and so a PDF saying that wright had 1.1mill bitcoins are stored in a legal 'tulip trust'.. is just wrong
Maybe it's wrong. Maybe it's right. Do you have conclusive evidence about whether or not a "Tulip Trust" exists? If it does exist, do you have conclusive evidence about what it has (or doesn't have) control over? If it does control the private keys to any bitcoins, do you have conclusive evidence of how many?
It is generally trivial to create trust documents that creates a trust. On legalzoom, it
costs roughly $250 to create the documentation for a living trust. I suspect the trust described in the article is slightly more complex then what legalzoom can offer, however that should give a starting point as to how much it would cost to create such a trust. I would concede that the trust does exist in one way or another.
There are a couple of key points to the trust:
- The coins must remain in the trust until the year 2020
- Wright can borrow against the bitcoins held in the trust for....."to help Bitcon" (this is what the article said in a nutshell)
- The article seems to imply that Wright has the right (no pun intended) to assign his interest in the trust to others
It is also important to note that a trustee has a fiduciary duty to the trust that the terms of the trust are carried out. This means that he has a
Duty of Care of the trust's assets, which generally means to insure the non-cash assets against loss, and to invest the trust assets prudently (to protect the trust's assets). The fact that satoshi's coins have not moved since they were mined (for the most part) means that it is extremely unlikely that the trustee has exclusive control over the private keys that "hold" the ~1 million (or whatever amount) bitcoin that is claimed to be held in the trust. To give this person the absolute benefit of the doubt, it is possible that the trustee generated a large number of private keys, calculated the corresponding addresses, and provided those addresses to satoshi/Wright to have the coinbase transactions be sent to when he was mining -- even this theory can be debunked, at least in part by the fact that satoshi did spend
some of his bitcoin while he was still around, as well as the fact that it would make little sense to go through that much hassle over something that he realistically had no way of knowing will be as successful as Bitcoin has become.
Another interesting point is that the article implies that Wright can assign/pledge portions of his interest in the trust to others. As implied above, the trust does not have full control over the bitcoin it is supposedly holding, so it would be impossible to perfect any interest in the trust......it would still however be easy to argue that the coins cannot move because "they are held in trust" but I can sell you 50,000
BTC to be delivered to you in 2020 in exchange for 10,000
BTC today. If this trust does actually exist, it would not be difficult to draw up a legal document assigning a 5% stake in the trust, although it would be far from certain that the beneficiaries will ever receive anything come 2020.
tl;dr - this smells a lot like a scam to me.