Topic: Craig "Faketoshi" Wright saga continues. His team turns against him. - page 2. (Read 1150 times)

Nah. I don't think that would really make much difference in terms of CSW's ability to drag people through the courts. It would be a solid proof for the community (not that we really need it) and maybe it could be used in a court as a proof, but they'd still have to go through trials and therefore incur legal costs.
And of course, crashing the market would be an undesirable side effect.

I may sound silly but, wouldn't it be great if satoshi appeared, just once, to sign a message saying that CSW is fraud? Of course the main point behind this action would be to save Core Devs from paying absurd money in legal expenses

Some people thought that-- and indeed Gavin implied it--, but we now have Gavin's communication w/ Wright (it was made public as a result of the Norway trial).  I don't think it supports that description.

No he didn't. To appeal he would have had to post the >$100 million (actually over $140 million due to interest).  The *estate* appealed.

The defection of Craig Wright's team is a major setback for his claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto. This comes at a time when he is already facing significant legal challenges. It remains to be seen whether he will be able to maintain his credibility in the face of this new evidence.

Wright has been involved in a number of lawsuits related to his Bitcoin claims. He has also been accused of plagiarizing the work of others. In 2019, he was sued by Dave Kleiman, the estate of his former business partner. The lawsuit alleged that Wright had stolen billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin from Kleiman.

In January 2023, a Florida jury found in favor of Kleiman's estate, awarding them $100 million in damages. Wright has appealed the verdict.

What about his next steps 

gavins main point of initial approval. was that CSW read the public messages of satoshi and the emails and then wrote emails to gavin in that satoshi style mentioning things mentioned in early satoshi messages. which intrigued gavins curiosity

^ gavin also tweeted/blogged the same sentiments
^gavin revealed they signed NDA and paid for gavins time and costs for the session

gavin was invited to do the "signing proof" engagement but the session the proof was not for bitcoiners it was for CSW's investors to see someone approve CSW. with all the NDA's there is always some compensation arrangement to stay quiet. no one ever signs something just offering threats if you speak, because they just wont get involved in the first place. you only get involved if there is some payment to accept the terms


so as you can see the signing session was not about proving to the community but to prove to ncrypt investors MacGregor and Matthews
which.. invested $15m into CSW to set up in london, with the proof to gain ncrypts confidence would release further money to CSW
whereby matthews and macgregor paid gavin for his time and costs
'scribling on pieces of paper' = more NDA's wrote to benefit matthews and macgregor
gavin in other communications admitted there were several NDA signing sessions before during and after the 'proof' session


all of this drama is to fake proof. to the pretend to offer "rights" of satoshi to his investors
book rights: O’Hagan
movie rights: ayres and stevens
IP rights mathews and macgregor

Indeed, he was pretty wishy washy in the deposition.

So he would have been protected from being accused of breaching an NDA but that doesn't protect you from someone's ire.  Example, when Wright later sued 'developers' half the defendants hadn't worked on Bitcoin in years (myself included).  Wright just as well could have included Gavin in that lawsuit-- there would be more logic for including Gavin than Eric Lombrozo or Peter Todd (for example)-- at least Gavin had been a committer at one point.   Wright is willing to lie so if he wants to target you he can make something up, and that's just assuming his retaliation would come in the form of a lawsuit and not some other form.  Wright's already willing to ignore the law, ignore ethical behavior, so what might he do if you become a target of his?

Right now Gavin is protected from Wright: other than nChain insiders and Wright's wife no one else is better positioned to mess up Wright's plans.  At any point Gavin could go review all the evidence made public since the ceremony and put out a statement explaining how confident he is that Wright tricked him (which I'm sure he would be if he reviewed the stuff Wright has been putting out), detailed how he was probably tricked, etc.  It would be a mortal wound to Wright's schemes, might even stop him completely if it caused Ayre to realize he was had.  I think that the only reason it wouldn't stop Ayre entirely is that Ayre might dismiss him as having been bribed, especially since Ayre clearly will bribe and coerce people (see the leaked emails re: Lynn Wright).  I'm sure this leverage protect Gavin a lot, but it comes at a cost to everyone else who doesn't benefit from the protection, would really benefit from the truth, and is exposed in part because that endorsement gave Wright an incredible credibility boost.  But if Gavin does too much to undermine Wright then then that protection is gone.

Exactly. I think this can also be a contributing factor to the evidence against CSW claims that he is Satoshi. I mean, I can imagine that writing Bitcoin's code is something that the original developer would remember. Personally, I work as a dev and I can remember lots of code things I 've written in the past 5 years. At least I can easily understand it and why I wrote it - and realise the mistakes I have made. But if I had written something so important like Bitcoin, and having been engaged for multiple years in this project, I would definetely remember it and of course, I would definetely understand every single aspect of it. How fees work, how keys and addresses work, how signatures work, how mining works etc.

Here's a question, and much like Satoshi I am not a lawyer:

When Gavin was being deposed during the Kleiman trial back in 2020, and therefore both under oath and permitted to break his NDA if required, could he not have said at some point during the deposition "I do not believe CSW is Satoshi" and be protected from any future frivolous retaliation from CSW?

I think the closest he got during the deposition was when he said "Yeah, I've learned things after that give me doubts", referring to things he had learned since the "signing session" which make him now doubt that CSW is Satoshi.

The now published discussion isn't very consistent with that theory.  It's not impossible that there were messages removed or agreements made over the phone or in person, but I think it's an excessively powerful explanation.

The main arguments for it is that it's just so outrageous to imagine he actually believed Wright, but that really is the power of conmen.  As of recently we do know that that group has offered substantial payments (e.g. reporting that a KC was offered $100 million to secure Wright a victory) but if some agreement like that were to have existed there are reasonable odds that it would have been indicated by their private communication and it simply isn't there.

I think someone who wasn't paranoid enough falling for a skilled con would be explanation enough, but we also have the background bitcoin drama to supercharge the situation.  And the continued position is explainable because Wright has legitimately frightened many people (you don't exactly see most of the Bitcoin media seriously covering this nonsense).  All of those points are indisputable. No more explanation is required.

Is it impossible for there to have been greater plots?  No. But there is no end to the speculation-- why assume a bribe when it could have been a sekret deep state black operation to embarass bitcoin? Maybe space aliens don't want us to have P2P money. etc.  We should use the simplest explanation that explains the facts, failing to do so is among the errors people who still believe Wright are themselves making.

He didn't.  You can read Gavin's email discussions with Wright in the archive linked above.

In fact, it's pretty clear today that Wright was not aware of Gavin's discussions with Satoshi.  OTOH, Gavin's discussions with Satoshi weren't actually all that extensive, at least outside of highly to-the-point functional discussions. Satoshi didn't share anything really in the way of personal opinions. Gavin tried to pry a little into Satoshi's identity and Satoshi ignored it.  Ironically Gavin may have perceived a similarity between Satoshi's privacy protection and Wright's evasion-- but Satoshi wasn't being evasive, Gavin was being intrusive.  With Wright the situation was flipped, he was trying to establish his identity and probing questions would have been entitled to straight answers.

In Gavin's email dialog with Wright Gavin didn't challenge Wright's knowledge of Bitcoin in any meaningful way, it's a real shame because any detailed discussion about Bitcoin's programming should have exposed Wright or at least forced him to start suggesting the parts Gavin discussed with him were written by other people.  It's telling that Roger Ver-- who also fell for Wright for a while-- ultimately saw the light when he realized that Wright didn't know Bitcoin addresses had a checksum.  Roger's not an entirely non-technical guy but he's not a serious programmer... but given enough exposure to Wright they eventually stumbled into a subject where Roger knew enough to see through him.

Aside, "gave him the project" is perhaps a bit of an overstatement.  Satoshi gave a number of people access, including Gavin, and then quietly stepped back.  Satoshi's last message to Gavin was wagging is finger at him telling him to give more credit to the other contributors.  It's more accurate to say that Satoshi handed bitcoin over to public collaboration which at the time was being substantially organized by Gavin but the whole point of Bitcoin really depends on there being no one ultimately controlling it. Not even Satoshi.

I have asked before, but I will ask again, in case anyone knows. Did CSW provide evidence that he was talking to Gavin via email, or at least, anything that can prove that he gave him the project?

If CSW = Satoshi, then CSW was the guy who was talking to Gavin via email and gave him the project.

Yes.

I mean, absolutely correct. In addition, you guys are more or less the inventors of Bitcoin. Satoshi (the real one) trusted Gavin the project. He was entitled as the main Bitcoin maintainer for a while, and he was chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation (which was to promote Bitcoin back in 2012). If I were him, I'd feel pissed off if someone (who I would knew is a liar, don't fool ourselves) confidently going out and suing the people I'd worked with, attempting to steal coins he doesn't own via the court, and ruin Bitcoin development's reputation in general.

I have read he left the project in 2014, so I guess you weren't going well together. Hardforks and the like. I can't have a complete opinion on this matter, as I wasn't into Bitcoin around then.

It's always the better path to give someone the benefit of the doubt, although I believe Gavin Andresen cannot redeem himself anymore after trying to co-opt the network through Bitcoin-XT and after vouching for a con-artist. It's obviously the same for Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, and it should be the same for Barry Silbert for leading the New York Agreement, which also tried to co-opt the network away from the Core Developers.


How high would be the probability that Gavin Andresen was bribed by Craig Wright? Perhaps he was, but I refuse to believe that a person like him would easily be persuaded by money.

The lost access story came later.


From Craig?  It's a very realistic concern. OTOH, in his shoes I'd feel honor bound to do the right thing in spite of the risk.  That said, I'm saddled under a pair of bullshit lawsuits by Wright, which I guess shows the price of principle.  But if you're just going to let bullies determine your life why bother living at all?  What kind of message is someone lets themselves be cowed like that sending to their community, their children, and prospective bullies?

If you meant from other people-- I think not.  There is a big gap between a moral wrong and a legal one, his diligance failure violated the trust of others but it isn't like he had a formal duty.  If someone were going to start lobbing lawsuits there the media that promoted Wright would be more obvious targets. Of course, frivolous lawsuits can be brought at any time for any reason, but he doesn't need to admit an error there for other people to go after him.  Though keeping a low profile and not appearing to have any significant wealth is generally protective against frivolous lawsuits.  If he were really concerned there I'd expect him to have deleted his twitter and disappeared entirely.

Anyone who claims he's Satoshi without providing cryptographic evidence is instantly pictured as a lying scum to me. I'd question anyone who claimed the same with cryptographic evidence, let alone without. Anyone who claimed to own the private key of the genesis block without publishing a signed message for everyone to see, would do even worse impression to me. Now add that this person had also told everyone that he lost access to his private keys, and requested from Gavin to see his "evidence" privately.

You either have an extremely naive Bitcoin developer, or a bribed one; honestly, I don't know what's worse, but in both cases he can't be trusted.

Could he be afraid to go out and admit the truth (that CSW is a liar) because he might get himself a lawsuit?

It's funny how polarized the community is on this. One one hand you have people being extremely damning and just failing to comprehend the psychology of someone who was victimized by a conman making really strong assumptions that there was a big conspiracy, on the other hand you have people making all kinds of excuses.  Upthread someone linked to the archive with the email chain between Gavin and Wright.  I really recommend reading it.  In particular, it has Gavin pointing to reddit posts basically explaining Wright's fraud, in one message he even says that Craig is making himself sound like a fraud!  You simply cannot say that he had no warning.  And, in fact, Wright tried to get other people to witness for him like Andreas who were prudent enough to not put themselves into an easily compromised position.

I think the thread undermines both most of the apologia but also most of the conspiracy theories.

The fact is that conmen exploit vulnerabilities in the human psyche just like a buffer overflow attack exploits a piece of vulnerable software.  If you're not the target, if you don't have a vulnerability in the same place it's going to just seem inexplicable to you.   You could imagine some anthropomorphized mailer daemons hanging out someone walks up to one says a bit of nonsense and then the target empties his wallets, takes of his clothes, and gives everything he had to the person who just babbled at him and everyone else sitting around watching is going what the actual f*ck just happened?  Humans aren't quite so fragile as software, but they're also not the entire opposite of that.

Falling for a con is something that could happen to anyone.  Now, true, you might never fall for Wright but there is probably some other con that you could fall for. The only people who are even somewhat safe are people who both admit that they're at risk and have studied cons.  Upthread apogio express incredulity that anyone could be so audacious ("Can someone be so arrogant and stupid"?)-- and that sentiment is one of the ones conmen exploit: they actually make themselves look more unreasonable to make people doubt that anyone would tell a lie that big.

Gavin long criticized other Bitcoin contributors like Peter Todd and myself of being *too paranoid* and concerned about fringe vulnerabilities, that most of the time no one attacking, most of the time most people were nice, etc.  And most of the time he would be right. But only most.  And that's the issue with security: most of the time it's a waste of effort/time/money because most of the time you aren't being attacked.  But if you don't have enough...... watch out!  I don't say this to say his position is objectively wrong: if Gavin had been as paranoid as Peter Todd perhaps he would have never encouraged other people to contribute to Bitcoin and things would have developed far more slowly and it's not hard to make a case that early in Bitcoin's life that is exactly the attitude that was needed: after all Bitcoin was worth very little in the beginning, so there was little to protect.  Different perspectives have different costs and different benefits.  One of the costs of being less cynical is increased vulnerability to attacks like Wright's.

Given the politics at the time it's easy to see how Gavin probably had a particular vulnerability.  He was already somewhat ostracized from the tech community, his position in the blocksize war drama wasn't the leading one.  Then out of the blue "Satoshi" swings in on a vine to seize victory from the jaws of defeat.  It's a very human mistake to not look a gift horse in the mouth.

Gavin has suffered greatly for his error here.  And make no mistake, it was a serious one: many people trusted him to apply the kind of expert scrutiny that they couldn't apply themselves and he simply didn't.  Unfortunately, his mistake didn't just harm himself-- it greatly harmed a lot of other people (including people who lost money on BCH and BSV as a result as well as the people Wright has been suing) and that harm is continuing to this day which is why people are still unhappy with him for it.  If you look at the footage from the Norway trial Wright still leans heavily on Gavin's endorsement and current relative silence, he'll almost certainly do so again in the UK trial.  Gavin could still improve the situation but he chooses not to, presumably because he has reasoned that he's better off being additionally disrespected by the Bitcoin community than he is drawing Wrights ire.  (Something which is probably true, but is made less true by the public pressure).  So I think we don't have to adopt either of the extreme positions:  It's both an understandable error and it's also not unreasonable for people to blame him both for the original error and his handling subsequently (including today).

But the most important thing to take away from it is skepticism. You could fall for something like this or someone you trust and listen to could be falling for someone elses scam.

To cut GA some slack, back then, Wright had a lot of positive press and was often pictured as a humble, modest genius which kind of fit in with many people's expectations of the real-life Satoshi. No one really knew what kind of psycho he would turn out to be.

And GA did admit that he regrets getting involved in it in the below statement, although he has never explicitly acknowledged that he has been duped nor called CW a fraud.

http://gavinandresen.ninja/satoshi

Anyhow, he did pay a big price and went from the single most influential person in the Bitcoin space to someone almost completely forgotten.

Merely an assumption I have made. We obviously don't have evidence when bribing happens, but it seems extremely likely to be the case here, IMO.

I mean, we have a Bitcoin developer who is known to having technical expertise with Bitcoin in general, publicly stating he thinks CSW could be Satoshi, because... He was invited in his place to get shown cryptographic evidence privately from altered software? Didn't it cross his mind to request digital signature over the Internet? What kind of desire to do this privately is that, if Craig doesn't mind Gavin publicly stating he was shown cryptographic evidence? Can the rest of us confirm? Wild conspiracy, but they might have exchanged more than "digital signatures".  

BTW, needless to say he must have got mountains of evidence that CSW is not Satoshi, just like everyone else here. And as an icing in the cake, he still hasn't convinced us he really regret getting involved in all that shit, for if he did, it would be easy to just state the obvious; "I believe Craig is a scam".

gavin didnt just travel to the UK for just a free lunch
having to sign NDA's and such there is usually and commonly some form of compensation involved.
gavin in early years already mentioned he was going to retire around the time he did so its obviously a selling out of his reputation for a pay day

i see it the same situation as the native americans that thought no one can own the land so when some colonials invaded and were offering money to be declared the rightful owners. the natives just laughed and thought "free money", not thinking anything would come of it due to how they experienced their land having no owner before. thinking even after taking the money people cant claim to be a owner, thus no harm in taking a pay day

Was Gavin Andresen really bribed, or is that just a presumption from some people? "Tin-foil hats on", yes it's very possible, BUT is there confirmation that he was bribed?


He probably doesn't want any legal action from Craig Wright, just a shower thought.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But didn't Gavin also say he was "bamboozled" by Craig Wright and Jon Matonis? That would be enough evidence for me to believe that Gavin does not think Craig Wright to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

I was watching a couple YoutTube videos over the weekend having to do with bitcoin and Craig Wrights name was brought up.  I was shocked to see in the comments section that there are still so many people who support this utter moron.  He's so clearly not Satoshi, and Satoshi didn't spend all that time and effort hiding his identity to then one day come out as the creator.  I mean it just makes no sense at all.