Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto

Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by acqq on Monday May 02, 2016 @06:02PM (#11616065)

When he mentions PGP Nick refers to the four month old fraud by Wright:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3w027x/dr_craig_st...

Which was also "good enough" to appear "technical" and "valid" initially to some.

So it's really time for the quote of one famous thinker:

"I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says, 'Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me... You can't get fooled again!'"

The shortest summary of the current Wright's hoax is by Kaminsky:

"Yes, this is a scam. Not maybe. Not possibly.

Wright is pretending he has Satoshi’s signature on Sartre’s writing. That would mean he has the private key, and is likely to be Satoshi. What he actually has is Satoshi’s signature on parts of the public Blockchain, which of course means he doesn’t need the private key and he doesn’t need to be Satoshi. He just needs to make you think Satoshi signed something else besides the Blockchain — like Sartre. He doesn’t publish Sartre. He publishes 14% of one document. He then shows you a hash that’s supposed to summarize the entire document. This is a lie. It’s a hash extracted from the Blockchain itself. Ryan Castellucci (my engineer at White Ops and master of Bitcoin Fu) put an extractor here. Of course the Blockchain is totally public and of course has signatures from Satoshi, so Wright being able to lift a signature from here isn’t surprising at all.

He probably would have gotten away with it if the signature itself wasn’t googlable by Redditors.

I think Gavin et al are victims of another scam, and Wright’s done classic misdirection by generating different scams for different audiences."

https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/02/validating-satoshi-or-not...

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by nickpsecurity on Monday May 02, 2016 @06:34PM (#11616295)

Good write-up. The Australian tax thing in the Reddit is another good example. And yes, those of us from Tennessee do not take kindly to folks trying to play us for a fool. ;)

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by mirimir on Monday May 02, 2016 @11:05PM (#11617563)

So why would be want people to think that he's Satoshi? He will probably end up owing money to the Australian government. Wouldn't they try to force him to sell Bitcoin? If he could, I mean.

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by nickpsecurity on Monday May 02, 2016 @11:15PM (#11617613)

Have you seen him in interviews or descriptions of his companies? He wants notoriety with benefits it can bring or he's screwing around with people. Those two are reasons for epic levels of bullshit all over the globe going back thousands of years. Should always consider those. Also, realize sometimes you won't understand the Why of what people would do and focus on the What/How/Evidence. That helps with the stranger ones. ;)

One intuitive moment I had in first story I read was how one person asked his wife about it. If she knew he was Satoshi, she'd likely have a neutral, cautious, or irritated dismissal of the claim. Instead, I think it said something along the lines of her smirking and walking off. More like a wife reacting, as usual, to a husband's bullshit she's seen 100 times that isn't worth further consideration and the fact the person asking hasn't figured that out yet. Maybe my mental bias but her reaction stuck out a bit to me on top of more solid evidence.

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by mirimir on Monday May 02, 2016 @11:54PM (#11617792)

Fair enough.

But I am betting that it's an Australian ;)

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @12:26AM (#11617910)

Nah, you're betting on Gibraltar and Seattle, WA. Why do you think Satoshi is Australian, though? ;)

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by mirimir on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @12:57AM (#11618018)

It's just a feeling, based on IRC etc talk of cryptocurrencies, from many years ago.

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @01:06AM (#11618060)

I gotcha. Can't go on that myself. Yet, I understand the intuition pulling you in that direction based on patterns you saw. Just as I had mine about Wright's character via his actions and his wife's responses.

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by vintermann on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @01:50AM (#11618242)

Why would anyone want people to think they're extremely rich and clever? Well, ego for one thing, another is that a conman could make use of that to smooth some paths wherever he goes.

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by creadee on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @05:05AM (#11619001)

If you had a lot of bitcoins and needed a good excuse for how you got them, convincing people you're Satoshi would be one non-taxable way to do it.

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Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto by CydeWeys on Monday May 02, 2016 @08:25PM (#11616918)

> He probably would have gotten away with it if the signature itself wasn’t googlable by Redditors.

The nice thing about the blockchain is that it's necessarily public, and therefore everything on it is Googleable (various block explorers are crawled and indexed).

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