I saw this post by the Meme Czar of big-block bitcoin himself, the mysterious-yet-hilarious anon and court-jester of BSV and well, got carried away and wrote a blog post as I tend to do. This is what I said in response (oh, and RH = Richard Heart).
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RH’s parroting of Vitalik’s “CSW is probably a fraud because signaling theory says that proving something the hard way indicates…” mic drop shows that he’s fundamentally pretty dumb. I couldn’t even tell you how a storied-email-turned-crypto-scammer (admittedly an exceptionally clever and funny individual) who has dealt in internet espionage, subterfuge, and high-stakes risks would conflate being the inventor of Bitcoin with whatever perfect-universe banal scenario in Vitalik’s heuristic could otherwise be.
We still don’t know what happened to the SourceForge boards and the supposed early-day rumors that Satoshi was schizo-posting because CSW and whoever else was in the inner circle were posting contradictory things. Bear in mind there were two SourceForge accounts made: s_nakamoto, I believe (who was the primary and only account used during the pre-Bitcointalk, bootstrap-via-IRC days, using Martti to do all the legwork) and nakamoto_2, which was never used but made around the same time. We still don’t know what Joseph Vaughn-Perling saw or heard (although he did claim to have met met a man who called himself Satoshi Nakamoto in 2005 at a cryptography conference—which was corroborated by the photo someone found in an old Flickr album taken at the event, where you can see the back of a man in front of a coffee booth who looks exactly like CSW).
We still don’t know what the deal was with Miss Nguyen, the Tulip Trust in general, or what happened to the keys from block 1 and 9 (which hold more leverage than the keys to a 1M BTC fortune, which I personally believe CSW has access to less than 50k or so by my estimate). The leverage of block 1 keys is so immensely powerful that it could indeed bring down a trillion-dollar industry and cause a miner panic and/or subsequent death spiral like in 2020, but far worse.
What happened to BitcoinBelle? Why did she orchestrate an unproductive coup against Nick Szabo, with JVP playing the mediator—using a clearly contrived script/plan that CSW, Belle, and JVP were all in on—only to subsequently disappear? Is it actually likely that CSW, who is objectively terrible at pulling off scams, “bamboozled” Gavin, Jon Matonis, Ian Grigg, and everyone else? I genuinely doubt it—Gavin’s signing was apparently very emotional (something Craig is known for and bad at faking). There was a negative verification at first because Craig forgot to add “-CSW” to the end of Gavin’s message. Furthermore, neither Gavin nor CSW has commented publicly about what was said between them, although my inclination is to suspect that Gavin asked a lot of questions about their private correspondence, which CSW backed up. So many known unknowns and relatively few known knowns at this point.
Also: CSW has a family; Richard Heart, the Cardano guy, Vitalik will probably get scammed by random e-girls and in Buterin’s case probably doesn’t even have reproductive organs. Both CSW and Vitalik are digital nomads at this point, it seems, lol.
BSVers have grown tired of explaining all this and defending a self-admitted pedantic autist who has clearly used the deaths and disappearances/public silence of these inner-circle figures to his advantage. The anti-CSW army still believes it was Adam Back and Hal Finney (a somewhat-likely candidate: essentially the bridge between the inner and outer circles and the community at large before Gavin came along) who might have been involved, albeit a bit weirdly narcissistic and strange considering the praise and adoration from Satoshi that Hal received towards the end when he left the project. Again: subterfuge, deception, red herrings. Who knows.
I know this is common knowledge, and I’m not trying to get into the morass of CSW defending, but RH showed his cards when all he did was the dumb-but-effective Vitalik play. CSW should have signed for a lot more people and tried to, but they refused to participate. Why would anyone refuse to participate? Why did the BBC only show one small clip from a huge press ordeal at the BBC in which he spent an hour IIRC proving the keys were legit, and yet…
Going back to what Orctep said: he is not wrong, but I’ll add this: what the crypto community more specifically wanted all along was something like Szabo and Buterin doing the tech while Richard played the Martti role.
Do I think CSW played the most prominent role and deserves the cartoon-character/fake person title of Satoshi Nakamoto? I’d like to think my post doesn’t come off this way; I’m totally open to this being an incredibly elaborate scam, one with a lot of bizarre caveats and, to flip the Vitalik/RH heuristic; a lot of hard things that have been done easily, just not in the manner we’ve been fed as part of the (justifiably fuzzy) CSW narrative. I think CSW, possibly a totally unknown third-party, (probably not the conveniently deceased) David Rees, Kleiman and (I have yet to meet a single person who agrees with me on this but fuck it:) very possibly Scronty, considering his quite-compelling “Bitcoin Origins” story (vu.hn) — and contrary to what CSW had said about him being a scammer who had nothing to do with it, who was the Jamie Wilson that CSW co authored several(?) patents with and is it not like, objectively strange that this man shares the same name as Scronty? I think Hal and JVP were in the outer ring of the inner circle, and Adam Back and Nick Szabo are jonny-come- lately’s in the same manner Greg Maxwell was/is.
Oh yeah, and ‘member when CSW gave the private keys to 500k BTC in exchange for gold bars and elite banking software and the man absconded with the coins?
& why was there such little on-chain activity early on? You’d think people the earliest of adopters and inner circle members would have, y’know, sent digital money worth nothing at the time, just for the fun. I have read Schneir and Zimmerman and all that and I know way too much about cryptography and crypto primitives & the math and all that & I personally would have been all over that shit (hindsight is 20/20 but p2p is my lifelong computer-thing more or less and like, when I play video games I like to just run into corners hoping that I’ll somehow emerge through into some bizarre non-existence zone you’d sometimes stumble into in the older stuff (around the 90s, when we first had real 3D graphics and such).
Satoshi did talk about deploying some of his stash (much of which he apparently mined using a cluster of computers he had donated after furnishing the remote
hinterland village New South Wales of Bagnoo with hi-speed internet access) in the recently released Martti emails, where he talks about starting the first faucet using his stash and offering to pay Martti in BTC (which I am not sure he ever ended up doing?— will need to follow up on some of this (although broadly I’ve done enough amateur sleuthing to feel confident; feel free to correct me or challenge me (on something new; no Richard Hart/Vitalik/GMax re-runs) the next time I drink too much tea at 4am and am CSW-posting in possibly the lowest point in this man’s life and for a community* which seems to have finally woken up to the fact that he wasnt necessarily talking about Jack Dorsey or COPA or Blackrock when he said, to paraphrase: “when this is all over I will be seen as the anti-christ.”
Again I realize that this is nothing new and will probably lose me some cool-kid points or followers but I don’t care.
@Dr_CSWright @CsTominaga @CalvinAyre @nChainGlobal @RealCoinGeek @kurtwuckertjr: Here’s my proposal for you all: get to the bottom of this and get a real documentarian like @errolmorris and his patented Interrotron device to ask real questions by way of a machine that makes it difficult to lie. Acquire the $BC ticker, the original Satoshi ticker from the Brunswick Corporation. I’ve tried to look into how tickers work exactly and if anyone could offer insight as to whether this is possible it’d be much appreciated. But let’s say Lord Brunswick the IV or whoever plays ball and is willing to negotiate and sell for a reasonable sum. You have the original Satoshi ticker. Too afraid to call it just “bitcoin” after that? Then turn my spoof-fork (@b_j_t_c_o_i_n ) into reality, or at least re-brand BSV or again, start a new chain using sha-512 or something and stop funding garbage and appointing sycophantic weirdos & listen to people like me instead. I have the panoramic view. I know how this game really works and what everyone is saying in the crypto trenches about the ridiculous, seemingly scorched-earth tactics and public figures you’ve installed into the dying “ecosystem” who keeps dumping oil into the lake & tries to spin incredibly unwise, myopic nonsense into virtuous, essential tasks which will literally destroy everything with tangible value that hasn’t been sold off to Saudi Arabians or whatever yarn I saw spun a while back about Calvin liquidating the patent portfolio (again, could be wrong about this but if you can’t go with the gist of what I’m saying in broad terms then you will fail spectacularly.
Or don’t. Keep kicking the can, lying and funding fake projects.
Again, I don’t care; I just want to get a really good Aaron Sorkin film out of this at the end of the day or maybe, y’know, use a L1 which isn’t trapped (& to reuse this phrase) in the morass of human drama and second-order effects and cultural/aesthetic dominancy and extremely unpopular and politically unwise “digital asset retrieval” nonsense. Start to play dirty if you want to win, because all bets are off & you may very well have a Royal Flush yet despite these Interesting Times.
Re-brand everything, fire pretty much everyone and get people in who seem to actually give a shit about the stakes and whatever leverage remains — someone who is willing to go scorched earth and terraform the industry, because you are trying to use band-aids for a decapitation and have alienated the people who gave true value to your blockchain; they went on a limb and bought a ticket for A Bitcoin Cash Tale: Satoshi Vision (2018) way too long ago and have largely abandoned your chain (although there are still many people & very ardent, intelligent people who are trying their best to look past this all & just use the thing; a testament to the collective conviction you have neglected and squandered). I am not a BSV-bagholder & in the past decade or so I’ve held almost everything except for BSV at its height, because I had just found out my girlfriend was pregnant with our first son @ the time & genuinely had no clue if I’d ever even find exit liquidity let alone at such high prices for an obvious COVID-bubble— probably the most obvious-to-predict halving bull market in the history of crypto.
Enough blog posting; “I’ve moved on to better things. It’s in bad hands with everyone else.” But I’d be willing to sell you the map to the highest peak so you can see the panoramic view for yourself.
Hint: it’s not in Antigua. And Craig didn’t pass geography last I heard…
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