Courts and Consensus, Satoshi and Salome
Or, “Craig Wright, My Part In His Downfall”.
Dateline: San Francisco, 8th March 2024.
There’s a massive crypto case being tried in London’s Royal Courts of Justice right now. The case centres on whether the Australian cryptographer Craig Wright is, as he claims, the famous and elusive Satoshi Nakamoto, inventor of Bitcoin. I am not a lawyer, nor am I a cryptographer, but from the outside his defence seems to be creaking. In witness statements submitted to the court ahead of the trial, people who Wired magazine dubbed “Bitcoin Royalty” (including Adam Back, Mike Hearn, Martti Malmi and Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn) provided testimony to support the view that Mr. Wright is wrong to claim to be the originator of the cryptocurrency.
New York News
My good friend Rory Cellan-Jones writes entertainingly about his part in this story. Rory explains that in 2016 he was contacted as the BBC’s Technology Correspondent, one of three journalists called by a PR agency and given the irresistible scoop of a lifetime: the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.
As it happens, I had a bit part in this, because Rory called me (at 4am, he didn’t know I was in New York) to ask for my opinion on Wright’s claims. I told him that I’d read up on the claims and get back to him. I set about googling and trying to understand what exactly had or had not been demonstrated in Rory’s presence.
Now, the reason that I was in New York was that I was attending Consensus 2016, a major cryptocurrency conference. I went to learn from leaders in the field and to test some of the thinking that I had gathered from some early projects. I chaired the session on “Reimagining Identity” on Monday 2nd May and my colleague Salome Parulava, Consult Hyperion’s subject matter expert on crypto, chaired the session on “Preventing the Next Lehman Brothers” on Tuesday 3rd May.
Back to the story. After talking to Rory I showered and dressed and ambled down to the Green Room along with Salome. As I went in I was greeted with a cheerful “Hello Dave” from Vitalik Buterin, a very nice guy but also a genius who had actually invented a cryptocurrency.
Vitalk had very kindly come along to Consult Hyperion's 2015 Tomorrow’s Transactions event that I had chaired and given a terrific presentation on the potential for the technology. What’s more, he is Crypto Royalty of the first order. So naturally I asked him what he thought about Craig’s Crypto Claim. I don’t remember his exact words, but as far as I recall said he thought the claims were likely to be at variance with reality. I dutifully reported his scepticism back to Rory in London and went off to my session.
Salome Parulava and Vitalik Buterin at Consensus 2016.
I remember my session very well, actually, because one of things discussed was key management and I was (and still am) sceptical that the average person (e.g., me) would have the persistent competence necessary to maintain the procedures and disciplines for managing the private keys that are core to cryptocurrency. Here’s what CoinDesk said about it...
This humorous panel kicked off with talk about the possibility of protecting ones private key for accessing encrypted data by converting it to a QR and tattooing it on a very private body part. The moderator, David Birch of Consult Hyperion, was presumably being hyperbolic (though he provided no proof), but his point was well taken: protecting one’s identity can result in some extreme precautions.
That session was a riot, but the whole event was great fun, I learned a lot and had the opportunity to catch up with a few people whose opinions I took (and still take) very seriously indeed.
Me explaining to Jeremy Alliare of Circle why his idea for a stablecoin would never work.
Oh, but back to Craig Wright. Later in the day, the general consensus at Consensus was that the journalists had been fooled. Indeed, as Rory writes, within hours of Craig Wright publishing details of his evidence, the “proof” was being torn apart at that very event.
Not Satoshi, Not Crazy?
None of this is to suggest that Craig Wright is stupid or should be ignored. I remember when my old chum Izabella Kaminska from the FT stepped in and pointed to something that he had written on the subject of bitcoin. She said it was the first time anyone in the bitcoin world had actually made a compelling argument. He described bitcoin not as a currency or a commodity but as a security service.
(I had not read the Wright piece she referred to before, so I had a very quick glance and then bookmarked it to read later. Unfortunately, there was no later as Dr. Wright canned his blog, but a correspondent found it using the wayback machine .)
In fact what he said was that “The mining of bitcoin is a security service that alone creates no wealth”. So to return to the point above, the sheer volume of mining going on (provided it does not become concentrated) means that there is a very, very secure piece of infrastructure out there. This infrastructure may be used to “anchor” all sorts of new services that need security. Some of them may be payments (as the Lightning folks hope) but most of them will not be.
This is an argument that says that bitcoins could continue to have value even if it is not money or a currency and no-one is using Bitcoin to buy goods or services. While I remain sceptical, that view seems much more interesting to me than whether Craig Wright is Satoshi or not, whether it justifies a price of one cent or a million dollars.
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