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
but I doubt that this is going to happen. It would be meaning double standards related to freedom of speech and I don't think that this forum will go on that path.
