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Bitcoin Dev Drops Withering Assault on Craig Wright’s Satoshi Claims

Last Updated March 4, 2021 2:45 PM
P. H. Madore
Last Updated March 4, 2021 2:45 PM

By CCN.com: In a rare foray into editorial writing, Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp has dismantled Craig Wright’s Satoshi claims, one by one. “How Many Wrongs Make a Wright? ” should be bookmarked in the browser of any cryptocurrency enthusiast. It’s as a master list of reasons not to believe Craig Wright’s claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Lopp Finally Gives a Peek At Wright Research

Lopp uncharacteristically chose to publish the piece in Bitcoin Magazine, as opposed to his Medium blog . Presumably, the post is partially the result of exhaustive research conducted by Lopp. He’s been teasing the release of such research via Twitter for a couple of weeks. He recently said that after legal review, he wouldn’t be moving forward with the publication of his research just yet. Some of the things written in the post can only have derived from that research.

Lopp writes:

“From examining the public timestamps on over 100 blog posts by Wright during the 2009 & 2010 time period and comparing them against over 800 public timestamps from emails, forum posts and code commits by Satoshi during the same period, we can gain some insight as to the sleep patterns of each. It’s pretty clear that Wright was generally inactive from 13:00 to 18:00 UTC while Satoshi was inactive from 7:00 to 12:00 UTC. As such, Wright appears to maintain a sleep schedule consistent with someone living in the AEST time zone (Australia) while Satoshi maintains a sleep schedule consistent with the EST time zone (North American east coast and part of South American west coast). While it’s possible that Wright was meticulously maintaining two separate schedules for each identity, Occam’s Razor suggests that the reason for the different patterns is probably because they belong to different people.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAjJ9sMMpjQ

Did Craig Wright Code for the Australian Military?

The lengthy post details the history of Craig Wright and Bitcoin but also dives into Wright’s background.

For example, Lopp reveals that after some back and forth with the Australian government, he was able to obtain substantial information about Wright’s military service. Craig Wright entered a military training program at some point but failed out due to poor grades. Nothing about his military records gives credence to Wright’s claims that he coded for the Aussie military.

“It’s interesting, to say the least, that this man who claims to be a lifelong academic with more than a dozen degrees appears to have failed out of his first semester in the RAAF, according to these public records. […] Is it likely that he was given the responsibility to write code for bomb guidance systems as a first-semester cadet? Did he leave the military due to a “conflict of interest”? Records show he was at the RAAF in 1990, so what about his claim that he was studying at the University of Queensland from 1989 to 1992?”

An oft-forgotten episode with Craig Wright is that time he claimed you could retrieve “burnt” bitcoins . Lopp says:

“He didn’t demonstrate any such thing. Rather, he claimed that Bitmain might have the private key to the burn address. Of course, this is an impossible claim and the math is irrefutable — it would take on the order of 2¹⁶⁰ calculations to brute-force the private key, and there isn’t enough computing power in the world to do that in any reasonable time frame.”

Other examples of Craig Wright’s ego overpowering his actual intellectual abilities are littered throughout the piece.

Why Would You Want to Be Satoshi, Anyway?

At this point, the real question that remains about Craig Wright is why he would want to claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto if he couldn’t prove it. Or why he would want to claim it at all. The mantle of Satoshi Nakamoto is not a fun one to hold. The man who solved the double-spending problem, created Byzantine fault tolerance, and created a liberating financial protocol in the process chose anonymity for a reason. It might never be safe to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto.

Lopp comments on this, as well:

“[…] Wright may be performing a sophisticated form of advance-fee scam or affinity scam, whereby he uses his credibility to convince investors to part with their money for the promise of future returns.”

This summary won’t do Lopp’s masterpiece any justice. This reporter strongly suggests anyone with an interest in the past, present, and future of Craig Wright and his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto to read the lengthy piece in full .