Craig Wright and his claims of being the original creator of Bitcoin i.e. Satoshi Nakamoto have recently been debunked by four crypto experts in a remote panel set up by Coindesk. Wright, who has been claiming of being Satoshi Nakamoto for over four years has provided wafer-thin proof and is often ridiculed by the cryptocurrency community at large because of his apparently damaging antics and bloated boastings.
Craig Wright has been extensively covered here at cryptounit.com including his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto and legal struggles including the plagiarization of PhD thesis and courts ordering him to prove his ownership of the first 1 million Bitcoin that have been mined by the original Satoshi Nakamoto. Wright is also ridiculed for his role in announcing new Bitcoin forks like Bitcoin Cash and subsequently Bitcoin Satoshi which was a fork of Bitcoin Cash itself. So, his behaviour over the years has been anti-Bitcoin and anti-decentralization overall and he is not showing any signs of slowing down.
The four experts included Nadim Kobeissi, Matthew Green, Tim Ruffing and Sergio Demian examined the recent “proof” being put forward by Craig Wright. In a recent interview at ReImagine 2020 conference Wright answered a query regarding digital signatures and said:
no message was signed. You cannot have a digital signature that is anonymous, by definition. Sorry. So, no signature. You can run a digital signature algorithm. It’s not signing a message….., You either have to have an identity attribute or an identity to sign a message. Someone can’t go and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a key, I’m signing.’ If you think that, you don’t understand digital signatures at all.’”
However, this latest claim was immediately debunked by these four experts on the panel. According to Kobeissi who is an applied cryptographer:
The usage of digital signatures is indeed correct and Wright’s subsequent claims that ‘this is not how digital signatures work’ seems vague and misleading.”
Green, who is an associate professor at John Hopkins said:
If Craig Wright is saying something meaningful here then he needs to slow down and explain it more clearly. Because the words he’s using sound like nonsense to me.”
He also added that his current arguments made zero sense overall.
Tim Ruffing, a cryptographer and Blockstream developer debunked the claim made by Wright and claimed that he had checked some random signatures himself and he found them valid enough.
Bitcoin security researcher and IOV Labs engineer Sergio Demian Lerner stated that Wright was confusing people by using a different definition of the term altogether. He claims that it was a colloquial definition and such, it was inaccurate to state it in this case.
He said:
used a colloquial definition of the term to confuse non-technical people, because a technical person knows that the published signatures are enough to prove that the publisher has the private keys, and the identity of the owner is irrelevant for the proof,”
Kobeissi summed it up best and said that by following Wright’s tale it was clear that his claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto is as valid as the Earth being flat. This was highly likely to ruffle a few feathers in the Wright camp and it did.
Wright is known for sticking to his point of view and not answering directly at his criticism. In an email response he pulled out a definition from Stroud’s Judicial Dictionary and called these four experts “armchair cryptographers” and stated that he firmly believed that the concept of digital signature was entrenched as the signing of an individual and not the action of an algorithm or a line of code. He returned the blame and said that some coders do not understand the Bitcoin system and are using their limited knowledge to twist the meaning of these cryptographic definitions.
Kobeissi followed up and called Wright’s rebuttal an incredible amount of bullshit”. Lerner also had similar concerns and said that even non-cryptographers can call Wright’s bullshit. Square root is a separate definition and is neither related to square and root but is a completely separate thing altogether.
He said:
This person emphasises that if he somehow convinces a judge that he owns a million bitcoins that nobody has claimed (and that some people think belong to Satoshi), then the judge may rule in his favour and magically give him control,”
Image source: pexels.com
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