That just isn't how the system works.

Ironically, some of the funds that Wright is trying to demand a backdoor to access are ones that were indirectly stolen from the developers he's suing!

If we could have just wave a magic wand and magic those coins back into our possession, we would have!

Anyone at any time-- including you or wright or anyone else-- can go and make a modified version of Bitcoin with its own consensus rules that do whatever you want, print yourself a trillion coins from nothing. Wright even did this already a few years ago.

But your modified version doesn't do anything to anyone else, the only people it has an effect on are the people who choose to run it. Your version would form a separate currency (just as Wright's has) and you can compete in the market for adoption. If your version is distinguished by stealing a bunch of coins, I'd bet that it doesn't get much adoption particularly since the whole premise of Bitcoin advanced in it's initial announcement was giving people power against being overridden by that kind of capricious change.

https://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-sou...

I don't really have a dog in this fight. I highly doubt the miners would move to that chain/protocol. There would be a hard fork of the source code and chain, possibly by people outside the reach of whatever jurisdiction this guy is in. It's just completely impossible for this to actually happen AND actually mean anything. Anyone can get access to any coins by changing the source code/protocol and hard forking the chain. But they won't be worth anything, just another orphaned side chain with nobody on it.

I think he's pinning his hopes on the assumption that if courts say his fork is Bitcoin, his chain is the one that exchanges regulated in Western countries will trade as Bitcoin, and therefore his fork is the one that dumb money that's heard Bitcoin is going to the moon and hasn't heard of Craig Wright or forks will buy. If actual cryptoenthusiasts are too disgusted to even sell off their tokens on his fork, that just helps his token sales

Nah, he already has a fork, the super sketch bitcoin knockoff "Bitcoin Satoshi's vision"... AFAIK the only US entity that will trade it is robinhood (which IMO tells you all you need to know about RH).

It's a not-particularly popular fork of Bitcoin. If they did this, I guarantee there would be a hard fork and the value of Craig's "bitcoin silver" would go to 0.

It would be funny but it is physically impossible for all the reasons that make Bitcoin desirable.

> physically impossible

You mean ethically questionable? Because it is not impossible.

It's analogous to suing someone who makes gold jewelry to try to force them to get everyone else to start referring to lead as "gold" and paying gold prices for it.

That would be if he was asking for Bitcoin silver to take over Bitcoin. This is like someone asking the bank to give him someone else's massive but abandoned account, if more than half of its clients agree.

> This is like someone asking the bank to give him someone else's massive but abandoned account, if more than half of its clients agree.

That isn't how Bitcoin works, however. The protocol is enforced autonomously by each participant all on their own. The only voting like property in Bitcoin is the consensus used to decide the order of transactions in order to reject double-spends. Wright doesn't want to change the order of transactions-- the coins he's attempting to steal haven't moved since 2011.

If someone creates a transactions that spends some coins without the required signantures it'll just be ignored by all participants. If some participants adopt backdoored software that allow bypassing the authentication they'll just be ignored by everyone else, it doesn't matter how many do-- all automatically. Even if everyone else adopts that backdoor your own computer will just ignore them and continue the Bitcoin network with other non-backdoored participants.

So inherently what he seeks is to replace Bitcoin with an incompatible alternative. The only way that's possible is if people choose to adopt the alternative, call it bitcoin, trade it for bitcoin-prices, etc.

He's attempted it already too, he created Bitcoin Satoshi Vision-- his fork that is distributed under a proprietary software license. His conspirators and their victims go around telling people that it's the real bitcoin and that Bitcoin is an imposter. This has been mostly unsuccessful.

But the blockchain is all about immutability and you can't change the fundamentals!