Bitcoin Forum

Summary, TL;DR: Crack White and Gavin Andresen r either on Crack or Insane or both.
Crack White is NOT Satoshi, he even stole his blog post and failed to simply sign a message.

Story is too intense, this is just nonsense

~CfA~

Gavin looks so enthusiastic when he is talking about Craig maybe he doesn't believe himself that Craig is a scammer but people are so gullible nowadays. At least Gavin admitted that only time will tell whether he is wrong or right so I think we need to lay our pitchforks for a while and wait for the story to unfold further.

    How Craig Wright Privately ‘Proved’ He’s Bitcoin’s

When rumors surfaced early last month that Australian cryptographer Craig Wright would attempt to prove that he created Bitcoin, Gavin Andresen remained skeptical. As the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, his opinion counts: Andresen is among the earliest programmers for the cryptocurrency, and likely the one who has corresponded more than anyone with Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous, long-lost inventor.

Today, Andresen fully believes that Wright is Nakamoto. Now he’ll have to convince the rest of the world, because he’s among the only people to have seen what he claims is the best evidence in Wright’s favor.

In an interview with WIRED on Monday following flurry of media reports stating that Wright now publicly claims he created Bitcoin, Andresen described in detail a private meeting he had with Wright in London. And he explains why he left that meeting convinced that Wright is the same Nakamoto who unveiled Bitcoin in 2009 and emailed extensively with him in 2010 and 2011. Andresen says his belief is unwavering, despite a bizarre and highly unconvincing blog post Wright published Monday offering the flimsiest evidence that he invented the cryptocurrency—evidence of a very different sort from what Andresen says Wright revealed to him.

“I’m still convinced he’s Satoshi despite the really weird proof he’s put in his blog post,” says Andresen. He stands by a statement he published on his website this morning: “I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented Bitcoin.”

    The Private ‘Proof’

As Andresen tells it, a firm representing Wright contacted him in March and invited him to London for a private, in-person demonstration designed to prove Wright created Bitcoin. Andresen understandably expressed reluctance. WIRED and Gizmodo had named Wright in December as a Satoshi Nakamoto candidate based on leaked emails, accounting documents and transcripts. But then gaps in Wright’s story appeared following those reports—including signs he had backdated evidence and misrepresented academic credentials—it seemed Wright was likely pulling an elaborate hoax or con.

But Wright followed up with a series of emails that piqued Andresen’s interest. “This is a person who knows an awful lot about Bitcoin and an awful lot about early Bitcoin stuff,” Andresen says. “The email conversations I had [with him] sounded like Satoshi to me. It sounded like I was talking to the same person I’d worked with way back when. That convinced me to get on an airplane.”

On the morning of April 7, Andresen took a red-eye to London and proceeded directly to a hotel in the Covent Garden district. He met Wright and two associates in a conference room there that afternoon and, Andresen says, Wright performed the cryptographic feat that erased his remaining doubts.

Cryptographers have suggested at least two ways the creator of Bitcoin could prove himself: Nakamoto could move some of the earliest Bitcoins, which are known to belong to him and have never been spent in their seven-year existence; or he could use the same cryptographic “private keys” that would allow those coins’ owner to spend them to instead “sign” a message—transforming the message’s data in a way that proves he or she possesses keys that only Nakamoto would have.

Wright, Andresen says, offered to perform the second test, signing a message of Andresen’s choosing with a key from the first “block” of 50 coins ever claimed by a Bitcoin miner, in this case Nakamoto himself. (He also performed a similar test for Jon Matonis, a former board member of the Bitcoin Foundation, and a reporter for the Economist, the magazine says, using both the first and ninth Bitcoin blocks.) Andresen says he demanded that the signature be checked on a completely new, clean computer. “I didn’t trust them not to monkey with the hardware,” says Andresen.

Andresen says an administrative assistant working with Wright left to buy a computer from a nearby store, and returned with what Andresen describes as a Windows laptop in a “factory-sealed” box. They installed the Bitcoin software Electrum on that machine. For their test, Andresen chose the message “Gavin’s favorite number is eleven.” Wright added his initials, “CSW,” and signed the message on his own computer. Then he put the signed message on a USB stick belonging to Andresen and they transferred it to the new laptop, where Andresen checked the signature.

At first, the Electrum software’s verification of the signature mysteriously failed. But then Andresen noticed that they’d accidentally left off Wright’s initials from the message they were testing, and checked again: The signature was valid.

“It’s certainly possible I was bamboozled,” Andresen says. “I could spin stories of how they hacked the hotel Wi-fi so that the insecure connection gave us a bad version of the software. But that just seems incredibly unlikely. It seems the simpler explanation is that this person is Satoshi.”

    The Problem With the Public Proof

Under other circumstances, the Bitcoin community could almost be convinced by Andresen’s account, too. But in contrast to Andresen’s private demonstration, the evidence that Wright publicly offered to support his claim almost immediately collapsed. “The procedure that’s supposed to prove Dr. Wright is Satoshi is aggressively, almost-but-not-quite maliciously resistant to actual validation,” wrote security researcher Dan Kaminsky early Monday. After more analysis, Kaminsky updated that assessment: “OK, yes, this is intentional scammery.”

On a newly-created website, Wright published a blog post featuring what appeared to be a cryptographically signed statement from the writer Jean-Paul Sartre. It seemed intended to show, as in Andresen’s demonstration, that Wright possessed one of Nakamoto’s private keys. But in fact, Kaminsky and other coders discovered within hours that the signed message wasn’t even the Sartre text, but instead transaction data signed by Nakamoto in 2009 and easily accessed on the public Bitcoin blockchain. “Wright’s post is flimflam and hokum which stands up to a few minutes of cursory scrutiny,” wrote programmer Patrick McKenzie, who published an analysis of Wright’s message on Github. “[It] demonstrates a competent sysadmin’s level of familiarity with cryptographic tools, but ultimately demonstrates no non-public information about Satoshi.”

Even Kaminsky and McKenzie say they can’t explain the discrepancy between their analysis and Andresen’s story. “But for the endorsement of core developer Gavin Andresen, I would assume that Wright used amateur magician tactics to distract non-technical or non-expert staff of the BBC and the Economist during a stage-managed demonstration,” McKenzie writes. “I’m mystified as to how this got past Andresen.”

    The Disconnect

Andresen, for his part, remains equally mystified by Wright’s highly dubious public evidence. The contradiction between the two accounts is so stark that at first some in the Bitcoin community believed that Andresen’s blog, where he’s vouched for Wright, must have been hacked. He says Wright and his staff wouldn’t let him leave the hotel meeting room with his own much stronger evidence, for fear that Andresen would leak it before Wright was ready to come forward. But Andresen says he can’t understand why Wright didn’t release that information publicly now. He hopes Wright still might.

Andresen’s only attempt at an explanation for Wright’s bizarre behavior, he says, is an ambivalence about definitively revealing himself after so many years in hiding. “I think the most likely explanation is that … he really doesn’t want to take on the mantle of being the inventor of Bitcoin,” says Andresen, who notes that his own credibility is at stake, too. “Maybe he wants things to be really weird and unclear, which would be bad for me.”

That uncertainty, Andresen says, seemed to be evident in Wright’s manner at the time of their demonstration. Andresen describes Wright as seeming “sad” and “overwhelmed” by the decision to come forward. “His voice was breaking. He was visibly emotional,” Andresen says. “He’s either a fantastic actor who knows an awful lot about cryptography, or it actually was emotionally hard for him to go through with this.”

Gavin looks so enthusiastic when he is talking about Craig maybe he doesn't believe himself that Craig is a scammer but people are so gullible nowadays. At least Gavin admitted that only time will tell whether he is wrong or right so I think we need to lay our pitchforks for a while and wait for the story to unfold further.

One freaky, and completely unfounded, hypothesis is that Wright is Satoshi, and was pressured by government to have experts prove he was satoshi (for tax reasons), but is willingly playing stupid publicly and releasing a blatantly foolish post to keep his anonymity and let the world think he's not Satoshi.

Yes I know, I have a very creative mind :)

Gavin is much smarter than that

This leaves me with five possibilities:

• Gavin has lost his ability to think properly
• Gavin is part of a conspiracy
• Craig Wright is a better scammer than I can comprehend
• Craig Wright got a hold of some of Satoshi's private keys somehow
• Craig Wright is Satoshi

One more possibility: Gavin knows who real Satoshi is and doesn't want to reveal his identity. Gavin saw Wright as a way to distract public to wrong path (but unfortunately it backfired, as the public "proof" was so clumsy).

the OP's post is not a summary. because it doesnt show the hoax part
-snip-

With all due respect to your legendary status, but I think Gavin knows more than you.

If he says he has proof, is because he has proof, Gavin is not stupid.

no offense to your noob status.
but did you see the way gavin was smirking when saying he "thinks" its him. and how no one can be 100% sure

no offense to your noob status.
but did you see the way gavin was smirking when saying he "thinks" its him. and how no one can be 100% sure

Still, Gavin seems to believe he really is Satoshi, he even said that he was also a skeptic before.

So surely he saw something that made him change his mind.

In any case everybody should see what he saw so we can put this case to rest.

hahah this guy is so funny lol. He doesn't need to move any coin to prove it, just sign the fcking message if he has the prive keys

Something is weird. He provided a message and a signature, but there's nothing in the message to indicate that he signed it himself, or when it was signed. It could have been signed months or years ago and there's no way to prove otherwise.

In his initial blog post (http://www.drcraigwright.net/jean-paul-sartre-signing-significance/), Wright noted that “Satoshi is dead... but this is only the beginning.” He also said that he would follow up with a more detailed mathematical explanation for the revelation. Now, the world will likely have to wait for “the coming days”—however long that may be—for more clues.

If I sign Craig Wright, it is not the same as if I sign Craig Wright, Satoshi.

I think this is true, but in my heart I wish it wasn’t.

Since those early days, after distancing myself from the public persona that was Satoshi,

Satoshi is dead.

But this is only the beginning.

David Kleiman, Craig Wright's friend more likely Satoshi Nakamoto

OK so this might get a little meandering but I keep finding tidbits of David Kleiman's life that makes him a far more likely candidate for Satoshi than Wright. So here are some in no specific order.

The implication is that either Craig Wright has stumbled upon an infinitesimally rare occurrence of an SHA256 collision, or that he had used the signature from block 258 to reverse engineer a hash (the first shown in his blog demonstration) and hoped that nobody would notice. ycombinator user JoukeH noticed.

Andresen’s only attempt at an explanation for Wright’s bizarre behavior, he says, is an ambivalence about definitively revealing himself after so many years in hiding. “I think the most likely explanation is that … he really doesn’t want to take on the mantle of being the inventor of Bitcoin,” says Andresen, who notes that his own credibility is at stake, too. “Maybe he wants things to be really weird and unclear, which would be bad for me.”

That uncertainty, Andresen says, seemed to be evident in Wright’s manner at the time of their demonstration. Andresen describes Wright as seeming “sad” and “overwhelmed” by the decision to come forward. “His voice was breaking.

No - what Craig did was grab an existing signature used by Satoshi and pretend he had created it to sign a document by Sartre (which is fraud and even Gavin is not sure what on earth to make of that).

And he *is* claiming to be Satoshi (which is why he asked Gavin to come and *verify* his claim).

Also - why are you posting the exact same thing in multiple topics?

It isn't relevant and it is just spamming (you could start your own topic of course).

And if he was saying that he just knew Satoshi and is not Satoshi then why does Gavin come out this "meeting" saying that he is Satoshi (surely he would  have told Gavin it was his friend and not him).

in my feeling, i don't believe that craig wright is founder of bitcoins, i dont know why but i don't believe even if he can prove that he have all document about bitcoin from beginning starting the project.

why he shown himself? is it better that he stay on the shadow of the knight? is he need famous and glamor? i just don't know

bulista, between here and Reddit and dozens of blogs there has been a tremendous amount of research and speculation regarding the Craig Wright saga. And you manage to studiously avoid all of it with your three links. That's not even remotely helpful. I suggest you stop posting for a while and start reading and digesting what has already been established.

I'm sorry, but you do know what a "summary" is, right?

(not saying whether OP's summary is good (enough) or not, didn't look at the links)

Still, Gavin seems to believe he really is Satoshi

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36202904

economical problems

If I were Satoshi I might be tempted to sign a message stating that I am Craig Wright. I would then disappear again and be less worried that ever about being discovered. It would be quite a shock to Craig also, assuming he in not Satoshi.  ;)

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36202904

He is not satoshi.

https://twitter.com/ICOcountdown/status/727648910647431170

https://github.com/patio11/wrightverification/blob/master/README.md

Remember that Craig Wright had obtained funding for and was running a the largest Supercomputer in Australia. So what Craig has ostensibly done is he is used supercomputer resources to find the inverse of a hash function and then used one of Satoshi old transactions to pretend he has the private key:

And with his access to a supercomputer, it is plausible he was able to reverse the hash in order to find a text that matched the signature that was already on the blockchain. Without that explanation, then he must have the private key! You seem to not understand the technology.  ::)

Craig Wright’s chosen source material (an article (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1964/12/17/sartre-on-the-nobel-prize/) in which Jean-Paul Sartre explains his refusal of the Nobel Prize), surprisingly, generates the exact same signature as can be found in a bitcoin transaction associated with Satoshi Nakamoto.

The likelihood that a private key will generate two identical signatures when signing two different sources – a Bitcoin transaction on the one hand, and a Sartre text on the other – is so infinitesimally small that it is unlikely.

What I'm expecting to happen next is that Wright is going to move some early coins (or produce a signature from some early coins) some time soon, but this is only going to fuel the speculation even more because it won't be a definitive proof from a GPG key or a genesis block.

I'm guessing the reason why Wright will be able to do this is because he found out about Bitcoin from Kleiman from the cryptography mailing lists (which we know Kleiman was a member of.) We already know that he mined coins early on so it won't be that much of a surprise when he moves coins. But as has already been pointed out by other people -- this also doesn't prove anything -- since Bitcoin was released -publicly- anyone could have mined those coins (or he could have simply purchased access to the private keys of any early block.)

If I had to speculate: I'd say that in all likelihood neither of them are Satoshi. Kleiman's work was on digital forensics which means he was focused on doing things like scrubbing memory dumps for meta-data to find files pointers and then using them to find hidden files on disk. It would have required fairly low level programming to write the tools needed to do this (so its plausible Kleiman had the skills to code something like Bitcoin but still highly unlikely given how expertly the original source code was – so I'd be surprised if the person(s?) who created Bitcoin didn't have a background in software.)

Consider that Forensics is also quite a specialized field and that a person participating in it wouldn't necessarily have needed to know anything about digital signatures to do their work. Hashcash-style proof-of-work in that regard is even more esoteric and I'd expect to see a lot more interest in general cryptography (and economics) if Kleiman was actually Satoshi. But if you look at what he replies to -- he's only really interested in forensics and talking about his own work. I think it's far more likely that the two of them were early adopters / miners who were intimately associated with Satoshi in some way (possibly they corresponded at some point via email like a lot of people at the time) but weren't actually Satoshi themselves.

My profile for Satoshi is a lot closer to the group of people currently involved in the Bitcoin-space, to be honest: people who find cryptography interesting (but aren't necessarily cryptographers) and enjoy programming (but aren't necessarily "software engineers" by trade.) This would make a lot more sense since all the pieces needed to produce Bitcoin were in place for years before it was invented: digital signatures, hash functions, and proof of work – so at the least I'd expect some kind of evidence of an interest in those areas.

Tl; dr, I think Wright was just in the right place at the right time and that Kleiman was unlikely to have had the skills, knowledge, or time to have invented something as massive as Bitcoin even being an “expert” in digital forensics. Both Wright and Kleiman strike me as men who were more interested in building up their respective careers as “experts” through academic channels and the press, rather than people who are genuinely passionate enough about economics and crypto to have invented Bitcoin in their spare time.

Remember Craig is a lawyer. Remember how Bill Clinton explained in court what the meaning of 'is' is.

Craig has consistently claimed he was backing "the persona behind Satoshi" and was part of a group involved with Satoshi, so the above statement is consistent with that, without him actually being the man who developed the code of Bitcoin with his own fingers. The interviewer did not ask Craig "are you going to prove you are the man who wrote the code of Bitcoin?" which obviously can't be proved nor disproved by any signature since Satoshi did not sign the code of Bitcoin.

Is Satoshi after all of Blockstream?


https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4hs2ca/can_all_core_developers_confirm_they_havent/

You are quoting what a reporter has said, not what Craig has said. I said find a quote where Craig has claimed his is the man who wrote the code for Bitcoin. You will never find that.

Butthurt idiot. Bye.

I see you locked your thread again (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1459550.msg14748758#msg14748758). You are an emotional basketcase.

Don't pretend you've forgotten when you closed the technical thread where we were debating and told me in PM that you never wanted to talk to me again.

I don't have time for your melodrama. Bye.

You do not seem to understand the math. Either Craig broke SHA256 or he has Satoshi's private key (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1459846.msg14755896#msg14755896).

Also by getting core Bitcoin devs and their tribe to claim that the proof Craig provided is not a proof, he has revealed them as being disingenuous. Very clever political game theory he has concocted.

Craig has astutely accomplished his goal, as only 42% of Bitcoiners conclude he can't be Satoshi (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1281423.160). And when and if Craig signs coins from an early block of Bitcoin, the level of confusion will increase. Craig is playing a political game theory.


Refusing to believe is not the same as proving he is not. Craig is winning the political game theory. He is a clever lawyer mofo.

Reading this, quite interesting:

http://gizmodo.com/this-australian-says-he-and-his-dead-friend-invented-bi-1746958692

One theory that is being floated on Reddit runs like this:

Kleiman is Satoshi, and had the keys to the ~1 million bitcoins. He dies, and his USB stick/computer/whatever went to a relative, who doesn't realize what he is holding. Wright knew Kleiman and knew he was Satoshi. So he invents this crazy story about being Satoshi, but that he can't spend the coins because they are all in a trust that was held by Kleiman.

So now Wright comes public claiming to be Satoshi - and sets himself up to launch a lawsuit against Kleiman's relative to get "his" bitcoins back. If Wright pulls this off, he gains the fabled treasure of 1 million bitcoins off Kleiman's estate.

Thoughts pro and con?

I just came up with another theory though...we might be missing the forest for the trees. Much of what CW has said has proven sketchy, or even downright lies (claiming multiple fake phd's for instance). We do know one thing that's incontrovertible: CW was very interested in high performance computing / supercomputing. Think about that for a minute.

Now what if Kleiman, being the typical computer geek, enjoyed the intellectual challenge of creating the code but had little interest in testing...and asked his friend CW to help test Bitcoin by mining. It's very possible that CW could own Block 1, and even if not, it's still possible that a significant part of Satoshi's stash...actually doesn't belong to Satoshi. What if most/all the coins we thought were Satoshi's were actually CW's?

It's also possible that Kleiman wrote the first version of the Bitcoin code, and that CW took over testing, bug fixing, and future development. Kleiman could have written the code, while CW could have been the "Satoshi" that communicated extensively with Gavin and others...

I think that CSW stumbled upon Bitcoin circa 2013 (late 2012 at the earliest) and started concocting a narrative to fit his long con. Stumbling upon the death of David Kleiman, a person who CSW co-wrote with, Craig saw that the pieces of Dave's life fit nicely in what's known about Satoshi. It was just a matter of creating docs to make it look like he and Dave were partners of sorts which I've demonstrated he's done.

I thought the following article by Ian Grigg was very interesting:

http://financialcryptography.com/mt/archives/001593.html

He basically says that "Satoshi" was actually a team, and Craig Wright was a member.

Forget Satoshi Nakamoto, are we sure this is the real Craig Wright?