A new video released by Bitcoin.com puts their CEO Roger Ver firmly in the camp of people who do not believe that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Ver appeared in the video with lawyer Daniel Kelman to discuss the goings-on of Bitcoin Cash following the hard fork that took place last Friday. Several shots were fired at the Bitcoin SV camp, the first of which was related to the “stability” of the other Bitcoin Cash fork. Ver said that he was 100% in favor of “locking down the protocol” so that businesses can build on and rely upon it, and that while the SV folks (eg Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre) were “good at saying” the same thing, their actions spoke to the opposite.
The pair reported that the difficulty of Bitcoin Cash ABC is about 53% more than the difficulty of Bitcoin SV, which demonstrates that much more hashpower is being directed at the one than the other. Difficulty re-targets faster in Bitcoin Cash than it does in regular Bitcoin, and it increases the more miners are attempting to find block rewards.
Ver addressed the continuing angst in the wider Bitcoin community against Bitcoin Cash, saying that people should redirect their ire toward fiat money which “manipulates billions of people all over the world.”
Why are you mad at any digital currencies? Be mad at the fiat currencies that are used to manipulate people all over the world. That’s the currency you should be mad at. Not at Bitcoin Cash.
Ver also noted that many exchanges have gone as far as listing the Bitcoin ABC fork as the official BCH symbol, meaning that SV tokens will be the outlier on those exchanges. He also specifically stated his intention to sell off his SV tokens – which would be significant – and acquire more regular Bitcoin Cash.
But the most interesting part of the video appears later on, beginning when Ver notes a recent allegedly signed message from Satoshi Nakamoto decrying Segregated Witness . The alleged message has a questionable cryptographic signature which at least one person who appears to know what they’re talking about says “anyone can do.”
Kelman says that, in his opinion, the only valid signature would use the genesis block of the Bitcoin blockchain, something which everyone is 100% sure was mined by the creator of Bitcoin himself.
Ver added that at this point, as Vitalik Buteirn has famously said, it doesn’t matter if Craig Wright is Satoshi or not.
Like Vitalik [Buterin] said, if it turned out that Craig were Satoshi, that would just lower my opinion of Satoshi at this point.
From there, Ver says that he has already thanked whoever Satoshi was for what they created.
And Craig, if you did play a role or part in that like, thank you for that. If you did. I don’t know. I’m pretty damn skeptical at this point but truth is stranger than fiction sometimes. But I don’t think he did. That’s my opinion. If you want to prove otherwise just sign something with the genesis block. It’s that simple.
Ver had previously been open to the idea that Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto, but more recently he has walked back his support of Craig Wright, saying recently that he could have been “fooled.” He, of course, was not the only person to buy into the idea. Former Bitcoin Core lead developer Gavin Andresen famously backed Wright as Satoshi when he first came out as such and later recanted his statement, calling it a “mistake.”
Update: this article previously stated that Roger Ver supported Craig Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto. In a strict sense, it’s unlikely he ever said as much. What the author intended to convey was that Ver and Wright were very close for a long time and shared a vision for Bitcoin Cash’s future, even as Wright further cemented his so-far unproven claims to be Bitcoin’s creator.
Featured image from Youtube.