Is Satoshi Nakamoto Back?

Today the Economist publishes a picture of Craig Wright, who decided to confirm and embrace the claim that he is the mysterious creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The picture and the paper portrays a sad man who is badly struggling “to convince the world that he is indeed who he claims to be”. He also gave a TV interview broadcast today in which he says that he does not care what people think about him, that he wants to be alone, and he will never give any more TV interviews.

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The history of bitcoin until today was a history of obscure origins and a certain obscurantism. If obscure origins could eventually be dissipated, could something eventually be done about obscurantism? Yes. A little bit. It is not too late.

I will repeat my long standing proposal that source code of a computer system should not be anonymous and there should be some real person who should be held [legally] responsible for it. So no one will force Mr Wright to appear on TV but he might in the future be forced to explain himself on certain technical questions or appear in court for some strange reasons.
For example I would gladly ask whoever claims to be Satoshi AND current bitcoin core developers to stop their appalling practice of using a bizarre non-orthodox form of cryptography to protect billions of dollars of assets. Until today the bitcoin community have been so careless and irresposible about customer money as to mandate a crypto solution (secp256k1) which is NOT approved neither by the NSA nor any other major government, nor by a single academic researcher in cryptography I have ever met.

ADDED later:
It is now clear that Craig has cheated, elaborate fraud and an incredible show of contempt for the press and bitcoin community. More details. Two key personalities in bitcoin however have announced that they still believe that Craig was Satoshi (or that they saw some evidence of it, which is almost certainly totally untrue). Subsequently Craig Wright announced that he intends to break his word and that he is unwilling or unable to or that he will no longer try to provide any sort of a proof in order to convince anyone that he is Satoshi. (Remark: this paper provides an alibi or a plausible explanation for that: it claims that Craig changed his mind because of news about his UK arrest under terrorism act, and said that he prefers to be seen as a fraud then to be prevented from seeing his family.)   

ADDED even later: this same paper by Andrew O’Hagan sheds light on a key moment which happened just a few days before the story about Craig coming out Satoshi have hit the mainstream media [The Economist, TV interviews etc]. During one meeting, at the very moment when Craig Wright was about to be found out as fraudster, Craig has a sudden outburst of anger and asked the cryptography expert to “get the fuck out” of the room. It is for sure a lot easier to commit fraud and convince naive journalists in absence of an senior cryptography expert who has written and knows 1000 more than Craig on applied cryptography and specifically about this sort of questions of security of cryptographic keys in real-life systems.

REMARK: None of these proves that Craig is not Satoshi or that he is not 30% Satoshi [group work]. It just shows what kind of dark character Craig is and that it is not necessary to present any evidence whatsoever to convince the press and the media about a claim, you just need to write large cheque to a PR agency which will arrange for your claim to be very widely publicized and many will believe it.

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  1. Pingback: Bitcoin Block Reward Halving | Financial Cryptography, Bitcoin, Crypto Currencies, Cryptanalysis

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