In case you don't know, here is a nice article about how the story unfolded a few years ago:
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/craig-wright-privately-proved-hes-bitcoins-creator/[Note article date: “05.02.16” American-style, = 2 May 2016 — nullius]
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.
[...]
"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."
[...]
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."
Craig Wright is a “confidence man” and career scammer. It is not exactly news that experienced scammers are indeed “fantastic actors” who realistically simulate emotions they do not feel. File that part under, “Do I need to explain this like you are
literally five years old?” :-/
Whereas the connected clause, “...who knows an awful lot about cryptography” demands another either-or:
Either Gavin Andresen knows an awful
negligibly, infinitesimally little about cryptography,
or he had an ulterior motive for boosting Craig Wright’s perpetration of grand-scale
identity theft with authoritative “Bitcoin Chief Scientist” expert praise that was as fake as Wright’s Satoshihood.
The Gavin Question: Stupidity or malice?The proposition of malicious ulterior motives must invoke the ancient question,
Cui bono?Subject: Gavin will visit the CIAI want to get this out in the open because it is the kind of thing that will generate conspiracy theories: I'm going to give a presentation about Bitcoin at CIA headquarters in June at an emerging technologies conference for the US intelligence community.
Subject: Gavin will visit the Council on Foreign RelationsI've accepted an invitation to do a question and answer session at the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC on Thursday, February 6, 2014.
I've been told anything related to the Council on Foreign Relations tickle's peoples Grand Conspiracy buttons, so I thought it would be best to be open about exactly what will happen. I hope it doesn't spark as long a thread as my visit to the CIA, but Bitcoin is a lot bigger than when I visited the CIA...
When somebody is a guest of such “interesting” entities as the CIA and CFR—I mean here, when he
actually chums up with them, and that is not an “space aliens told me that he might secretly communicate with them” sort of speculation—
and then,
he in fact proceeds to undermine Bitcoin in every way he can (with his boost of CSW being far from the only such misdeed), that preëmptive bashing of “conspiracy theories” reads as if
he doth protest too much, methinks.https://web.archive.org/web/20120712200425/http://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm5) Anti-conspiratorial. They almost always have disdain for 'conspiracy theorists' and, usually, for those who in any way believe JFK was not killed by LHO.
(Link already handy for another post that I am preparing on a different topic. :-/ )So, that is the “Gavin is compromised!” theory. Whereas Craig Wright’s “proof” of a Satoshi signature to Gavin was the kind of idiotic charade that would not fool anybody with an IQ of at least 90, who had at least read the
Wikipedia article on digital signatures.
The only alternative theory is thus that the “Chief Scientist” of the ill-conceived “Bitcoin Foundation” is himself so ignorant of cryptography that he does not know how to verify a digital signature! This, in turn, would require an outward-spiralling technical ignorance enveloping everybody who ever endorsed Gavin’s expertise: Satoshi himself, various Core members... Could that multiplicative,
exponentiating group incompetence be so?
Really? The actual creator of Bitcoin extensively corresponded with an idiot who doesn’t know how to verify a digital signature?
In this case, Occam shaves
against discarding the “conspiracy theory”. The
simplest, most probable explanation is that Gavin is compromised.
Indeed: Cui bono?Now, bearing in mind that Gavin has been a friendly guest of the CIA and the CFR, let us see what he created by endorsing Faketoshi. Who benefits, indeed?
In the following quotations, I deliberately cherry-pick so as to bring out the subtext beneath Wright’s empty emotionalist appeals to things that scare people (drug dealers, etc.—whom I myself personally despise, by the way:
I don’t do drugs; I have
never bought anything off the “
darkweb”; I just want
privacy, because
it is my right!). Bracketed material is added by me, sometimes in summary; boldface, red, and (except for a section title) large fonts are mine, whereas italics are as in the original.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190228100312/https://medium.com/@craig_10243/careful-what-you-wish-for-c7c2f19e6c4fBitcoin was never designed to help an anonymous money-transfer system...
I do not like Wikileaks, and I have never been a fan of Assange’s methods....
Any blockchain is able to be controlled and made to work within the legal frameworks of where it exists. It does not stop government taxing, and it does not bring down banks. It was never designed for such a purpose.
A blockchain is... incredibly simple to trace when the parties to a transaction have breached the law, and it allows a complete audit trail to exist. The past is something people do not understand, and few have learnt. In the 90s, a far more anonymous electronic cash system was developed, and since then, many others have been created.
DigiCash was founded in 1989. Unlike Bitcoin, DigiCash was based on an anonymous model. The system incorporated the transfer of blinded transactions that used DigiCash as a settlement system. Bitcoin uses an open pseudonymous model...
Chaumian eCash can be implemented inside Bitcoin script. I know it well; I have patented it, and will in time realise how it can be achieved. The issue here is that the main issue with eCash was that it used an anonymous currency. Bitcoin does not face such an issue and the regulatory issues that follow...
Bitcoin is an immutable ledger... Bitcoin is a permanent and an unalterable evidence trail. I was not afraid of Gavin and when he met with the CIA. Bitcoin is an immutable data store, that is something that honest government desires.
I needed to fix what I allowed [sic]...
I was embittered for many years.... [A brief swipe at Timothy C. May...]
I have worked in digital forensics a long time prior to creating Bitcoin. I only ever worked for the prosecution....
There is no form of PoW or PoS or any hybrid system that cannot be regulated and monitored, and the most beautiful part of what I am releasing (and have completed) is that the more you try to make something anonymous (rather than pseudonymous), the more it can be controlled. The more you seek to be like Zcash or some other crime coin, the more privacy you give up.
Lightning—all about losing data
The economy is all about information. Bitcoin was a means to take data and add value, it is an informational commodity; that is how it obtains value.
In a perverse twisting of this, Lightning was created...
The creation of off-chain channels that allow information to be deleted [sic]...
It is why the Core team have capped Bitcoin at 1.0 MB and refuse to allow it to scale. It is why they added SegWit and other completely ignorant and insecure changes that have been discarded when I spoke to some of the same people a decade ago.
Let’s see this again:Subject: Gavin will visit the CIAI want to get this out in the open because it is the kind of thing that will generate conspiracy theories: I'm going to give a presentation about Bitcoin at CIA headquarters in June at an emerging technologies conference for the US intelligence community.
Subject: Gavin will visit the Council on Foreign Relations"I’m still convinced he’s Satoshi despite the really weird proof he’s put in his blog post," says [Gavin] Andresen. He stands by a statement he published on his website this morning: "I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented Bitcoin."
https://web.archive.org/web/20190414230321/https://medium.com/@craig_10243/satoshi-nakamoto-a7c4cf21253e[Opens with a swipe at Timothy C. May...]
Privacy and anonymity are polar opposites... [sic]
To create Bitcoin, I used the very system of thought it is designed to collapse.... All of what I have said and done is hidden in plain sight. Such was the nature of my company, Panoopticrypt...
Bitcoin destroys anonymity in all its forms.... [Followed by an appeal to the emotions of “The proletariat” (!)...]
I was a part of the movement that was the cypherpunks. Not because I agreed but because it needed to be stopped. When you understand Bitcoin, when you understand a sound system of money that acts to allow exchange privately [sic] but with an immutable evidence trail, you will start to understand why I created Bitcoin.
I am not exactly going out on a limb here in positing that the CIA and banks (and organizations where these sorts of things get cozy) indeed benefit from Faketoshi. They would thus have the motive. In Gavin, they would have the means to obtain, in Craig Wright, the opportunity.
N.b. that potential motive this is not mutually exclusive with Wright’s obvious personal motive of scamming hapless newbies for money with his pump-and-dump altcoin, falsely advertised as “Bitcoin”.
I saw this years ago. (And that’s why I am not rich.)Because
“Lightning is nascent”, I have recently
begun talking about talking about something I hereto held my tongue about to avoid FUDding Bitcoin before a fix was ready:
The draft of one of my not-yet-published essays opens with the observation that
Bitcoin has a fatal flaw; and I continue with some personal discussion of why I’m not “Bitcoin rich”:
I spent years casually watching Bitcoin as an intellectual curiosity, whilst assiduously avoiding use of an append-only global public ledger—an idea which frankly horrified me. (My proposed solution is Lightning. By the way, observe who hates Lightning and the Layer-1 technologies that enable it.) BSV agrees with me, after a fashion:
Bitcoin destroys anonymity in all its forms. [...] The path forward is already set in stone. [...] When you understand Bitcoin, when you understand a sound system of money that acts to allow exchange privately but with an immutable evidence trail, you will start to understand why I created Bitcoin.
Orwellian word-twisting and imposter-claims aside, the quoted portion is correct: Bitcoin, as originally designed, is an anti-privacy technology. I saw that years ago. That’s why I am poor. I am not revealing non-public information by pointing out that “nullius” appeared on the Zcash project forum before appearing here. The Zerocoin paper caught my attention in 2013, and I am too patient for my own good. I am
not advocating Zcash here—to the contrary! Lightning makes “privacy coins” obsolete.
The biggest incentive that I can think of to keep Bitcoin’s design “set in stone” is to retain its anti-privacy characteristics. BSV openly,
explicitly declares that this is its agenda! WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE IS PRIVACY.
Wake up, people! This is not about Craig Wright. This is much bigger than a scam to grab money (though Wright is no doubt enjoying that ancillary benefit for himself).
It is a strategy to impose KYC-GovCoin by the backdoor.... that Occam plus
all available evidence show that Satoshi just made an awful mistake in his belief that “pseudonymous” transactions would provide sufficient privacy. Satoshi was a genius working on
an extremely difficult unsolved problem:
Trustless, Byzantine fault-tolerant transaction ordering. Well, that is a technical description; the colloquial explanation is that Satoshi wanted a way to
make people who distrust each other all agree on one financial ledger,
without any central authority to resolve disputes.
Satoshi was mortal. He was a genius, but he was not a god. He solved one problem that had crippled previous digital monetary systems, and thereby inadvertently introduced a problem which is actually much easier to solve. From a technical perspective, it is understandable that he failed to foresee
how powerful blockchain analysis would become. (I foresaw it; but
I am not Satoshi.)
Lightning
is the solution,
* for exactly the reason that Craig Wright hates it! Lightning is a network of
private ledgers which are all synchronized by a global public ledger. The private Lightning ledgers hold your private bank statements, by rough analogy—the global public ledger shows only the opening and closing of the private ledgers. Do you want to avoid publishing your bank statements on the public ledger? Move to Lightning!
Lightning is the next step in perfecting Satoshi’s true vision of freedom.(* And n.b. that I cut my teeth on what Craig Wright calls a “crime coin” (!), as quoted above. I lost much of my money in Zcash—and knowingly so, painful though that has been: To me, privacy is more valuable than money. I am pleased to be able to move on to Lightning, which has better privacy, and is Bitcoin. Moreover, other strong privacy solutions for Bitcoin are also in development.)
Gavin’s Overall Pattern of Supporting Fork AttacksIn 2015, only about nine months before he boosted the Faketoshi (the forker and fork-forker extraordinaire), Gavin Andresen knifed the rest of Core in the back, and joined surveillance and financial censorship fan
Mike Hearn in an early prototype of a fork-attack against Bitcoin: “Bitcoin XT”.
This post is already too long; and my eyes are blurry after searching for links and quotes for this post and others. Would somebody else please help concisely to debrief readers on the history here, and its relevance? For now, I will simply excerpt a 19 August 2015
IEEE Spectrum interview with
Dr. Adam Back, the
inventor of the
Hashcash which Satoshi used as the basis for Bitcoin mining (as cited in the original
Bitcoin paper):
https://web.archive.org/web/20150820000929/http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/networks/the-bitcoin-for-is-a-coup[Dr. Adam] Back: Gavin [Andresen] naively thinks he'll do the coup, force the issue, and then invite people to participate in the coup. However, Mike [Hearn] states on the BitcoinXT website that he is the final decision maker (or benevolent dictator as he puts it). So, its clearly intended to change the decision making process. And Mike has not been without bias and controversy.
It seems quite unlikely from indications I see that any of the core people who maintain Bitcoin's security will participate in BitcoinXT. It is therefore not clear that BitcoinXT will have the resources or expertise to maintain it's safety and security.
Quelle surprise that after he supported Bitcoin XT and then boosted Faketoshi, Gavin then supported Btrash;
e.g.:@gavinandresen tweet (
archive):
Bitcoin Cash is what I started working on in 2010: a store of value AND means of exchange.
So, how’s this shaping up?
- April 2011: Gavin visits the CIA.
- January 2014: Gavin visits the CFR.
- August 2015: Gavin joins the first fork-attack against Bitcoin, “Bitcoin XT”.
- May 2016: Gavin publicly endorses Faketoshi’s technical claim to have “verified” a Satoshi signature—a claim that is later used to promote the BCH fork-attack, and is the sole basis of the BSV fork-attack plus Nchain frivolous legal attacks.
- Late 2017: Gavin supports BCH fork-attack on Bitcoin.
That’s a summary, and I am tired. Others should feel free to fill that out a bit (but please keep it to the major points, not minor details).
N.b. that Gavin’s more recent equivocation over Faketoshi does not alter the fact that he gave him a critical boost at a critical moment; and he does not seem terribly eager to try to stop the monster which he himself gave life.
For relative brevity, I will leave aside for now the question of how Gavin’s behaviour with the odious “Bitcoin Foundation” fits the foregoing argument. Anyone else care to take that up? If so, please
keep it brief and relevant to the topic of showing how Gavin’s boost of Faketoshi was only a part of his consistent attempts to undermine Bitcoin. If you really want to get into it, create a new thread focused on that topic—quote excerpts and link to it here.
The Same Standard Applies to MeLet’s take the media-hyped 15-minutes-of-celebrity name of “Gavin Andresen” out of the picture. And let’s make this personal, insofar as the foregoing argument hypothetically would apply to me, too, if I were to do as Gavin did.
Two years ago, I received the following
endorsement of my technical competence:
| achow101 | 2018-02-13 | Very knowledgeable about Bitcoin and cryptography related things. Frequently gives in-depth, constructive, and well though out answers on various topics. |
If, tomorrow, I were to claim that Faketoshi “verified” a signature for me (!) on the same basis as his “verification” for Gavin, then that would leave only two realistic possibilities:
Either (1) I am maliciously lying with the intent to support Faketoshi in a scam,
or (2) Bitcoin Core developer and technical forum moderator Andrew Chow is himself so incompetent that he said the foregoing about someone who doesn’t even know how properly to verify a digital signature.
What would Occam say about that? —Would any sane person
not accuse me of lying, and
not question what motive I may have for abusing my technical reputation to support a scam?
Despite the strength of the foregoing argument, I need not hereby
positively conclude the question whether Gavin acted from stupidity or malice. For it is unnecessary to reach a conclusion either way: Those are indeed the only options, and either one
damns Gavin.
Wherefore I conclude:
Perennial fork-attacker Gavin Andresen is jointly responsible for having essentially created the Faketoshi scam, which would have fallen flat as a clown act if the so-called “Bitcoin Foundation Chief Scientist” had not wrongfully supported Craig Wright’s grand-scale identity theft against Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr Andresen is untrustworthy.
