A while ago he (this Craig Wright fraud) actually sat with one of the first people behind bitcoin development Gavin Andresen. Gavin was the main developer in the beginning chatting with satoshi in the forum. There was a video of Gavin saying that Craig proved to him that he was satoshi. But later seemed to have been part of some kind of social engineering - wasn't totally clear how he proved he could sign the keys.

Regardless the guys's behavior doesn't at all match Satoshi's behavior from the initial days in the forum (before he disappeared that is).

edit: video of Gavin saying Wright is satoshi https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNZyRMG2CjA

Craig produced a proof on a computer he himself provided. Wouldn't have been hard to alter it to say whatever he wanted to.

Indeed. I think Craig is a fraud. I'm just dumbfounded why Gavin --a person I admire from intial days and who is probably person n.2 after satoshi in terms of bitcoin actual initial lines of code written -- was so easily fooled.

Just because people demonstrate remarkable skill or intelligence does not make them immune to the same cognitive biases shared by every human being on the planet. We are all susceptible to being fooled, and a lot more easily than we probably like to imagine.

Yeah it's hard to understand. Gavin's good nature of assuming good intentions from anyone is sure to play a big role.

Also worth to remember that anyone can get bamboozled, even if you're highly intelligent and knowledgeable in a certain area. Just look at how many cult followers there are in the world.

It is easy to understand. Gavin wanted to say what he said. It does not mean that he thinks this is true. He just wanted those words to be out of his mouth. Now how to interpret this fact is another question. May be he wanted to distract public focus from another person. May be he was paid to say so. May be he was bored and did it for lolz.

It is usually easier to con smart people. Or in the alternative, being a bit thick can provide protection against fast talk.

Also book smart vs street smart. Gavin is book smart, but not street smart. Street smart people don’t get taken by conmen with flawed cons.

Maybe because he didn't expect anybody to do a lot of work to convince him of a basically worthless fact.

How long have you spent verifying your own computing platform? However it is, it is never impossible that somebody can corrupt it and fool you about something.

> he didn't expect anybody to do a lot of work to convince him of a basically worthless fact.

Being Satoshi seems like the exact opposite of a basically worthless fact.

Gavin was just being gullible. Being a good early developer on an important project isn't mutually exclusive with being gullible to social engineering.

What does he lose if he guesses wrong?

> What does he lose if he guesses wrong?

Total credibility loss in the BTC community.

I could some how look past his indiscretions: calling himself 'chief Scientist' of an open source project, gate-keeping antics for pull requests, attempted forks with Hearn et al, his involvement with the foundation... He was still critical to the project for many years and not beyond redemption as open source project typically fork into other things for experimentation purposes that grow the project in the long term--Linux distros being a prime example.

But when he went public that he bought faketoshi's narrative it was clear he was beyond help, and that his meeting at the NSA was more than what any of us ever assumed and he was so compromised that nothing could help that anymore.

I hope he is mentally well, and I'm sure he has enough money to do what ever he wants in Life if he just kept a fraction of his coins, but other than I never want to see or hear from Gavin ever again.

Reputation obviously... He'll forever be "the guy who believed Craig"

He probably wasn't fooled, or actually, he got screwed by both sides. He knew CSW wasn't satoshi, also he knew adam back was satoshi but couldn't tell anyone because of the NDA he signed (adam had long been compromised at that point). I think he felt the only way to save the project was to point to someone else being satoshi that did believe in the original bitcoin = p2p cash narrative, but that obviously backfired. Craig also did a complete 180 on his 'beliefs' and made everything he touched proprietary, patented and anti-freedom and privacy. Hard to believe that happened without any external influences as well.

The history of bitcoin is a very interesting one. The video series of unmasking satoshi nakamoto from barely sociable is a great first step into the rabbit hole. But i'm warning you, the deeper you go the weirder it becomes.

>also he knew adam back was satoshi but couldn't tell anyone because of the NDA he signed (adam had long been compromised at that point).

uhh what?

After you watch the socialy bareable video it would probably make more sense. Makes it pretty clear that adam is satoshi (i would say with a 99% certainty). Adam says completely different things about bitcoin today than satoshi did all those years ago. It's not definite that he was compromised but him taking back control over the project with blockstream and the direction he steered it in makes it pretty clear to me.

On Gavin, that's also explained pretty well in the video, also this reddit quote from gavin says more than enough for me (this was under a post named "How Craig Wright probably tricked Gavin Andresen"): "I won't violate people's privacy or repeat things told to me under non-disclosure agreements, so I'm stuck-- I'm not going to say anything more, except I suspect someday the full story will come out (and it'll be made into a movie).

Of course, everything I was told could be a lie, and even professional magicians can be fooled sometimes (ever seen Penn & Teller's Fool Us show ?)."

And yet you can explain Adam Back/Bitcoin Core/Blockstream's actions much more simply as them being insidious actors that wanted to take over the Bitcoin project in order to promulgate propaganda supporting ridiculously high transaction fees so that they could establish a for-profit company to extract the delta between how high the fees are and how low they need to be for bitcoin to actually be usable.

Sending a message from Satoshi's e-mail is very obviously not proof of identity. Satoshi needs to move coins or sign a message. That's the only acceptable proof.

You claim Adam Back is compromised because the things he writes and does are so contrary to Satoshi and what he believed in that it's the only explanation that would make a universe where Back is Satoshi make sense. I much prefer to believe (with better evidence, btw) that Back is just not Satoshi. Boom, no logical contradictions to resolve.

The connection with the very niche bmoney, the conspicuous absence of adam the years before and after bitcoin's release, his move to a tax haven, his creation of hashcash which is very similar to bitcoin, his deep knowledge of bitcoin's source code without having ever contributed to it with his bitcointalk posts, his writing style, and not many other people that would be able to pull it off...

Also even if he didn't create it, why did he never contribute to or interacted with the project? Why did he create a company that would make something he always wanted to create unusable? He even put this on his wikipedia page in 2007: "He has an interest in privacy technology, electronic cash (of the payer and payee anonymous type)..." and yet he is completely absent from bitcoin from 2009-2013 and sets up a company the completely defies everything that he wanted to create for years? It's completely illogical.

I know most of these arguments are from the video but come on. He is the perfect candidate. And i think you will not get much better evidence when someone doesn't want to be publicly known to be satoshi. But sure there is no 100% conclusive proof so believe whatever you want.

Adam Back? The guy who said we should use "tabs" instead of Bitcoin while we waited for Lightning Network to be finished?

I'm not kidding, here's the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHc81OL_hk4&feature=youtu.be...

> Adam Back? The guy who said we should use "tabs" instead of Bitcoin while we waited for Lightning Network to be finished?

While I don't claim to know that Back was involved in the creation of Bitcoin, it's also really hard for me to understand why many people think Satoshi was just one person after all this time.

If anything Hal makes more sense and has way more circumstantial evidence if it was just a single person, but even then I don't think it matters much who was/were the thing we refer to as Satoshi Nakamoto and is actually a cool part of the mythology we've created over the years.

It's like something you'd expect from a Neal Stephenson or Daniel Suarez Book.

Because in the end, they don't matter anymore; it's gone so far from the original codebase that its entirely academic and quite honestly incredibly uninteresting in comparison to everything else that has been accomplished in this community. Though I argue much more could dhave been done if we didn't have to be derailed by this kind FakeToshi BS drama we so all too often in Bitcoin.

What are some good subsequent steps after the barely sociable vid?

The e-mails between Peter Todd John Dillon and the connection with Greg Maxwell and the FBI. There is a pastebin out there from 2013 which is mind blowing. (see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=335658.0)

But looking into what happened in 2015 with the introduction of blockstream, the core devs and the small block campaign. The massive censorship on all major bitcoin discussion platforms. introduction of RBF. the rise of Bitcoin XT and later classic and unlimited. The major signalling for Bitcoin Unlimited by businesses and miners and its subsequent DDOS attack. The segwit proposal with the subsequent Segwit2X proposal. The NY and Hongkong agreements. The BCH fork (and subsequent SV fork if you're interested in that side). The activation of Segwit and the UASF and anti S2X campaign. The complete narrative change shifting to digital gold, SoV and scrubbing anything related to the title of the whitepaper (p2p electronic cash). and so much more interesting stuff, much of the info can be found on reddit's /r/btc that has been scrubbed from other parts of the internet. warning: many info you will find on the subject will be biased one way or another so try to get info on these topics from different sources and make up your own mind.

AFAIK this is probably the same trick he attempted to use where he took a signature from the blockchain and used it. The signature would be of a hash of a transaction, but it would appear as a "valid" signature from that wallet public key.

Unless satoshi lost his keys lol like virtually everyone else of that cohort.

You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private key?

You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.

> You think a guy smart enough to give birth to Bitcoin, and maintain complete anonymity while doing so and while communicating in public forums etc, would forget his private key?

> You just need to remember one seed and suddenly you have billions of dollars of value stored in your brain. I don't think that's a realistic possibility.

BIP39 mnemonics ("seeds") were not around in the early days. Bitcoin core software generated random private keys that were completely unrelated to one another. So it was necessary to backup the wallet file each time that new keys were created. Most users would generate hundreds (or thousands) of keys at a time, to reduce the frequency of backups.

So how could you use these private keys now? Considering they're not seeds.

EDIT: downvoted for asking a question

I can still import a wallet from at least 2012 and move the coins using the official client just like it was created yesterday.

edit: and obviously you can't remember that but if you encrypt your wallet you can save it to long term storages like Dropbox / differrent servers / medias / etc, what Satoshi would most likely be doing

Any one of those individual private keys could be imported into another wallet software application (e.g Electrum). Then the funds can be swept to a newer wallet that has a seed backup.

Private keys are just numbers. That has not changed since the beginning.

They're still supported by most if not all wallets.

I see. Very interesting! I wasn't involved that early so wasn't aware :)

Anyway, my general point stands, just s/remember a seed/store an encrypted file

Personally I think Satoshi is either dead or never going to move his bitcoin.

Sure why not! It was utterly worthless at the time (and today in my opinion) and we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins.

All it takes is spilling some coffee on your laptop.

Everything you say is true*, but there's plenty of other evidence that Craig Wright is a fraud, independent of whether he's in possession of Satoshi's private keys: https://craigwright.online/

* - Except where you point out that it's your opinion

> Sure why not!

For multiple reasons

> It was utterly worthless at the time

If you read what Satoshi wrote, he didn't think it would be worthless in the future at all.

> (and today in my opinion)

Your opinion is contradicted by reality

> we know plenty of people who lost multi tens of thousands of bitcoins.

They weren't the creators

Maybe his house burned down and he had failed to keep offsite backups. Maybe he never made backups in the first place and his hard drive failed. People make all kinds of mistakes, sometimes very costly mistakes.

> People make all kinds of mistakes, sometimes very costly mistakes.

For example, pizza-Bitcoin guy. The stories always talk about how he traded 10,000 Bitcoins for two pizzas. That's only a small part of the story, what actually happened is drastically worse. He sold several times that many Bitcoins in other low-value transactions at the same time (some straight up for cash) and did the pizza trade more than once.

Pizza guy likely traded a minimum of 50,000 Bitcoins for less than a few hundred dollars of value. That's $1.6 billion presently at 50k.

And plus, who knew it would grow so big when things were just getting started? For all we know it was used as a test of the program rather than a real account.

Satoshi, Hal Finney, etc were very aware that it at least theoretically could become the world's primary transaction system. Indeed it was that insight that motivated Satoshi to make Bitcoin in the first place.

Of course.

I know a lot of security phds who fall for phishing emails. The hugely likely outcome of btc was that it would end up worthless. "Oh crap, those keys were stored on that disk" after dropping it on the floor or having a laptop stolen is an entirely reasonable situation.

Satoshi was a mathematical and programming genius who did not take backups. LOL.

Of course this is easily possible.

Or perhaps being incarcerated for 25 years shortly after releasing bitcoin

If CSW was genuinely Satoshi, he would be humble and genuine enough to admit he simply lost the keys. He would also acknowledge that there is no way for him to prove he is Satoshi, but that that is his own fault for losing the keys. Instead, he is engaged in childish lawsuits and actual fraud (his PhD, the backdated keys). Not the moves of somebody like Satoshi.

That wouldn’t really mean anything. If he is Satoshi, he may have lost the keys. If he has the keys, that doesn’t mean he is Satoshi, it only proves that he has the keys.

Anyone who has the keys is Satoshi, for all intents and purposes. The problem is no-one has the keys (at least publicly).

Satoshi has never revealed themselves. That's because they're either smart enough not to, or they're dead.

If the paper was signed with that key, then the signature must be FIPS compliant to be legally significant, but the paper is not signed.