In person if someone is too over the top obnoxious they might well walk away with a black eye.  Online people can abuse with impunity.  Free from the risk of being punched some people reach hereto unseen levels of obnoxiousness.  In such cases further responding just provides them with more opportunity to misbehave.  The response they need is a good old stab in the face.

Unfortunately, no one has developed the technology to allow you to stab someone in the face over the internet.

Yet.

Has there been any discussion around having a negative merit thing?  Like something that costs 100 merit to deliver 1 stab or something.   Obviously there are tools like the trust system, but the focus of the trust system is on fraud or at least trust worthy behavior.  Someone can be not untrustworthy but still be deserving of a swift kick in the groin. 

If you used "bx seed" you probably already lost your bitcoins, but if you did and you still have them. MOVE THEM NOW.  It turns out that in late 2016 it was changed from using the OS provided secure entropy to using 32-bits of timestamp fed into an insecure generator.  If you used it prior to the introduction of the vulnerability I would still recommend moving any coins you have left.

Do not update and continue to use it.  The author insists the insecure behavior was intentional and expressed disinterest in changing it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37054862

https://twitter.com/_electronicCash/status/1675834992956506112

According to coindesk a newly unsealed DHS investigation report (which I can't find) alleges that Charlie Shrem and Roger Ver laundered money for the hackers of MTgox (run by Bitcoin Foundation founder Mark Karpeles).

I found the coindesk article after seeing the indictment mention a 2012 "new york based bitcoin broker" and figuring out someone else probably made that connection and googling for the hackers name and Shrem.  If it's true we now have:

* Peter Vessenes   --  Stole $5 million dollars from MTGox by accepting deposits and not remitting funds, then tried to shake the insolvency down for billions alleging ludicrous contract breaches

* Roger Ver -- According to the DHS laundered money for the mtgox thieves

* Charlie Shrem -- According to the DHS laundered money for the mtgox thieves


There were only six founding members!

Of course, there were red flags for anyone sensitive to them-- it's a big part of why many in the early community kept cautiously distant with the Bitcoin Foundation.  But those kinds of subtly are lost to history, because at the time they were more suspicions than allegations.

https://twitter.com/itswillmack/status/1594667376020267010

He's demanding they stop using the word Bitcoin to refer to Bitcoin and that they pay him billions of dollars in damages. (The particulars of claim is the interesting document)

https://blog.bitmex.com/bitcoin-sv-hardfork-significant-security-risks/

As many are aware, the infamous faketoshi scammer Craig Wright has been on a campaign to use harassment, intimidation, barratry, and fraud to attempt to steal some 1.1M coins that belong to Satoshi and others.

In furtherance of this scheme his company just published code for directing the seizure of third party coins in the BSV blockchain. BSV is a scammy bitcoin knockoff that is proprietary software controlled exclusive by Wright and his agents. Users of BSV are only permitted to run the software he approves so they're able to foist their coin stealing code onto their users which would be impossible for legitimate cryptocurrencies.

Because of this I believe any user of the BSV altcoin is in serious risk of exposure to network consensus instability or outright having their assets frozen or stolen out from under them.

This would be of no direct relevance to Bitcoin users except some Bitcoin exchanges support BSV and so far whenever an exchange has gone insolvent they've pooled assets from all users in the bankruptcy. This means that if an exchange becomes insolvent due to Wright stealing or freezing BSV out from under it users Bitcoin balances may be used to make BSV customers whole.

While it's never a good idea to leave Bitcoins you aren't actively trading on exchange I'd strongly recommend getting your funds off the following exchanges ASAP (non-exhaustive list):

• Robinhood
• Bitfinex
• Bittrex
• Hitbtc
• Huobi Global
• Kucoin
• Bithumb
• Gate.io
• Poloniex
• CoinW
• Indoex
• OKX
• CoinDCX
• Pionex
• Upbit
• Bibox
• Bkex
• Yobit
• Deepcoin
• Mexo Exchange
• Wazirx
• CoinEx

This shouldn't be news to these exchanges as it's been known for some time that this was coming: https://twitter.com/Arthur_van_Pelt/status/1577647343595315201

Of course, since the BSV ecosystem has been engaging in non-stop harassment of Bitcoiners including multibillion dollar lawsuits against Bitcoin developers and non-BSV supporting exchanges it's probably prudent to not to business with exchanges still supporting this ecosystem to begin with, if you care about the value of your Bitcoins'. If an exchange will support this scam just to make a bit of extra money-- what else might they do?

Would people be supportive of creating a sub-forum for investigating/exposing Craig Wright and his BSV scam for the protection of Bitcoin and Bitcoiners?

Most of the people doing this work have been coordinating on twitter and reddit,  but BSV scammers have been flooding the platforms with false reports and have successfully knocked out more than a couple account thanks to idiotic and/or artificially-idiotic (AI) report processing. There is also a real risk that the scammers simply buy off the platforms (e.g. in the case of reddit) or their staff (e.g. in the case of twitter) to achieve their end. 

Moving a community around can be really hard but it doesn't necessarily need to happen:  If it's clear to the attackers that at most all their attack will do is switch the URL people are collaborating at then they may just give up on the attack.

I'd say we could post in some existing subforum but part of maintaining a community around a subject that is protracted as one involving a decade long scam and a dozen court cases (each of which has months between each event) ... involves a bunch of lulz and shitposting,  traffic that is basically only interesting to people working on the subject, mocking the latest forgeries, etc.  While the big events in faketoshi land are of general interest to most forum members most of the day to day traffic is only interesting to faketoshi debunkers and people following the ongoing train wreak(s).

If it's not obvious to you why this is important to Bitcoin, here is some background:

As anyone not living under a rock probably knows by now:  The most infamous faktoshi, conman par-excellence Craig Wright, has been creating a rather substantial nuisance of himself by piling lawsuit after lawsuit against Bitcoin community members, journalists, developers, and former developers.  For example, he's sued me and a dozen other bitcoin developers and former devlopers demanding ~6 billion dollars in damages, and has a second lawsuit filed naming us that we haven't even seen yes.  His court case in norway with hodlnaut has been in the news lately.

Over time his necessity has evolved from a simple (although high value) tax rebate scam to an advanced fee fraud (nigerian prince) to what is, hopefully, its final form: an impersonation scam with a target of a >$20 billion dollar payoff:   Their plan is to steal a mountain of early bitcoins by fraudulently claiming to have owned them and lost the keys, then demanding bitcoin developers write and bitcoin users deploy a cryptographic back door to reassign those coins to them.  I say "their" because the real scam here is that likely Wright has convinced wealthy funders that together they're partners in a scheme which is going to rob the world/Satoshi but really Wright knows it won't work and his goal is just to scam the funders.

It's *very* common for cons to take the structure of the conman convincing a mark that they're really going to rob a third party, when in fact the third party is in on it, or doesn't even exist and it's the mark getting robbed.  The story however, helps keep the mark from getting good advice, explains the con's sketchy behavior, and answers varrious microeconomic questions the mark would already have ("Why are you sharing this windfall with me? -- because I need your help to pull off the con.")

Anyone with a reasonable Bitcoin background knows that Bitcoin doesn't really work that way-- if developers (or whomever) were trusted to not steal coins bitcoin could have just skipped the whole ledger thing and had them run servers like paypal.  Unfortunately, even if Wright was only able to convince his true mark that they have just a small -- say 1% -- chance of success then it would make economic sense to spend tens or hundreds of millions on the effort and that's exactly what is happening.

To put it in non-Bitcoin terms:  Mr. Bumblecharm has convinced Duke creepycal that with Bumblecharm's long history of obvious forgeries they'll be able to convince the world that Mr. Bumblecharm is true heir to the royal throne, and should property be awarded control of the empire along with its vast estates and accounts which he'll share with creepycal in exchange for funding the enterprise.  To accomplish this they're harassing, intimidating, and litigating against any visible person that disagrees in public or otherwise stands in their way.  Duke creepycal likely believed the story in the past (in the earlier nigerian prince phase) but likely doesn't believe it now (though it doesn't much matter if he does or doesn't-- he's in it for the payoff).

If this really were about royalty the public would laugh it off the stage, but since it's about something new and technical people's eyes glaze over and their reason goes out the window.  Large parts of the media is complicit because "maybe" makes a better story and a reduced lawsuit risk than "this is an obvious joke as was proved years ago"-- so even as wright get caught over and over again with utterly indisputable forgeries they're able to keep carrying to the public that this his claim is merely 'disputed by some'.  This translates into courts and professional services (like PR agencies, and lawfirms) having at enough plausible deniability that they're willing to participate in the con in exchange for payment.

His highly funded lawsuits have already cost people millions of dollars defending them and if carried to trial are expected to cost ten to tens of millions of dollars more, and there is little to limit him filing more of them.  Stopping him requires casting a light on his actions so clear and stark that no one can ignore the facts -- we need to get to a state where his lawsuits are laughed out of court and where prosecutors feel pressured to take action against an obvious fraud.

Some Bitcoiner's I've encountered say things like "I see why this is personally tragic for the people being targeted, but I don't see why this matters to Bitcoin: He can't get people to run a backdoor and devs can go anon".  But I think both this is anoverly narrow perspective.

It's true that no one can force people to adopt some hardfork like Wright wants-- but it's only because the community speaks out against it that people will know to not run it and avoid being bamboozled into it.  Bitcoin's non-cryptographic security comes from its users defending their own interests. There is no authority charged with protecting Bitcoin: it's in the hands of each and every user and owner of Bitcoins.  And as the say-- 'The price of freedom is eternal vigilance'.  So it's not a proper response to someone pointing out an attack to say "don't bother doing something, bitcoin is strong against attacks" when we're taking about strength that exists specifically because people will do something.

The specific pressure against developers may create a bias toward developers that are more reckless or even ones that have bad motivations (why worry that you're going to get sued by Wright if your real goal was to get your own backdoor in).   Anonymity is an additive tool some may use, but unless your involvement is to toss a patch or a post over a wall and quickly disappear it's basically impossible to stay strongly anonymous against a competent and concerted attacker: every word you say risks leaking things about you.  Satoshi is anonymous, sure, but he left in 2011 before anyone was really paying attention to bitcoin.  Anyone who participates anonymously should be assuming their identity will be exposed eventually that, at best, it's an additional security measure. Anyone who thinks anonymity is a serious fix has not given a lot of thought on what it takes to be strongly anonymous.

While Bitcoin can handle losing any particular developers but developers are a resource bitcoin uses to fight other attacks, and so it's easier for Bitcoin to be wounded or disrupted in the future if competent developers are chased out.  So while wright's attack probably can't kill bitcoin on its own, it's not inconceivable that it could weaken it enough that some future attack does much more harm.  And sure, while kill bitcoin completely is a pretty unrealistic idea-- a bitcoin that was barely used by anyone, outlawed many places, and/or unreliable would be much less valuable and useful to the world.  It might not be "totally dead" but that would still be a sorry outcome.  I worry a lot that an attack of this approach evades Bitcoin's immune response.  I think if a state were to do what Wright is doing there would be a very strong reaction-- but if the attack is disguised as a joke many people go 'meh'.

Wright's attacks are also against individual bitcoin advocates, journalists, and Bitcoin companies-- not just developers.  Even if you ignore the direct harm, they divert tremendous amounts of resources that could otherwise be spent improving bitcoin or hardening it against other attacks.  So I think that although Mr. Wright himself is an obvious joke, the harm he's causing and can cause the ecosystem is a serious concern.

So given that I think this is a subject worth at least a little attention from every serious Bitcoin-- and it's certainly worth making sure people that have picked up the mantle here have a place they can discuss their efforts without being silenced by Wright and his conspirators.

We could obviously setup a separate forum but there is a lot of work that goes into maintaining something like that which is already done by Bitcointalk.

Cheers

Earlier thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5311388.0

Craig Wright is increasing the intensity of his campaign of harassment.

He recently filed a lawsuit against several former and current Bitcoin developers, including myself. In that case he is attempting to steal 111k BTC which clearly doesn't belong to him-- he claims he was "hacked" but that he has erased his computers to be sure there was no malware, not only does the hack appear fake but the coins were never his to begin with. He is demanding developers distribute effectively backdoored copies of Bitcoin node software -- of course, that wouldn't work even if they developers tried because people wouldn't run them. Failing a recovery via backdoor, he is demanding over $6 billion USD in damages.

He also filed a copyright lawsuit against Cobra for bitcoin.org hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper.  Satoshi himself put the whitepaper on Bitcoin.org back at Bitcoin's beginning.  Unfortunately,  Cobra found it to be procedurally impossible to obtain representation and present a formal defense while preserving his pseudonymity.

Cobra's identity is irrelevant to the case-- the case depends purely on Wright's obviously false copyright claims and the fact that even if his claims were legitimate his complaint would be blocked by the fact that the author put the file there himself and took no action for over a decade.  But Wright intends to use Cobra's identity to harm him, so Wright is using the case as a pretext to obtain that identity.  This is an indication of what Wright would do to Satoshi if Satoshi were around.

There is an ongoing litigation in COPA v. Wright (IL-2021-00019) over the same subject matter-- the copyright of the Bitcoin Whitepaper-- where another party Wright threatened has filed a lawsuit seeking a declaratory judgement as to the falsehood of Wright's claims.  Because Cobra was unable to obtain representation while protecting his privacy, Cobra threw himself on the mercy of the court presenting four pages for argument and hoping for a stay of his default judgement pending the result of this actively litigated case.

The court was unwilling or procedurally unable to provide that mercy. The court issued a default judgement in Wright's favor, ordering cobra to remove access to the whitepaper for people in the UK and post a message claiming that the site had violated Wright's copyright.  Given that Cobra is, apparently, not subject to UK jurisdiction the court will presumably have a difficult time enforcing its ruling.

Satoshi Nakamoto authored the Bitcoin Whitepaper with the intention that it be shared widely, and Craig Wright’s takedown notices and litigation are fraudulent, but since he is a litigious jerk who has bankrupted people with his fraudulent legal claims in court, it is sometimes a wise strategic choice to avoid provoking him into suing, which is expensive and disruptive to a defendant even when they ultimately win, or a wise choice to keep him from obtaining your identity.

But you might be in a good position to host this paper that Craig Wright so desperately wants taken down and kept under his exclusive control.  If you are, you probably also would like to host a mirror of some Bitcoin Node source code-- since Wright will come after that next and node software is more important than the whitepaper.  E.g. https://bitcoincore.org/bin/bitcoin-core-0.21.1/bitcoin-0.21.1.tar.gz  or https://github.com/btcsuite/btcd/releases/download/v0.22.0-beta/btcd-source-v0.22.0-beta.tar.gz  or whatever other node software you like.  Wright has also been claiming that some people hosting the white paper are in support of him and his Bitcoin scam-version clone, hosting the code for a node implementation will deny him that excuse.

After hosting it-- You might want to give notice to his attorneys, just to let them know.  Below is an example notice you can send to his attorneys (make sure to fill out the two [ADDRESS] blocks).

Warning: sending this makes you considerably more likely to become the target of a lawsuit by Craig Wright. You should think about whether you are prepared to be in that position before sending this letter.

(This is absolutely, positively, not legal advice, and you are strongly encouraged to consult with your own attorney, especially if you are in the UK.)

To: Simon Cohen <Simon.Cohen@ontier.co.uk>
Cc: Paul Ferguson <paul.ferguson@ontier.co.uk>

Mr. Cohen,

I have recently become aware that the firm of Ontier LLP has been sending notices on behalf of Craig S. Wright to parties hosting “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (the “Bitcoin Whitepaper”), alleging that Mr. Wright is the rightful copyright holder of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that further distribution is an infringement of Wright’s exclusive rights.

I believe this to be a fraudulent misrepresentation of both the authorship of the paper and of its licensing status for many reasons, including but not limited to the following subset of points:

    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was released, along with the initial public version of the software, under the MIT license. This license is a perpetual grant to the general public of the right to “use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies” of the software and associated documentation files (including the Bitcoin Whitepaper) and may not be revoked or rescinded, even by the true author.
    
    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was authored by a person or entity writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and any exclusive rights under copyright are held by that person or entity (or their assignees). There is no evidence that Wright is that person; in fact, despite challenges in courts of law and mass media journalism, Wright has been either unable to provide proof, unwilling to produce proof, or produced documentary support in the form of forgeries. Any reasonable observer would conclude from this that Wright is unable to claim this connection through legitimate means, and is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • Wright has attempted to defraud the courts for his own personal advantage on previous occasions. For one example, he perjured himself in an earlier legal proceeding, which was exposed by the true owners of $200M+ in bitcoins he claimed to own producing unforgeable digital signatures stating that Wright was a fraud. In more recent actions Wright admits to not having a large amount of Bitcoin but instead attempts to force Bitcoin developers to effectively steal Bitcoin for him, were his claims true he would have no need for these supposedly lost coins.  His claims cannot simply be taken at face value, even when made through counsel.

It is therefore my good faith belief that I have valid license to distribute copies of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that Wright’s claims do not have any bearing on that right. Upon that belief, I am hosting a copy at [ADDRESS] along with the code for a Bitcoin node implementation at [CODE ADDRESS].

I am providing notice to your firm so that any credible claims to the contrary may be addressed in a timely fashion to avoid running out the clock on equitable defenses.

Best,
[NAME]

I've noticed a large number of my old posts are no longer discoverable via google, maybe on the order of half that I search for (really informally).

Here is an example:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1427885.msg14601127#msg14601127

You should be able to find it by googling for substrings:

Example.

Yet you can't.  In fact, AFAICT, no substring will make google return anything on the first page of that thread.

If you google the thread title you get the second page of the thread and only the second page of the thread.

Duck-duck-go, however, returns it just fine.

I find it pretty demoralizing to have my posts vanish from search indexes, especially because last year Reddit changed so that negative-voted posts don't get search indexed and as a result thousands of posts of mine in rbtc effectively vanished from the internet.

We Are All Satoshi

Except for Craig S. Wright.

Craig Wright definitely is not, but he would really like everyone to believe he is.

Satoshi Nakamoto authored the Bitcoin Whitepaper with the intention that it be shared widely, and Craig Wright’s takedown notices are fraudulent, but since he is a litigious jerk who has bankrupted people with his fraudulent legal claims in court, it is sometimes a wise strategic choice to avoid provoking him into suing, which is expensive and disruptive to a defendant even when they ultimately win.

But you might be in a good position to host this paper that Craig Wright so desperately wants taken down and kept under his exclusive control. And you might want to give notice to his attorneys, just to let them know.  Below is an example notice you can send to his attornies.

Warning: sending this makes you considerably more likely to become the target of a lawsuit by Craig Wright. You should think about whether you are prepared to be in that position before sending this letter.

(This is absolutely, positively, not legal advice, and you are strongly encouraged to consult with your own attorney.)

To: Simon Cohen <Simon.Cohen@ontier.co.uk>
Cc: Paul Ferguson <paul.ferguson@ontier.co.uk>

Mr. Cohen,

I have recently become aware that the firm of Ontier LLP has been sending notices on behalf of Craig S. Wright to parties hosting “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (the “Bitcoin Whitepaper”), alleging that Mr. Wright is the rightful copyright holder of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that further distribution is an infringement of Wright’s exclusive rights.

I believe this to be a fraudulent misrepresentation of both the authorship of the paper and of its licensing status for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was released into the public domain upon its initial publication by Satoshi Nakamoto on the Cypherpunks mailing list. All participants to the Cypherpunks list, including Satoshi Nakamoto, agreed to the Cypherpunks anti-License (CPL) for their list contributions, which states "The intent of the Cypherpunks anti-License (CPL) is to inform users that they are free to use and redistribute the indicated work or any derived or modified work in any manner they choose. Works distributed under the CPL are in the Public Domain. [...] The distributors will not use or participate as far as they are able to government legal systems to attempt to enforce requests restricting the use, modifications, or redistribution of the work for perpetuity."  

    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was additionally released, along with the initial public version of the software, under the MIT license. This license is a perpetual grant to the general public of the right to “use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies” of the software and associated documentation files (including the Bitcoin Whitepaper) and may not be revoked or rescinded, even by the true author.
    
    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was authored by a person or entity writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and any exclusive rights under copyright are held by that person or entity (or their assignees). There is no evidence that Wright is that person; in fact, despite challenges in courts of law and mass media journalism, Wright has been either unable to provide proof, unwilling to produce proof, or produced documentary support in the form of forgeries. Any reasonable observer would conclude from this that Wright is unable to claim this connection through legitimate means, and is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • Wright has attempted to defraud the courts for his own personal advantage on previous occasions. For one example, he perjured himself in an earlier legal proceeding, which was exposed by the true owners of $200M+ in bitcoins he claimed to own producing unforgeable digital signatures stating that Wright was a fraud. His claims cannot simply be taken at face value, even when made through counsel.

It is therefore my good faith belief that I have valid license to distribute copies of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that Wright’s claims do not have any bearing on that right. Upon that belief, I am hosting a copy at [ADDRESS].

I am providing notice to your firm so that any credible claims to the contrary may be addressed in a timely fashion to avoid running out the clock on equitable defenses.

Best,
[NAME]

Old version:

To: Simon Cohen <Simon.Cohen@ontier.co.uk>
Cc: Paul Ferguson <paul.ferguson@ontier.co.uk>

Mr. Cohen,

I have recently become aware that the firm of Ontier LLP has been sending notices on behalf of Craig S. Wright to parties hosting “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (the “Bitcoin Whitepaper”), alleging that Mr. Wright is the rightful copyright holder of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that further distribution is an infringement of Wright’s exclusive rights.

I believe this to be a fraudulent misrepresentation of both the authorship of the paper and of its licensing status for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was released, along with the initial public version of the software, under the MIT license. This license is a perpetual grant to the general public of the right to “use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies” of the software and associated documentation files (including the Bitcoin Whitepaper) and may not be revoked or rescinded, even by the true author.
    
    • The Bitcoin Whitepaper was authored by a person or entity writing under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, and any exclusive rights under copyright are held by that person or entity (or their assignees). There is no evidence that Wright is that person; in fact, despite challenges in courts of law and mass media journalism, Wright has been either unable to provide proof, unwilling to produce proof, or produced documentary support in the form of forgeries. Any reasonable observer would conclude from this that Wright is unable to claim this connection through legitimate means, and is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

    • Wright has attempted to defraud the courts for his own personal advantage on previous occasions. For one example, he perjured himself in an earlier legal proceeding, which was exposed by the true owners of $200M+ in bitcoins he claimed to own producing unforgeable digital signatures stating that Wright was a fraud. His claims cannot simply be taken at face value, even when made through counsel.

It is therefore my good faith belief that I have valid license to distribute copies of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and that Wright’s claims do not have any bearing on that right. Upon that belief, I am hosting a copy at [ADDRESS].

I am providing notice to your firm so that any credible claims to the contrary may be addressed in a timely fashion to avoid running out the clock on equitable defenses.

Best,
[NAME]

https://medium.com/@ledgerx/ledgerx-announces-the-launch-of-exchange-listed-bitcoin-mini-futures-afceb1a046ae

LedgerX has been doing physically settled  BTC (european-style) options for a couple years, I've had pretty good expirences with them.

They've just started listing futures and apparently they have a lot of new products coming down the pipeline.

A 40 minute long high production value video by a pseudonymous author was recently published that regurgitated a number of Roger Ver's false statements about the history of Bitcoin and topped it off with a bullshit claim about the identity of bitcoin's creator.  

The video has been previously discussed on Bitcointalk at some length. (I wouldn't recommend watching it unless you want to both waste time and make yourself dumber)

Weirdly, the creator is claiming their research was "original".

Problem is even beyond the fact that it copies the Ver/Falkvinge playbook almost exactly, I can't find anyone that was contacted or interviewed by them. In particular, none of the people who were discussed in the video that I've asked had heard from them. I certainly wasn't contacted (and I'm mentioned in the video a number of times). Had they contacted me (or any of many of the other people they smear in the video) they likely would have been pointed to places where their material had already been debunked.

(although they actually showed screenshots of reddit threads that themselves had comprehensive debunkings, so maybe it wouldn't have mattered.)

So is there anyone that heard from them as part of the "research" they supposedly conducted?  If so, would you be willing to share the content of your communication?  Keep in mind, the video went on at some length that there was no reason for people to keep Satoshi's emails private (a position I strongly disagree with)-- so sharing their communications even without their consent would only be acting consistently with the moral principles they expose themselves.

The latest published expert testimony in the Wright court case are amazing.

Wright submitted several lists of the Bitcoin he claims to own to the court.

The first was claimed to be a strict over-estimate, submitted because wright claimed that he couldn't determine what coins were his until they were submitted by a bonded courier. This first list was generated by his employ using a list of supposed characteristics of Satoshi's mining provided by Wright  (but really plagiarized from old research by bitcoiner that linked together that may have been mined by a single large miner early in Bitcoin's life).  The code they used to generate this list had an embarrassing bug and as a result it also included a bunch of other coins matching a complicated additional pattern in addition to the pattern Wright specified. Since this list was supposed to be a conservative list, the fact that the bug added some more didn't seem to be a big deal, but it later became a smoking gun.

The other lists were provided months later and wright claimed they were generated years ago (e.g. 2011) and in delivered recently by the mysterious bonded courier.  These new lists were strict subsets of the first list: Unsurprising because he'd swore before the court that the first list was a superset-- that all the blocks he mined matched that pattern. However, the way they were subsets was extremely revealing.

In particular, these new lists included most of the coins that were only on the first list due to the bug!   One of the criteria used to generate the first list was that none of the coins had been spent, to match wright's story about his temporary lack of possession of the keys keeping him from spending them---  but they apparently looked only at the BSV blockchain to generate their lists and included some spent ones, and also some were just spent after their filings-- so as a result wright's list included coins that were spend when he swore he had no access. 

Finally, the "bonded courier" excluded enough of the first list to bring the total number of coins down to match Wright's earlier provably forged "tulip trust" documents ... but it did so mostly by leaving out coins in two big blocks of _consecutive txids_.  TXID's are sha256 hashes, so they're close to uniformly random.  The only way to get big gaps in a list of your txids is if you specifically filter out ranges by rejecting transactions.

In other words, Wright's court submitted address list which he claims is an authentic document from 2011/2012 was almost certainly generated by a process similar to:

1. In 2019, directing his employee to use a list of criteria identifying an early miner's blocks which Wright copied out of a webpage. The employee messed this task up, but their mistake makes any data derived from this list without correcting the bug extremely identifiable.

2. Taking that list removing some coins that had been spent (either on BSV or after the first list was created), but ... unable to predict coins that would be spent later, he failed to remove those.

3. With it sorted by txid, he removed two bug chunks of consecutive transactions to bring the total down to match his earlier claims.

4. Fraudulently submitting this list to the court as an authentic document written years ago when it couldn't have been because it was clearly derived from a list created by recently written buggy software.

The really fun part is that by the time Wright's employee testified before the court they knew about the bug in their initial list.  Wright's inclusion of these bug coins in the list he provided the courts much later must either be due to another instance of gross incompetence in his forgeries or because he'd already shared a bug-list-derrived-list with someone else (his lawyers or one of his victims) prior to learning about the bug.

There are a fair number of posts on BCT where the poster is confused to the point of being infuriating or even being maliciously dishonest, trying to manipulate markets or shill altcoins, or whatever. 

The threads fill with other confused people while sensible people just shy away. For example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5223659.0

What we really need is a button that stabs someone in their motherfucking face over the internet.

But failing that, a "this is awful wtf"  button that e.g. can only be pressed by users who have recieved over (say) 1000 merit and which only shows something on the post when it's been pressed at least three times, would at least be a start.

This post might ruffle feathers but no sense incubating a lark. I'm just going to wing it.

After years of Wright puffin up his accomplishments some hawk-eyed observer spotted that most of them were parroted! He probably thought leaving twitter was da skies enough to avoid being caged for his ill eagle activities but he should have spent more time defending his nest and stayed out of Satoshi's territory.

While some might applaud his respect for national tradition, I don't think that this albatross is anything to emu-late. His raven about Bitcoin's Turing completeness generated much mocking but those it flew over were left thinking of him as Coq-of-the-walk. *Now* even his flock will know that he's a turkey. Who did he think was that gull-ible?

Even CSU has to find this too hard to swallow. Degree printer may go Brrrrrr but Brrrr-d is a cardinal sin! Letting it stand would cheepen their reputation.

Wright's migration to the UK has no doubt made handling the ensuing flap pretty cuckoo. Although I'm sure he'll keep preening, I bet he privately r-egrets hatching this plan.

I fully expect he'll be dis-quail-ified. Once he re-terns his ducktorate will he get a booby prize or will he be left brooding over a goose egg?  Either way I don't think it will be long before his fowl play goes entirely tits up and we hear the swan song of a caw-nvicted jail bird and, at last, the end of his robin.

Coming next: A shocking revelation that Wright's "first draft" of of the "Bitcoin Whitepaper" was also plagiarized!

Blockstream has announced a new version of their satellite bitcoin blockchain stream: https://blockstream.com/2020/05/04/en-announcing-blockstream-satellite-2/

It now supports getting the entire blockchain history over the satellite!

I've been beta testing this the last few weeks. The software is still pretty new but it's great.

One of the exciting new technical features in it is that it has an alternative serialization of Bitcoin transactions which is more bandwidth efficient.  Any bitcoin transaction can be losslessly converted, one transaction at a time, into this alternative serialization and applied across the whole Bitcoin history it reduces transaction sizes by about 25%.

It saves a little more on older blocks, in part because their transactions have a lot more uncompressed pubkeys and compressing pubkeys is one of the things it does to shrink transactions. Newer blocks are more like 20% smaller using this serialization.

Similar, but somewhat less reduction in size can be achieved by using standard compression tools like xz or zstd on groups of blocks.  But because the new serialization in blocksat works a single transaction at a time it's compatible with both transaction relay and fibre's-mempool-powered-reconstruction. (if you do want to work whole-block-at-a-time it can also be combined with traditional compression to get a little more savings).

If a Bitcoin nodes were to use this generally, they could drop their on-disk storage requirement for the full block data by about 25%, they could also negotiate using it with supporting peers and lower their bandwidth used for initial sync and transaction relay. Post erlay, this would give a 15% reduction in the total ongoing bandwidth usage of a node (pre-erlay the bandwidth used by INVs would diminish the gains a lot for anything except history sync).

The cool thing about it is that it's not a consensus change: How you store a block locally, or how two consenting peers share transactions data is no one else's business.  This is why blocksat 2.0 can use the new format without anything changing in the rest of the Bitcoin network.  Right now the blocksat software only uses this new serialization over the satellite-- where space savings is also critical--, but using it on disk or with other peers wouldn't be a huge addition.

The downsides of the new serialization is that it's more computationally expensive to decode than the traditional one, and of course the implementation has a bit of complexity. I've been pushing for this [sort of idea since 2016](https://people.xiph.org/~greg/compacted_txn.txt) (note: the design I described in that link is only morally similar, their bitstream is different-- I'd link to docs on it but I don't think there are any yet), so I'm super excited to see it actually implemented!

The history download is pretty neat: Every block is broken into ~1152 byte packets and redundantly coded with 5% + 60 extra packets.  A rolling window of about ~6500 blocks is transmitted in interleave, resulting in about one packet from each block in the window per minute.  With this setup, which can be adjusted on the sending side,  you can take an hour long outage per day or so plus 5% packet loss and not suffer any additional delays in initial sync. If it does lose sync it saves the blocks it completely received--even if it doesn't have their ancestors yet-- and will continue once the history loops back around again. If you have internet access (potentially expensive or unreliable; or maybe even sneaker net!), you could also connect temporarily and just get the chunk of blocks you missed instead of waiting for it to loop around again.

The software was also rebased on 0.19-- their prior stuff had been falling behind a bit.

The satellite signal is doing some neat stuff:  They time division multiple two different bitrate streams  (one about 100kbit/sec like the original blocksat stream, and one about 1mbit/sec) on the same frequency.  The low rate stream can be reliably received with a smaller dish and under worse weather, and only carries new blocks, and transactions.  The high rate stream also carries new blocks and transactions (when they show up), but in addition carries the block history. When new blocks come in the data from both streams contribute to how fast you receive the block.

I believe they're recommending an 80cm dish now, mine are 76cm and the signal on both streams is very strong and robust against poor weather. YMMV based on location and weather conditions. The low rate stream should be reliable on pretty small dishes.

This new high rate stream also significantly reduces the latency for transmitting blocks, making it more realistic to mine using blocksat as your primary block feed (and then using $$$ two-way sat to upload blocks when you find one).  Right now 4 second latencies are typical though there is some opportunity for software running that should get it consistently closer to 1 second.  The updated stream also handles multiple sat feeds more seamlessly-- in some regions you can see two different blocksat feeds, such as in California where I live, and if you have two receivers it'll half the latency to receive blocks (and obviously increase the robustness).

The new setup makes it easier to separate the modem from the bitcoin node.  You can have a modem left closer to the dish(es) connected to ethernet (directly w/ their ethernet attached modems, or w/ a usb modem and a rpi) have it send udp multicast across a network to feed one more receiving bitcoin nodes.  This can help eliminate long annoying coax runs.

Finally, they also preserved the ability to get the stream with a pure SDR receiver *and* added the ability to use an off the shelf USB DVB-S2 modem, and the DVB modems are more flexible in what LNBs you use... so if you're in a location where getting more blocksat specific hardware is inconvenient or might erode your privacy-- they've got you covered.

All in all, I think this is pretty exciting.

Posts by anyone promoting Wright/BSV will be removed from this subforum.  This subforum is for technical discussion related to Bitcoin but is not useful for that purpose when discussions are repeatability derailed by people with scam to market or an axe to grind.

Posters promoting other scammers, scams, or knock-off cryptocurrencies may receive similar treatment in the future if they are similarly annoying.

There are plenty of other less focused subforums which are more willing to entertain a broad spectrum of raving fraudsters.

I was commenting in a thread securing Bitcoin for inheritance and made the comment that if there is some asset you're going to give away after you die, it's usually better to give it away earlier and that made me think to post this year-end reminder:

For those fortunate enough to have a decent amount of highly appreciated Bitcoin: giving it away to less fortunate friends and family can be both a generous and tax efficient way to deal with it.

In the US, gifts of up to $15,000 per person per year (twice that if married) can be gift without triggering any gift tax, diminishing your lifetime gift tax exception (and even if your current holdings don't put you at risk of estate taxes, bitcoin value could go up or estate tax thresholds could go down...), or requiring any tax reporting.

The recipient of your gift inherits the cost basis and holding period.  Giving to family and friends who pay lower taxes than you (due to lower income, better deductions, etc.) is tax efficient because they pay the taxes at rates that apply to them if/when they sell your gift.

For example, say you have a sibling that only worked part of the year and earned $24,000.  You could gift them up to 2.1 BTC which you acquired years ago for $100, and they could sell it and pay no capital gains tax (because the LTCG rate for <$39,375 in income is 0%).   That's an extra $2236  (or $3548.58 if you are fortunate enough to have a 23.8% marginal LTCG rate) that stays among friends and family instead of getting paid in taxes compared to you selling the coins yourself and gifting cash or purchases using the proceeds.

Gifting away from ATH's works better, because the limits allow for more coins.

A big stash of Bitcoin doesn't do you any good after you're dead, and for people you'd otherwise consider bequeathing your coins to ... they would usually benefit more to receive them earlier and doing so can be a lot more tax efficient as an added bonus.

[Giving appreciated assets to a charity can have additional tax benefits, but because of recent changes to US tax code-- it's much harder to make use of those benefits than it used to be.  The standard deduction is so great now that you'd have to give a really large amount to overcome it, particularly with state taxes no longer creating a reason to itemize for many people. If you do intend to give to a charity it can be best to batch all donations up into a single year, potentially via a donor directed fund, so that you can just use the standard deduction in later years.]

I'd like to get in contact with the person whom I spoke to in mid 2011 on Bitcoin IRC who was using the nick lolwat`.

If you happen to see this message, please shoot me a PM here or an email at gmaxwell@gmail.com. I owe you something.