Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[jbreher]

1500 chairs for Consensus this weekend. i met a few of you back in San Jose 2013 and there was nothing like this attendance back then.

Regret that I don't recall meeting you at Bitcoin 2013 (nothing odd about that... there were a lot of folk there, and I had a rather short list of 'must-meets'). However, I seem to remember Lindsey Montana announcing quite a large figure for attendance. Around a thousand? Point being, it was enough that being 'nothing like' 1500 seems misleading to me.

 

[JVWVU]

Consensus was $199 to watch today and tomorrow - WTF. I had more fun reading twitter with Craig Wright stuff today.

 

[Christoph Bergmann]

Speculate away. I've more or less made up my mind.

..........But maybe that's what THEY want me to think?

Woaaah!

Did you listen what he says?

He don't want fame nor money, he would never accept a cent from anybody, categorally, he didn't do it to be on tv, he just has, because australia's tax authority, to protect those near to him, he was part of Satoshi --

"I have people decide this for me, and they make live difficulty, not just for me, but for people around me ...."

 

[Lee Adams]

Word of the day: incongruity

He also says he can’t send any bitcoin because they are now owned by a trust. And he rejected the idea of having The Economist send him another text to sign as proof that he actually possesses these private keys, rather than simply being the first to publish a proof which was generated at some point in the past by somebody else. Either people believe him now—or they don’t, he says. “I’m not going to keep jumping through hoops.”

I can't understand why this is not plain and simple now.

1) You can move at least 13 XBT from block 9. You have demonstrated (or have you?) that you control 13 XBT. If it's owned by a trust, then move it and move it back.
2) As Andreas says, the whole thing around bitcoin is not having to trust Gavin, Jon etc.
3) Andreas has it wrong. Satoshi's identity IS irrelevant, but the identity of the owner of a significant amount of XBT is NOT.
4) Craig's statement rings so many alarm bells.

Public proof that Craig controls 13 XBT from block 9 is EASY! Do it and stop trolling us.

 

[albin]

If what he's saying in the video about the taxation situation is accurate, then either Australia doesn't do the same thing as the US by treating mined Bitcoins as income @ the price they were mined at thus setting their cost basis, or he's just assuming his cost basis as Satoshi is zero across the board lacking any kind of market at the time?

 

[Lee Adams]

How to verify who you are using the blockchain!

 

[Norway]

Right now, Core/Blockstream are scared to death by Satoshi.

 

[albin]

To play devil's advocate here, maybe the guy doesn't care about proving his identity to the community-at-large?

Alot of assumptions about what he should be doing to prove it, but we know essentially nothing about his motivations here outside of whatever we can glean from the BBC video footage, which arguably is the most important factor in understanding why he's doing what he's doing.
[doublepost=1462231307][/doublepost]Is it possible that the Peter Todd tweet about revoking Gavin's commit privileges really more had something to do with being afraid of the return of Satoshi and having a reasonable claim to take back what many could believe should arguably be his repo?

 

[cypherdoc]

or he's just assuming his cost basis as Satoshi is zero across the board lacking any kind of market at the time?

now wouldn't that be something?

there couldn't have been much of a price back when he mined those coins as there was no mtgox. lol, i'll be the Australian tax henchmen are having no part of that theory.

 

[JVWVU]

My understanding is they want 20-30% now and not when he spends them.

 

[Melbustus]

I think I said this last time, but big blocker or not, if Craig Wright is Satoshi and still controls all the keys, that'd be bad for Bitcoin. The guy is clearly unhinged to say the least. I'd rather not have someone like that in control of up to 1m BTC.

 

[cypherdoc]

My understanding is they want 20-30% now and not when he spends them.

well if the tax law is like here in the US, as @albin said above, he only would owe his personal income tax on the value of BTC in Australian dollars at the time he mined them. given this was in 2009/10, any price at all then was close to zero so 20-30% of zero is close to zero.

 

[JVWVU]

No Cypher I think they want 20-30% of his bitcoins today, so 200-300K BTC. I think they are afraid he is going to defect first. I also think they are possibly hounding his friends, family and employees on this.

 

[johnyj]

Let's say he is Satoshi, so what? I will be more impressed if he invented a new way to solve the mining centralization problem

As an observation, all the core supporters went crazy, never seen so unified action in denying the claim. It is a good political test, showing unified style action in a communist party

 

[cypherdoc]

No Cypher I think they want 20-30% of his bitcoins today, so 200-300K BTC. I think they are afraid he is going to defect first. I also think they are possibly hounding his friends, family and employees on this.

i don't doubt you one bit. my point is at what justification? just b/c they want them? no wonder Satoshi has stayed anonymous for as long as he has. and why would CW admit he is Satoshi only to now have to cough up 20-30% of his BTC? it'll be interesting to see if he has the ability to pay...

 

[jbreher]

I think I said this last time, but big blocker or not, if Craig Wright is Satoshi and still controls all the keys, that'd be bad for Bitcoin. The guy is clearly unhinged to say the least. I'd rather not have someone like that in control of up to 1m BTC.

Unhinged? Anyone that can calmly sit on a pile of half-to-one-billion seems anything but unhinged to me.

 

[Melbustus]

@jbreher - Have you read the stuff he writes? Yes, unhinged.

Satoshi or not, Craig Wright is a rambling attention-seeking con-artist.

So this sucks regardless... Either we have the above as Satoshi, or Gavin got fooled (in which case Core et al will never let him forget it). Both are bad outcomes.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

Help me out.

1. It'd be trivial for the real Satoshi to prove his identity by publicly releasing a signed message with the private key from the genesis block.
2. If you're Satoshi and your goal is to publicly prove that to the world, there's no good reason not to do 1. And in fact, anything less than 1 doesn't make any sense because any other form of evidence will be met with extreme skepticism (and rightfully so).
3. Gavin is aware of 1 and 2.
4. Thus, Gavin would have every reason to be extremely skeptical of a private and controlled demonstration of proof that Craig Wright is Satoshi. "Ok, cool you're Satoshi and you're ready to prove it to the world. So... just release a signed message to the public and be done with it. Why the hell do you want me to schlep all the way to London for a private preview?"
5. But fine, let's assume the private demonstration of proof was 100% convincing to Gavin such that he, personally, has no doubt that Wright is in fact Satoshi. Why would he publicly vouch for that prior to the public release of the proof? How did Gavin fail to game out what it would do to his credibility if either (a) Wright isn't Satoshi and he was somehow bamboozled or (b) Wright is Satoshi but (for some strange reason) ends up not publicly releasing definitive proof?

But, in fact, it does sound like he understood the risks to his credibility. From the Wired story:

He says Wright and his staff wouldn’t let him leave the hotel meeting room with his own much stronger evidence, for fear that Andresen would leak it before Wright was ready to come forward. But Andresen says he can’t understand why Wright didn’t release that information publicly now. He hopes Wright still might.

AND

Andresen’s only attempt at an explanation for Wright’s bizarre behavior, he says, is an ambivalence about definitively revealing himself after so many years in hiding. “I think the most likely explanation is that … he really doesn’t want to take on the mantle of being the inventor of Bitcoin,” says Andresen, who notes that his own credibility is at stake, too. “Maybe he wants things to be really weird and unclear, which would be bad for me.”

So Satoshi doesn't trust Gavin, his hand-picked successor, not to leak the proof before he's ready to come forward? Well, that's a little weird. But ok, sure, maybe the risk (however small) is still an unnecessary one. But the clear implication behind that excuse is that Wright would, in the future when he was ready to come forward, publicly provide definitive proof. And then there's Gavin's acknowledgement that his credibility is at stake if Wright doesn't provide definitive proof. And so... if you're Gavin, why say a friggin' word before Wright does so???!!!

 

[Melbustus]

@Roger_Murdock - Also Matonis...

And to @Justus Ranvier 's point, Ian Grigg is perhaps the most interesting commentator thusfar.

Something akin to Grigg's implications are not too nuts; eg, that Satoshi was a team, and perhaps Craig was somehow involved (this would explain his early-Bitcoin knowledge, which Gavin stated was part of convincing him). But I find it hard to believe that CW was ever the Satoshi voice that was posting on BCT and the mailing list, and the mind that primarily authored the whitepaper....unless he's suffered from some nasty mental-illness in the past 5 years.

It does seem reasonably clear, though, that he was indeed a very early miner, and therefore it's not absurd to think he knew or was associated with the Satoshi team one way or another, if it was indeed a team. Regardless, I do hope that guy doesn't hold the keys to a million BTC.

 

[Justus Ranvier]

Help me out.

1. It'd be trivial for the real Satoshi to prove his identity by publicly releasing a signed message with the private key from the genesis block.
2. If you're Satoshi and your goal is to publicly prove that to the world, there's no good reason not to do 1. And in fact, anything less than 1 doesn't make any sense because any other form of evidence will be met with extreme skepticism (and rightfully so).

His goal is not necessarily to publicly prove his identity to the world.

The manner in which he has handled this claim has provoked a wide range of responses from many individuals. It's not out of the question that some of those reactions could have been at least one of his goals.

You can add that to the list of possibilities, but I'm not going to guess how likely it is compared to the possibility that it's a hoax.
[doublepost=1462249261][/doublepost]

Ian Grigg is perhaps the most interesting commentator thusfar.

@haq4good also had some interesting Twitter conversations today:

https://twitter.com/haq4good/with_replies