By CCN.com: Self-professed Bitcoin creator and ‘Faketoshi ’, Craig Wright, continued to give himself away in a blog post where he details the logic of false argumentation. Specifically, Wright takes aim at those who would seek to hide behind ad hominem attacks, and use misdirection to avoid the question at hand.
That question, according to Wright, is the scaling of Bitcoin, which he states in between bouts of launching ad hominem attacks on everyone from Julian Assange, to Binance, to John McAfee.
Here we have the manifestation of Wright’s logic in action. The real question is why he persists in the ruse that he is Bitcoin’s inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto. Everything else, as Craig Wright says himself, is misdirection.
Titled “The Genetic Fallacy ”, Wright’s latest blog post suggests (in meme form) that the reason people don’t believe his Satoshi claims is because he’s Australian. I resent this implication – as a Scotsman I’m proud of the genetic heritage that links my criminal great-great-great-grandfather to the founding members of the land down under. Wright states:
“You know the other side of the argument is failing when it has moved to attacking a person rather than the argument itself. It is a common tactic in the world of social media. Proof of social media is not about truth but rather about a deception that can change and mutate over time.”
Rather than a genetic fallacy, Wright presents his own straw man argument where we are the distractors, and he is the one quietly entrenched in reality. He writes:
“In effect, they attempt to redirect the argument. It is similar to the fallacy of avoiding the issue, too. In all cases, the person with a weak argument attempts to avoid his argument and use social media and personal innuendo to create a means to abandon the original argument and move on to something he can handle better.”
Perhaps the most succinct description of Craig Wright ever uttered – from the horse’s a-, mouth itself.
In Andrew O’Hagan’s 2016 book, The Satoshi Affair , Wright is at constant pains to remind his live-in biographer that he’s “not a good bloke”, or that he’s “really a bad guy”. Whether that self-denigration is practiced or genuine, Wright cites it again as a reason why people don’t believe he created Bitcoin, writing:
“The false claim is that, for instance, Craig is a bad man. If I am a bad man, then I can’t be trusted, and hence my claims about Bitcoin cannot be trusted.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. As the oft-stated maxim goes: ‘Great men are rarely good men ’. Given Bitcoin’s propagation among the cypherpunk and hacking community, it’s highly unlikely that Satoshi Nakamoto was going to be the nice guy next door. Other possible Satoshi suspects such as Paul Le Roux and Dave Kleiman drive this point home further.
Wright goes on to bemoan the state of today’s biased media landscape, where readers are primed on what to think just by the tone of the story alone. This is undoubtedly true, and has only become more magnified in the age of the internet. But then, did the internet start that particular fire, or did it merely expose a practice that has been the unspoken norm since time immemorial?
In this instance, transparency is key – literally. There could be nothing more transparent than for Craig Wright to move the funds in Satoshi’s dormant Bitcoin account using the private key he claims to have.
Either way, receiving a lecture on the partisan shaping of media perception by Craig S. Wright is one for the chroniclers of irony. In an industry rife with hype, showmanship and sales trickery , Wright has proven himself one of the masters.
For substantiation of this claim, reflect on the massive and ongoing collection of evidence showing Craig Wright’s numerous failed attempts at deception and trickery over the years. Wright continues:
“In many ways, it is designed to take you away from the issue at hand….as a matter of creating misdirection. It allows the arguer to slip in a red herring (ignoratio elenchi) in a relevant conclusion or relevant thesis, for example. They avoid refuting the point being argued, and cloud the issue.”
Mr. Wright is absolutely correct, just not in the way he’d like to think.