Bitcoin SV isn't just a bad investment. It's a scam.
Project ANN thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4985868ANN thread creator: Bitcoin SVWhy it is accused of being a scam:A. Fake Team Member*
Craig Wright, lead developer of Bitcoin SV (
nChain), has claimed he is Satoshi Nakamoto (creator of Bitcoin) for over four years; one of the more recent times being in a
Medium article he published in late April:
You’re about to find out why I created bitcoin and yes I am Satoshi Nakamoto.
However, Wright has yet to provide the cryptographic proof required to affirm his assertion, which would mainly include signing a message from an address known to be owned by Satoshi Nakamoto. From a 2016
Cointelegraph article that debunks Craig's ability to produce a signature signed by the private key of an early BTC address:
... it’s pretty safe to say that Craig Wright has not provided any publicly available evidence to support his claim, so the news are most likely fake.
As was demonstrated by a recent press release containing
erroneous information that Wright had been granted copyrights for the original Bitcoin white paper and version 0.1 of the cryptocurrency’s code - immediately after which the price of BSV more than doubled - a substantial portion of BSV's market cap value is driven by the notion than Wright is Satoshi.
As
chief scientist of its lead development team, which is
heavily invested in BSV, Wright has strong financial motives for proving to the world that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. However, all of the major pieces of evidence he has provided of such thus far have been demonstrated to be inconsequential or forged.
One of the most famous examples of Wright's deceptions is when he
edited a 2008 blog entry in 2015 to make it appear that he had invented the word "cryptocurrency" and inferred that he was releasing the Bitcoin white paper:
Wright has also proven to be untrustworthy in his actions over the course of the years, with a penchant for over-exaggerating claims in order to make a point; a couple examples of which include:
1. Wright
announcing his "departure" from bitcoin in 2016 after being ridiculed by the bitcoin community and media for presenting disingenuous proof that he had signed a message from an early bitcoin address. (He did not stay away for long)
2. Wright telling Roger Ver in an
email at the onset of the BCH "hash war" in 2018 that he will see BCH "trade at zero for a few years." (Of course BCH never traded at zero, or came close)
Additionally, in an op-ed
published on bitcoinmagazine.com entitled "How Many Wrongs Make a Wright?", cypherpunk/coder Jameson Lopp presents a vast collection of referenced claims made by Wright that were investigated and found to be incorrect; among them is evidence that Wright did not have the in-depth technical knowledge that Satoshi did. However, what the following list compiled by Lopp establishes the most clearly is that Wright has a propensity for not telling the truth:
What we know and can prove is that:
- He has a documented history of questionable statements and activities.
- He has a history of appearing to exaggerate his academic credentials.
- He has made a multitude of technical errors in his writings that call his understanding of Bitcoin and internet technology into question.
His
writing style (according to text analysis) and demeanor do not appear to be the same as those of the Satoshi whose writings are
archived here.
Wright once said: “I am a lawyer and this [financial law] is my area of speciality,” whereas the real Satoshi, when asked about how a financial law applied to Bitcoin, said, “I am not a lawyer and I can’t possibly answer that.”
Wright once said: “At no point have I said that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency,” and yet Satoshi called Bitcoin a cryptocurrency on several occasions.
Wright once said that he is an “academic coder” who has no idea about “real world coding” but Satoshi has said, “I’m better with code than with words though.”
In 2008, just six months before the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto appeared, Wright made a public post stating, “Anonymity is the shield of cowards, it is the cover used to defend their lies. My life is open and I have little care for my privacy.”
In February 2011, he seemed unaware of Bitcoin at all, as he was thinking about starting a gold-backed payment system.
In August 2011, he began to mention Bitcoin in his writings, but he called it “Bit Coin, whereas Satoshi didn’t use a space or capital C in emails or forum posts. There was one instance of “BitCoin” in the early codebase, but Satoshi himself later corrected the capitalization.
He actively bought and traded coins on Mt. Gox in 2013 and 2014.
He once asked why you would use Xs rather than zeros in a burn address. Satoshi Nakamoto invented the Base58 encoding scheme used for these addresses, which intentionally excludes numbers and letters that look similar, such as zero and the letter O.
He once claimed that Bitcoin’s block size was set in the block header (it’s not).
He once claimed that Satoshi chose the secp256k1 curve due to bi-linear pairing properties but Satoshi once said that “I didn't find anything to recommend a curve type so I just ... picked one.”
In an interview with GQ, Wright claimed, "I haven’t moved [any bitcoins]. I have sent them to Hal Finney and Zooko and that was it. Full stop." But in 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto sent 82.51 BTC to developer Mike Hearn.
He has thus far failed to provide simple cryptographic proof that he controls keys belonging to Satoshi after promising to do so.
The cryptographic “proof” he did provide has been widely debunked by numerous experts including Patrick McKenzie, Dan Kaminsky and Robert Graham.
Lopp also includes several other observations that point to Wright and Satoshi not being the same person in his article, and the
entire thing is worthy of a thorough read.
There exists a vast array of circumstantial evidence outside of Lopp's article that points to Wright not being Satoshi, but for the sake of "brevity" it is not included in this post.
B. Plagiarized White Paper**
As part of his claim of being Satoshi comes his claim that he wrote the original Bitcoin white paper, which is formally being used by BSV as their own white paper. While using the white paper from another project for your own may not be plagiarism per se, Wright did indeed engage in plagiarism by trying to pass off a copy of Satoshi's October 2008 Bitcoin white paper as his own work submitted to the Australian government.
In a February 2019
tweet, Wright claims he sent a copy of an original work entitled "Project BlackNet" to the Australian government in 2001 - a full 7 years before the release of the Bitcoin white paper. However, it was soon demonstrated by comparing Wright's document with an earlier version of the Bitcoin white paper (a draft posted on the cypherpunks mailing list in August 2018) that Wright had included minor changes made between drafts of Satoshi's white paper, which strongly indicates that
Wright had no previous knowledge of the August 2018 draft.
DisclaimerOf course, as has been highly circulated among BSV proponents as of late, its true that "you cannot prove a negative" -- we cannot "prove" that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. However, as it serves as a warning to potential investors, this scam accusation will not be retracted until Wright has provided adequate proof that he
is Satoshi, and accept that the burden of proof lies upon him. Upon successfully doing so in the presence of the public and the bitcoin community, this thread we be rescinded.
It should be noted that this post does not imply that Craig Wright is a scammer and BSV is a scam
per se, but the evidence presented in this post suggests that there is a strong likelihood of such, and therefore
those who are considering investing in BSV on the pretense that Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto are encouraged to exercise extreme caution before investing in this project.
*By "fake team member" I am inferring that Wright is claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto without providing adequate proof of such.
** By "plagiarized white paper" I am inferring that Wright is claiming to have written a body of text that he did not write (the Bitcoin white paper).
