Is Craig Wright aka pseudo-Satoshi becoming a burden for Bitcoin Cash?

From the ranks of Bitcoin Cash is increasing the criticism of the alleged Satoshi Craig Wright. The situation is more confusing than it seems at first sight.

Some things can be twisted and turned as long as you want, without any success. It is difficult to ignore the fact that the Bitcoin Cash scene has long taken it against better knowledge that the pseudo-Satoshi Craig Steven Wright has stood on their side. Better a false Satsohi confirms that Bitcoin Cash is the real Bitcoin than no Satoshi at all, right?

It seems that Bitcoin Cash's attitude is now falling on its feet. At least it causes internal controversy, now that more and more people are clearly against Craig Wright. Vitalik Buterin recently voiced this concern to the public when the Ethereum founder asked at the Deconomy conference why "this scammer" should speak here. Thus, Buterin agrees to a critique, which is vehemently represented by Peter Rizun of Bitcoin Unlimited and the scientist Emin Gün Sirer. They have publicly declared Wright to be a charlatan throwing big words that have little to no substance. Rick Falkvinge also blatantly points to Craig Wright in a video that explains how to identify toxical people.

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It's not about whether Wright is the real Satoshi. Except for a tiny residual chance, one may deny this after Wright has been doubly proven to have falsified evidence. An open ecosystem should not ask who someone is, but what he contributes, whether he is a fraudster or an impostor. But even if Wright is judged by what he wants for what he does, the result is very sobering.

Wright has made promises for years. He announced in early 2016 to set up a team for Bitcoin development, promising to develop his company nChain a Bitcoin SDK about a year ago, said at Satoshi's vision in Arnhem to form a better multisig, and and and. Craig Wright constantly promises what he will do, but so far no line of code is known to him. All he has done so far are hundreds of patent applications, as well as many poorly written, mostly confused papers. He has not made any contribution to software development so far.

All this does not exactly speak for Craig Wright. But it is not harmful in itself. For many, Wright's positive contributions outweigh this: his furious performances as a pseudo-Satoshi continue to be the strongest, loudest, and most eloquent message that Bitcoin Cash is the true Bitcoin. With no call to lose, Wright can say it all, rumbling, and decidedly what many others resist. For this he is often a good source of ideas, for example when he speaks of Bitcoins Turing completeness or the differences between Bitcoin and Lightning in terms of the network theory works out (Small-World vs. Mesh). Most importantly, Wright succeeds in mobilizing capital through Calvin Ayre's own company nChain or Coingeek, which flows into projects that are largely free of profit intentions aimed at making Bitcoin Cash stronger (such as Electron, Yours, Lokad, CentBee or CashShuffle ).

OP_Group and Selfish Mining

In recent months, however, there have been two events that have destroyed this balance. First, Wright has begun to intervene in Bitcoin Cash's protocol development through nChain. Although it is not clear how big his influence is, it may have contributed to the fact that the OP_Group proposed by Bitcoin Unlimited - which would have allowed the native token on the blockchain - was rejected while old, disabled opcodes were reactivated. Hardly concealed, patents by nChain play a role in which Wright claims to have invented a method for tokens that uses the opcodes to be re-activated. Much more obvious can not be a conflict of interest.

Second, a debate about selfish mining is on again. Selfish Mining refers to a technique discovered by Emin Gün Sirer that allows a miner to trick from a 25 or 33 percent hashrate by holding blocks back. The attack itself is relatively complex and has never been proven in reality, but is said to work according to the simulations. Wright said about a year ago that there would be no such attack, and Peter Rizin then dealt with his arguments intensely.

But Rizun realized that Wright did not really know what he was talking about. A little later, Wright published a paper in which Rizun promptly said he had found a mistake. The discussion went, among other things, that Wright, according to Rizun did not understand that mining was memorylessness - an absolute rookie error. Wright and Rizun then bet on 1 Bitcoin. Rizun claims to have won the bet, but Wright continues to insist he is right. Afterwards, it was clear to Rizun that Wright was an impostor.

For some, not very clear reasons, this discussion boils up again. While Rizun and Sirer publicly denounce Wright as a charlatan, he counters that Selfish Mining is an invention of technocrats. At the Deconomy Conference he said: "A lie, knitted to take away the power of Bitcoin. They tell you that you have to fix it, that a bunch of technocrats have to plan it centrally because they can do it better. "This marks Wright Emin Gün Sirer as an enemy - shortly after showing tendencies at the second Satoshi's Vision Conference, pro Bitcoin Cash. The pseudo-Satoshi, so the broader impression, creates with his poison strife in the community and scares away valuable members.

It's not all bad luck, what stinks ...

However, it makes it too easy to dismiss Craig Wright as a pure charlatan. Sorry, the world is not that easy. Because under the confused language hide often remarkable insights. For example, while searching for a clue to the lack of substance in Wright's paper, I read an essay by him on Bitcoin and quantum computers. To my surprise, I found in it the information I was looking for in vain recently when writing on the topic - how long quantum computers will take to crack ECDSA. Wright says even a quantum computer with a million qubits will take a week. With this information, the attack scientists have described in a paper becomes a purely academic speculation, while in reality Bitcoin is very very secure from quantum computers. Overall, this Wright paper was much better than expected, and an important addition to what I knew so far about the subject.

The effort to play the Satoshi seems to unleash creative energy at Wright. The only concrete idea of what to do with the Bitcoin Cash opcodes to be reactivated in May comes from him - Oblivious Transactions, a certain type of transaction in which the origin of the coins is not entirely clear. The concept is, as so often, very vague, but some developers have confirmed that the trend is at least not fundamentally wrong. The Oblivious Transactions is the best known attempt yet to guess what Satsohi meant by one of his most puzzling comments: In 2010, Satoshi wrote that he had implemented all sorts of script commands to make Bitcoin ready for the numerous transactions he invented years ago. What special transactions he meant, apart from the obvious multisig, remained a mystery to this day.

Selfish mining also has reasons not to dismiss Wright's point of view. Just because something is written in a scientific paper does not necessarily mean it is true. That there was not yet a proven incident of Selfish Mining and that Sirer announced the discovery by saying it was time to sell, since Bitcoin is fundamentally broken at the protocol level, should make one already think. Wright's main argument against the selfish mining theory is that the network of Bitcoin miners is so intertwined that it is impossible to attack them sybill. He expresses this by the strange remark that gamma is negative. Interestingly enough, he finds support from an unexpected side when Peter Todd says the Selfish Mining Paper starts from unrealistic assumptions about the topology of the Bitcoin network.

As so often, I can not end up with a definite conclusion - I have none to offer - but only call for thinking twice before believing the obvious conclusions.

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Image Sources:

• Post header created by myself
• twitter.com/SeatacBCH

Video Source:

• youtube.com/We Are All Satoshi
• youtube.com/CoinGeek

Have a nice day and a great weekend!

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