Topic: Craig "Faketoshi" Wright saga continues. His team turns against him. - page 4. (Read 1150 times)

True at least just sign some message from the address  If Craig can do that then he real satoshi and doesn't need this ongoing drama for a couple of years. Neither he nor his friend still talked about Bitcoin Satoshi Vision that pretty much community didnt accept it

He claims that he purchased the coins 1feex and 12ib7 in 2011/2010. He has claimed that in February 2020 "hackers" hid a wireless access point in his home behind a TV and used it to compromise his computer and erase the keys.  This is conveniently right after the date he was supposed to get access to his bitcoin fortune via a 'bonded courier'.  He claims that the coins were also stored in one drive and google drive and that they were 'synchronized' and erased too (so much for backups...).  He claims that after discovering the hack and the loss he wiped his own computers to be sure they were free of hackers.

The coins have not moved since 2011/2010, wright explains the "hackers" failing to move the coins-- unlike any hacker previously known to man-- by claiming the coins were protected by unspecified "algorithmic masking" (the precise meaning of which which he never explains, I would suggest that people refrain from making up things it could mean because he'll just adopt your explanations as people here are likely to be significantly more clue-full than he is).

The 1feex coins were well known to be coins that belonged to mtgox customers which were stolen long before Wright came on the scene back in March 2011 when they last moved.  Wright had previously included the 1feex and 12ib7 addresses on lists of addresses he claimed to own to the Australian Tax Office as part of R&D tax credit and GST rebate fraud.  The ATO concluded he didn't own the claimed coins, because (among other reasons) he couldn't sign with their keys when challenged.  After the lists became public the real owners of some of the addresses on his lists were identified. One even signed a message calling Wright a liar and a fraud.  I believe 1feex and 12ib7 were the only large addresses from the lists that hadn't been moved away by the time he started the lawsuits.

Wright provided a few records to demonstrate his ownership.  They are obvious forgeries (some apparently created to support the GST rebate fraud, some apparently newly created for case), but even if they weren't they wouldn't be particularly persuasive as they'd still just be his assertion-- they aren't third party verifiable.

You can read in detail in the documents at https://bitcoindefense.org/our-work/ under "tulip trading".

Particularly, our preliminary issue application goes into some detail about Wright's "evidence" being junk: https://bitcoindefense.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/2023.07.11-Elliss-1-Preliminary-Issue-Application-FINAL.pdf and after that was filed we gained access to prove even more of it was forged, which is described starting at paragraph 40 in https://bitcoindefense.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/BL-2021-000313-Tulip-Trading-Ltd-D2-12s-skeleton-argument-for-3-October-2023.pdf  


Wright has asserted that the people he's suing in that case have both the ability to introduce changes into the bitcoin protocol bypassing its authentication to allow him to seize these coins (the backdoor I referred to up-thread), and that we owe him a fiduciary duty under the law to do so.  A fiduciary duty is a duty of single minded loyalty, pretty much the strongest and most rare duty in the law.  We reply that he has not proved the coins are his, which is unsurprising because they're pretty obviously not his, that we don't have any duty to help anyone recover coins, much less write or publish backdoors, that we don't have the ability to grant him access to these coins. (and if we did, there are coins the defendants have lost that we'd have have recovered for ourselves first!)  While anyone could make a backdoored version of bitcoin, including presumably us, no one would run it because it would expressly defeat the purpose of the system as clearly explained by Satoshi (who wright claims to be!) and so it would have no effect (except perhaps creating another altcoin like BSV that no one but Wright wants, and destroying the authors reputations which I'm sure would suit him fine).

The argument that contributors to MIT licensed open source software owe fiduciary duties to rescue users of the software, in spite of the clear license language to the contrary is extremely concerning.  In both the US and the UK a police officer standing next to you with a life preserver has no duty to try to save you if you start drowning... yet Wright wants uncompensated volunteer open source contributors to be exposed to billions of dollars in damages if they don't rescue users from misfortune which the contributors had nothing to do with except having contributed to the software the user was using.  It's hard to imaging how open source could exist in a world with that kind of liability.

It would be a large scale disaster far outside of Bitcoin if he were able to establish that precedent that the MIT license waver of liability were insufficient.

As to why he's doing this when it plainly won't work:  Some of the defendants, like myself, had previously spoken out against Wright's obviously false claims of being Satoshi (as experts on Bitcoin related tech and first hand witnesses of its history).  Wright made numerous tweets saying that he intended to destroy the lives of the Bitcoin developers, making it pretty clear that retaliation is at least part of his motivation.  Wright's litigation (and lifestyle) is being funded by a wealthy sucker who may believe Wright's claims that the coins could be taken this way-- expecting a multi-billion dollar windfall.  Suing almost all the still visible "OG" bitcoin developers may have also been a strategic move to undermine our value as witnesses in litigation over his claims to be Satoshi and certainly has discouraged other people from stepping forward and speaking out against him.  It also explains his choice of defendants-- and it includes many people who stopped working on Bitcoin prior to his supposed theft but whom had attracted his attention by calling out his fraud (like me!).

Fortunately the Bitcoin legal defense fund was created to make sure that the outcome wouldn't be Wright "winning" by bankrupting his targets before the case even reached a resolution. (As happened in his lawsuit against podcaster Peter McCormack; though Wright seized defeat from the jaws of victory by getting caught lying about his damages.)

The legal tradition common to the US and UK torts makes some fairly strong assumptions that the participants are incrementally mostly honest because being dishonest will make you lose if you're caught (and potentially receive worse sanctions, though that's rare). But when you never had a real prospect of success and were only litigating to harass or for some collateral benefit (e.g. to keep getting funded) these incentives don't work well.  In the US we have widespread anti-slapp laws that are a basic attempt to try to address this weakness, but the UK is behind on these sorts of protections.  His willingness to tell arbitrary lies, forge documents, etc. makes it difficult and costly deal with this litigation even though it should be an easy slam dunk.

Thanks for the response. Could you tell me what's his argument concerning the UTXOs that you mentioned above (1Feex etc)? He claims he owned the private keys that derive those addresses, but he lost them somehow? If so, how? And again, why does this have anything to do with the bitcoin Devs? I am curious to know and of course any relevant link is well accepted.

There are some links above from some users but I haven't been able to read them today. I probably will do so tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone for the info you have provided. Much appreciated.

Also, and likely foremost, because he has sponsors that believe him that it would work and finance him as a result.

This doesn't make anything any better however.  The targets of the lawsuit are no more able to ignore it-- and if Wright bamboozles the court as he's bamboozled so many others and he wins they'll be facing bankruptcy and potentially even arrest when they're unable to do the impossible.  And if they don't fight him vigorously and competently he'll win by default.  Being in the right doesn't make you win in court if you don't fight any more than it lets you win in a duel when you fail to raise your gun. While Bitcoin users are safe from the backdoor itself, if he's able to disincentivize participating Bitcoin will be much more vulnerable to other issues and attacks.

The fact that he's demanding an impossibility just makes the public under-react because they wrongly think it's not a serious threat.  But it's not the thing he's demand for that is the threat, it's the nature of the demand.

Consider this: What would people say if the UK government banned Bitcoin.org from distributing Bitcoin, instead leaving people to go find more dubious alternative sources or malicious ones?  I think they'd be outraged and there would be vigorous opposition to this act of censorship.  But guess what?  It already happened!  But because it happened through Wright getting a judgement against the person operating Bitcoin.org it gets treated as just as much an irrelevant joke as Wright himself is.  But the effect is the same: the UK government has banned Bitcoin.org from distributing bitcoin.  The fact that some fking scammer clown was the proximal cause isn't relevant in terms of the seriousness of the effect, it's only relevant in terms of the actions needed to put a stop to it.

So likewise, we have the power of the UK government being used to intimidate and harass open source developers working on Bitcoin, making people afraid to participate, and making it clearly against their rational self interest to participate.  That's whats happening.  That ought to be basis for evaluating the seriousness and impact.  If it were the scammer clown alone or just with the help of some bought and paid for promoters that could well be addressed by ignoring it or an occasional editorial making fun of his antics.  He's not relevant when it comes to the seriousness of the issue, he's only relevant because his fraud is the causative factor and shutting it down is the shortest path to ending the abuse.

Exactly my point. There is no way, no matter what changes you decide to make, that all other users (miners, nodes) will accept them. In my opinion, CSW only does that in order to disturb and lead you to money loss in legal expenses. I may be wrong though.

Anyone who can program can write a backdoored version of the Bitcoin software that lets someone bypass the authentication-- go comment out the signature checks, to give a simplified example.  This wouldn't actually *work* because obviously users wouldn't adopt the backdoored version and any that did (presumably Wright) would just form a separate independent currency as their blocks would be rejected by everyone without the backdoored software.  If his position was that people would adopt it, because it were somehow desirable he wouldn't need any of us to do it.

But it doesn't have to work form him to claim it does and tie people up in court-- it just has to be not blindingly obvious to a judge that knows relatively little about Bitcoin.

yes it would have to be a hard fork breaking many rules.. but also having to get the economic nodes of services/exchanges and merchants to accept the fork as "bitcoin"..
however CSW could just fork it himself,(he already done it 2017/8) it does not need core devs to fork and produce a chain that allows funds to be moved without private key signing.
but again it still requires the economic nodes of major services to treat the fork as "bitcoin" and no longer service the natural bitcoin consensus we use today
CSW knows that trying to sue core devs wont get him "access to bitcoin" it would just be another altcoin airdrop of some ignored fork no service caters to. so ultimately he just wants to poke at core devs for publicity and malice knowing he wont get the claimed demands he wants

Happy that i was here when the whole saga started and to me, Craig wright was a man i followed back then because he sure knows how to make people like me have a good laugh, he was simply a comedian.
I used the word "was" because i think that all his claims about being the real Satoshi Nakamoto is now in the past, He himself right from time knew that no body believed him and neither will people ever believe him, he has the money, all he was doing is what we call over here "publicity stunt", A way to get himself famous and known worldwide.

And he did achieve that, at least today, he's or his name is not written in the book of history, as one the men who once claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

You should check out these threads from last year:

- Hodlonaut Trial.
- So, you want to get sued by a scammer?.
- BSV subforum.

I think they pretty much sum up what happened in the last years with this pathetic liar.

You can't, it'd require to fork the client and specify that particular transaction outputs can be spent without a cryptographic signature, which would obviously not be accepted by the Bitcoin network. Nonetheless, he surely has ruled that small detail out in BSV clown network by implementing on-chain censorship: https://twitter.com/BobSummerwill/status/1577714409618931713 (the tweeted link is archived in here).

he doesnt care about winning or losing, he personally didnt pay when there were loses, his entourage of scammers and dupes did.
all of this drama win or lose is just more content for his fame story which he thinks he can sell for hundreds of millions to publishers and movie producers and repeat it by having one story of becoming famous, one story of becoming infamous. then other stories of how he stepped between the two and so on (hoping for near billions in all life movie rights deals)
and its these promises of hundreds of millions that end up keeping his entourage of scammers and dupes to keep funding his campaigns

yes these lawsuits are SLAPP(frivolous) and yes it affects many people involved and many not involved. but even in a frivolous lawsuit if there is even a grain of salt of one valid dispute in the claim that needs judgement it wont just be dismissed as frivolous, so the only way to stop him would be if his entourage/dupes stop funding his campaigns

I really need to find more information. I don't know if it's my lack of experience in regards to cryptography, but I really don't understand how you can write code to give him access to any Bitcoin Address. In fact, I even hate the idea. All of us live with the idea that we must make sure our seed is secured, otherwise we lose our coins. How exactly is he supposed to be better than us. Besides, why does he want BTC since he loves BSV more?


No comment man, really... Unethical attack...

Most of CSW's bullshit lawsuits so far have been in the UK. The big case moving through the UK courts at the moment which involves several bitcoin devs is the case of COPA v CSW.

Exactly my point. He doesn't need to win. Holdonaut's legal defense cost over $2 million, even though he won the case. Hodlonaut is/was a teacher, who had nowhere near that kind of money. Cobra has been served with a bill of $640,000 despite not even mounting a defense. And these were relatively short and straightforward trials. The COPA trail referenced above has been going on for years, will be going on for several more years, and involves a lot more time, effort, money, paperwork, stress, etc, for all involved than his other sham lawsuits, even if he eventually loses.

The Bitcoin community essentially ignored him from half way through 2016 until 2018.  In the darkness he was able to assemble a scamming crew of well over a hundred people, including a marketing firm, a media company, acquired an altcoin factory, and the services of four law firms on different continents.  I've heard credible estimates of around 300 people working in service of the greater scheme there, not including the attorneys.  His representatives are lobbying governments all over the world, meeting with state and federal congress people in the US.

From this position they've launched numerous harassment lawsuits, making much of the media either afraid to cover him at all or do so with washy washy language that furthers the impression that his claims are at least credible when they're actually anything but.  The sheer numbers and the lack of normie accessible contradicting information makes it easier to pull others on to enable him.  Because of this most of the OG bitcoin developers have been saddled by this clowns lawsuits for years.

Ignoring him didn't create the problem but it let it grow much worse, so now there are numerous people stuck working full time holding back his attacks in court, attacks that simply can't be ignored.

His first lawsuit against varrious Bitcoin devs doesn't even depend on his claim to be Satoshi.  He's suing us to force us to publish (and somehow make effective) backdoored bitcoin code to grant him control of 111k BTC that he claims to have purchased long ago, but pretty obviously never owned (the 1feex and the 12ib7 coins).


No, it doesn't.  That's certainly a major factor, but the litigation is a major imposition even when the costs is covered (and ours are, for the time being at least, thanks to the Bitcoin legal defense fund).  It takes up time and attention, and even in the strongest and best run case there is a chance of losing because courts are far from infallible.  Along the way your privacy is invaded, your schedule constrained.  So why would anyone want to work on Bitcoin when there is a serious risk of this?  There are plenty of other things to do out there.  Funding the legal costs is just table stakes that prevent an immediate loss.

Because the other costs can't easily be solved by money this can't really be continued forever, something has to get him to stop.  Key to that is getting off the position where lots of the public (including the professionals working in the law) are left with a false impression that his claims are at least credible as a result of his successful censorship in the media via chilling effects.

Which court are you referring to? I mean, I don't know the specific legislation in the countries where he went to court against the Devs. It is clearly different and of course the legal expenses are different.

Let me say something though to add to your context. Being loud against him is obvious. What we could also do, is to keep developing new software on Bitcoin. Perhaps not Bitcoin core, but the area still needs lot of development. Especially in regards to the Lightning Network.

Finally, I can't really see how any court could make him win a case against the Devs, without him being able to prove he is who he says he is. So it all comes down to the ability of the Devs to cover legal expenses in a never ending case.

That's not how it works. If we all ignore him en masse, then he can run more and more bullshit lawsuits. These lawsuits can do things like prevent certain websites from hosting the whitepaper or letting users download Bitcoin Core, which isn't exactly great for the community. And even if he loses these lawsuits, they can be financially devastating for the other party, which at the moment include a whole host of Bitcoin Core devs. We don't want people to be scared to contribute to Bitcoin for fear of being sued by a scammer.

Rather than ignore him, we need to be loud and vocal in showing the world just how much of a fraud he is, and supporting those who are fighting him in court.

Also, it hasn't exactly taken long for this most recent forgery to be exposed: https://nitter.cz/Arthur_van_Pelt/status/1710144384899932574#m 

Actually I have never heard of the name before someone made a thread about fake Satoshi's tweet few days ago, then I dig more about him and to be honest he wasn't so good to do his fraud, lol.
Even some people who aren't really following crypto community (people who only knows Bitcoin) most of them do not believe that Craig is Satoshi, and I think no one on this forum will believe him. Previously his CEO even callout on him being a fraud,
https://www.theblock.co/post/253741/nchain-ceo-departs-asserts-craig-wright-is-not-satoshi

I used to be completely outraged by this faketoshis actions. But slowly I am realizing that he is only a mentally ill guy and instead of getting help, we are fueling his delusions. He is a clown that the entire world is laughing at. He needs to be locked up in a mental health facility and treated. He is either doing this for the attention or he truly believes his own lies.

Either way, I think its a symptom of some kind of neurological or psychological problem. We should stop giving him so much attention.

In the end everything will remain the same where Faketoshi will still be Faketoshi who will only be regarded as a joke with his bragging that he is Satoshi, As for those whose eyes have been opened because they are no longer on Craig's side it will not change anything because after all they have supported from the beginning but when they are now on the opposite side then it is good but trust in them is clearly still very lacking because in the end some of the people who left will definitely still be remembered as former people who believed in Faketoshi and supported as a form of manipulation in order to gain personal benefits.

This isn't shocking news to me since I never believed him. He proved himself as Faketoshi numerous times. He just tried to be a famous and public figure by claiming to be a Bitcoin creator. It's just one more time he proves to be Faketoshi. He is kind of mental since he constantly claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto. I don't want to waste my time reading his history.

I agree with your statement that there is no CEO for bitcoin. If Satoshi comes forward suddenly it will lead to increased scrutiny. The government can put charges against him to lock him up for their own agenda. I don't think Satoshi has any interest in revealing his identity if he is still alive. If he had, he would have done that long ago to sell his bitcoin holdings or do something with them.