular coin to which the coin's real owner signed a message stating he was not Wright and that Wright was a liar and a fraud.
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I don't know what a "private signing session" was supposed to be
You're young. Signing parties used to be held at security conventions or IT security meetings where people who knew each other would start a web of trust by introducing people to each other and physically verifying each other to sign each others' keys. Haven't had that in ages, but I'm sure it still happens somewhere.
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They are still a thing at conventions. I know of them happening at DEFCON from time to time and I think there's one at SCaLE also. I'm sure there are more.
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> I don't know what a "private signing session" was supposed to be,
There's a shell game you can play with ECDSA keys when you have a public key, and to someone who's not watching the 'shells' it looks like you signed a message with the private key matching the public key - if you tell them that's what's happening and control all the pieces.
Like all magic tricks using misdirection, it's fun if it's done in good spirit but never actually true.
If I was the creator it should be easy to prove (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd show them the series of version control commit messages I made as I created the code. There would be a clear and obvious, mostly-logical progression of code-creation, failed experiments, commented-out snippets taken from stack overflow posts that can be tied to my name, and tons of other evidence incrementally added over the course of many days or weeks as the code is slowly built. This record would very difficult to fake convincingly. Even if I was a weirdo who didn't use version control, I'd still make occasional backup copies of the whole code directory every few days, or something similar, and this record would exist. Nobody sits down to write something like bitcoin in one go without backing things up along the way, it's just too complex a codebase for that to be reasonable.
Re:If I was the creator it should be easy to prove (Score:5, Funny)
Funny story, the backups and repos he worked with were on the same hard drive with the keys that he stomped. There were some stunningly clear photos of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster on there, too.
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I'd show them the series of version control commit messages I made as I created the code.
I couldn't do that for anything I've made. Don't assume everyone making anything is a professional software developer. Sure there should be many other ways to prove your work is yours. But version control only works if you used it in the first place.
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Whole thing is a circus at this point.... (Score:2)
I mean, it's been said before that Satoshi could very likely be a fictitious person in the first place. It might be a made up name that a group was operating under when working on the initial bitcoin project. For all we know, these could be some folks who mutually agreed they'd leave the wallet of "Satoshi" untouched as funds that helped guarantee the crypto-currency couldn't be completely tanked by selling it all off. And meanwhile, when they saw it gaining traction, they got themselves rich by purchasing
Best theory I ever heard (Score:5, Interesting)
The best theory I ever heard about the ID of Satoshi is that he was a developer who committed suicide in the early days of Bitcoin. His death allegedly lines up with a ceasing in repository commits from an unknown developer with a particular style. People forget that back then spending 10,000 BTC on a pizza was the way to prove that BTC was a viable currency. Satoshi's hard drive is probably in a landfill several layers up from a rich vein of MLB rookie cards.
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Maybe he slipped on a banana peel? Does it matter? Dead is dead.
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That is one possible explanation, yes.
The best theory is that it was created by a state intelligence agency, however.
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what intelligence agency would invent a system where in fact transactions are traceable?
intelligence agencies cover their tracks with cash
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Who says the hypothetical intelligence agency created Bitcoin to hide their own spending? Maybe they created it to try to fool people who thought it was actually private into carrying out their transactions where they could be tracked.
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So you mean they invented it but had to wait years for it to catch on...
yeah, sounds like tin foil hattery
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I doubt it was a government project at its inception. If you google around, Bitcoin was not the first attempt at an online currency, or even a secure anonymous online currency. There was a lot of organic desire for it. However, I wouldn't be surprised if agents were monitoring or even planted in this project or many other crypto projects, especially after the Silk Road bust.
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Sure, that's the best theory if you believe the glamorous lies state intelligence agencies tell about themselves.
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His death allegedly lines up with a ceasing in repository commits from an unknown developer with a particular style.
Which repository?
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Was that the best theory you heard? Man, then either you have not heard a lot of theories, or you're bad at evaluating them.
I think it's a better theory that Satoshi is the guy who
1. Had proposed bitcoin's closest inspiration, bit gold
2. Sent out calls for help to turn bit gold into a practical system
3. Was active in the mailing list where bitcoin was first announced, yet...
4. Somehow was not credited by "Satoshi", and somehow didn't bother to comment on the release of bitcoin, despite it basically scooping
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Was that the best theory you heard? Man, then either you have not heard a lot of theories, or you're bad at evaluating them.
I have not heard a lot of theories, and decided to go down the rabbit-hole just a bit . The man to which you refer is NIck Szabo. I had read an article several years ago about the other man to which I was referring: Len Sassaman [bitcoin.com]. The Szabo theories are based on linguistic analysis of the Bitcoin white paper--Szabo is the best match for that, whereas the Sassaman thing I read abou
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Satoshi clearly understood game theory. Having the key is dangerous and therefore cumbersome to protect. Moving coins from that wallet would also be detrimental to the confidence in Bitcoin and dangerous to the owner. The safest, simplest, and most useful approach for someone who cared about promoting Bitcoin adoption would be to destroy the original private key. There's no reason why Satoshi couldn't have hundreds or thousands of Bitcoin in later wallets that would make him rich enough to not really ca
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I should have mentioned: no fucking way was Wright involved in the creation of Bitcoin. It scares me that the courts are stupid or corrupt enough to entertain this clown.
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I think you're right about Wright. No pun intended. The point about having one or more low-key wallets with less BTC is well taken. There may have even been a gentleman's agreement to destroy the private key for the Satoshi wallet--kind of a null tontine. It might also be an early example of the "burns" that other cryptos (often scammy ones) have adopted as a means to ensure confidence and/or deflate the currency; although IIRC BTC has a designated burn address too, as well as some wallets that are publ
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Nick had some good ideas but nowhere near the chops of the Satoshi entity.
If you read some of his recent nonsense he's against everything Satoshi wanted for p2p digital cash. Very different philosophies. Satoshi was oriented towards universal human flourishing and the choice of Genesis block was very, very deliberate.
Philosophy is more important than stylometry or cryptography for finding Satoshi and if you do you just might realize you didn't need to. There were many clues left, for the people who shoul
I whupped a tiger yesterday (Score:1)
One swift kick, grabbed the tail, and whirled the cat around my head and smashed it to ground. It ran away like the way that donkey did when I tied a Catherine wheel to its tail and lit it.
What? You don't belie
Stomped on it? (Score:2)
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I still say (Score:2)
If he can log into say the email account for Satoshi and send out messages, that would be a good start. Sure, you can always find ways to gain access to someone else's account, but it's at least SOMETHING. Then, assuming the guy's a coder, find some examples of his old code, preferably predating Bitcoin, and compare it to that of the early Bitcoin code to see if things line up. Things like variable and function naming, where they put curly braces, and other little idiosyncratic things that would require a l
A much easier way. (Score:5, Interesting)
Get him to post from the original Satoshi account on the p2pfoundation forum. Satoshi posted in December 2021 to offer a (sigh) NFT of the original post: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/... [ning.com]
That means that whomever Satoshi is still has access to the posting account. This was after an absence of 7 years. (Or I guess an Admin could have changed the credentials...)
Compel Wright to post there, and wait for him to come up with some new lie about how he can't access that account.
Then take it a step further: Subpoena an admin of the forum to get more details about that account's postings -- e-mail address, IPs used to post (if they're logged).
If Wright can't log in to that account or make a post saying "I am Craig Wright" then it's as clear as day to me that he is not Satoshi.
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Posting as someone else on some phpBB thing is much easier than faking a cryptographic key.
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> That means that whomever Satoshi is still has access to the posting account.
Sorry, no. Somebody knew the email he used there and that domain had expired so he grabbed that and did a password reset.
We knew about this years ago. I wonder, though, whoever informed you of this was deliberately leaving out the most essential detail, so what was their agenda? Making mint on an NFT?
What a scummy person (Score:2)
Lets hope the court does not buy any of his lies.
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Even if the courts did believe him, I fail to see what this is going to get him. If can't access the wallet then can't get access to the bitcoins any way. I also doubt any of the people that maintain the block chain, most of them scattered around the world, are going to pay any attention to a court order to change the block chain so he has access to the coins.
So, even if he came down from the mountain after 40 day, with stone tablets penned by the hand of God himself saying he is Satoshi, he is still s
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Well, scams work because a lot of people are stupid. Seems to apply here as well...
And I'll say it again (Score:1)
Crypto will never be taken seriously by big established firms as long as the ones behind it are stomping on hard drives, playing with transistor radios in their mom's basement, and going by hacker/street/prison aliases.
Either they shape up and get with the program (the real world), or crypto will be at best a toy currency.
Who gives a shit? (Score:2)
If he is him, then he is a billionaire. if not, then he's delusional. Frankly I don't care much either way, but if I was a paper billionaire I would not care so much if people believed me or not, I'd be off on my private island sipping sugary drinks with beautiful women.
He's a liar and a thief. (Score:1)
But he knows the real Satoshi is dead so that's why he feels safe doing this. They should be questioning him about the whereabouts of the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
But Isamu Kaneko created bitcoin... (Score:2)
(A) He's Japanese and the fact that "Satoshi" means knowledge is something very few non-native speakers knew at the time.
(B) He created the p2p file-sharing program Winny, essentially Limewire for Japan. He was arrested for this and thus learned to hide his identity when creating controversial software.
(C) He had a heart attack in July 2013, three months after bitcoin surged to $500, then dropped by half.
Yeah and also (Score:1)
Ever disassemble a hard drive? (Score:2)
He "stomped" on it? With the case? Anyone ever take a apart a hard drive?
Why, yes, I *have* taken apart hard drives - the old, "full height" one, because where I was working, their deGaussing machine could only handle "half height" drives. And he really thinks that "stomping" on it damages it, or makes it completely unreadable?
Did anyone read the whitepaper? (Score:1)
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