Property concepts at risk again as at least in the UK, Craig Wright is not the inventor of Bitcoin. Charles Ponzi didn’t think what he did was illegal, and historical revisionism is always a hot stock.
LONDON, March 14 (Reuters) - An Australian computer scientist who claims he invented bitcoin is not "Satoshi Nakamoto", the pseudonymous inventor of the cryptocurrency, a judge at London's High Court ruled on Thursday.
Craig Wright has long claimed to have been the author of a 2008 white paper, the foundational text of bitcoin, published under the pseudonym.
[...]
Judge James Mellor said at the end of closing arguments on Thursday that the evidence Wright was not Satoshi was "overwhelming".
"Dr Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper," Mellor said. "Dr Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011."
COPA – whose members include Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's payments firm Block
(SQ.N), opens new tab – said the ruling was "a win for developers, for the entire open source community and for the truth".
"For over eight years, Dr Wright and his financial backers have lied about his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto and used that lie to bully and intimidate developers in the bitcoin community," a
COPA spokesperson said in a statement.
"That ends today with the court's ruling that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto."
www.reuters.com/…
(2021) Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist has long been a vocal Bitcoin skeptic. He raises concerns about energy consumption, which he believes translates into high transaction costs, and a lack of government backing. He thinks government backing is what gives traditional (fiat) money its value.
In addition, in a recent column, he argues that Bitcoin has had 12 years to prove itself as a currency and it hasn't succeeded. "Twelve years on, cryptocurrencies play almost no role in normal economic activity. Almost the only time we hear about them being used as a means of payment -- as opposed to speculative trading -- is in association with illegal activity," he wrote.
Krugman compares Bitcoin to a huge, long-running Ponzi scheme. Any asset is worth what people are willing to pay for it. People continue to buy, even if they don't completely understand the technology, so the prices continue to rise.
That said, he recently tweeted that he's given up predicting the end: "But I've given up predicting imminent demise. There always seem to be a new crop of believers. Maybe just think of it as a cult that can survive indefinitely."
www.fool.com/…
'I Would Have Bought It Just Betting On Other People Being Dumb'
On March 12, as part of closing statements, COPA outlined a number of important reasons why Dr Wright simply cannot be Satoshi Nakamoto. These points, outlined below, come in addition to a large number of arguments focusing on Wright’s fraud and forgeries ‘on an industrial scale’.
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The Bitcoin White Paper. The Bitcoin White Paper was produced in OpenOffice, not in LaTeX. The real Satoshi would know that. Dr Wright has insisted that it was produced in LaTeX and has tried in vain to support the story with false documents.
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The exchange with Adam Back. The real Satoshi would know that in response to Satoshi’s August 2008 approach, Adam Back was not dismissive of the Bitcoin concept and did not say it would fail. Dr Wright has insisted otherwise, yet his story has been shown to be false by Adam Back’s own emails.
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The influence of Wei Dai’s work on Satoshi. The real Satoshi first discovered Wei Dai’s b-money proposal in August 2008, as is clear from the now-disclosed Adam Back and Satoshi email correspondence. Dr Wright, by contrast, has claimed to have been captivated by Wei Dai’s work since the late 1990s. Dr. Wright has compounded this by telling a series of lies about work he supposedly did with Professor Wrightson, who he says pointed him to work by Wei Dai, including a paper which Wei Dai did not in fact write.
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The Satoshi PGP key. The real Satoshi would know that the PGP, first of all, had been created, posted and used before 2011; that its primary function was as a signing key; and that it wasn’t restricted in some way to a Vistomail account. Dr Wright’s various inconsistent accounts about the PGP key only go to show that he’s not the person who generated it.
www.opencrypto.org/...
Satoshi Nakamoto is the name used by the presumed pseudonymous[1][2][3][4] person or persons who developed Bitcoin, authored the bitcoin white paper, and created and deployed bitcoin's original reference implementation.[5] As part of the implementation, Nakamoto also devised the first blockchain database.[6] Nakamoto was active in the development of bitcoin up until December 2010.[7]
There has been widespread speculation about Satoshi Nakamoto's true identity, with various people posited as the person or persons behind the name. Though Nakamoto's name is Japanese, and he stated in 2012 that he was a man living in Japan,[8] most of the speculation has involved software and cryptography experts in the United States or Europe.
en.wikipedia.org/...