Blogs & Articles: Craig Wright And The Gangsters 🔗 19 weeks ago

The finest quotes collected from Bitcoiners and other original gangsters who came across our wannabe Bitcoin inventor in the last 15 years.

Written and compiled by Arthur van Pelt

ABOUT EDITS AND UPDATES to this article: as more material may become available after the publication of this article, it could have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, to become a reference piece for years to come.

In October 2022 I published “Craig Wright And The Judges”.

I was browsing through that fine compilation, and it suddenly occured to me that I never did a compilation of what the hot shots in or related to the Bitcoin industry think of Craig Wright. At the same time, while the Bitcoin network is online almost 15 years, Craig Wright will be celebrating his 10 years of Satoshi cosplay anniversary in a few weeks. Indeed, January 2014 is where we find the first hints and spoofed emails of Craig Wright pretending to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin.

That gap is going to be filled today. Not as extensive as the judges’ quotes compilation though, as I only pulled the most pointy oneliners of the gangsters from the internet.

Enjoy!

February 9, 2010

We kick off with a classic from 2010. I’m still amazed by the extreme accuracy (cough, Calvin Ayre, cough) of this quote.

“People like you are dangerous and need to be exposed before someone in a position of power actually believes that you know what you are talking about.” — Thor (Hammer of God)

Source: SecLists

December 10, 2015

“The tech press was abuzz two days ago with a claim, from reputable journalists at Wired and Gizmodo, that Satoshi Nakamoto was Dr. Craig S. Wright.

I know Craig Wright. I was one of the 95 people he followed on Twitter. We’ve exchanged private messages. He told me his life story, which mixed quasi-academic references with allusions to quasi-legal activities that were clearly meant to discourage further questioning.

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way. Craig Wright is not Satoshi. Could not have been.” — Emin Gün Sirer in TechnologyReview and Hacking, Distributed

December 11, 2015

Adam Back retweets Emin Gün Sirer’s article.

Source: Twitter

January 21, 2016

Craig Wright, as said before, started his Satoshi cosplay in January 2014. Exactly 2 years later he was already being called out in public for his false representation of being the inventor of Bitcoin. Mind you, the Australian Taxation Office authorities had been thoroughly inquiring him in the 2013–2015 era, leading to the searches (aka raids) in December 2015 mentioned in this article of The Australian.

“Australian authorities are understood to firmly believe Mr Wright is not the creator of Bitcoin and that he may have created the hoax to distract from his tax issues.”

May 2, 2016

“Hours after his TV interview and his coming out in The Economist and elsewhere, I can confirm beyond reasonable doubt that Craig Wright (CW) has cheated us about his ability to sign messages with Satoshi’s private key.

Here is a short executive summary of facts guaranteed to be 100% exact. This is also a short and easy to check PROOF that Craig has lied and cheated.” — Dr Nicolas T. Courtois on his blog ‘BetterCrypto’

Seasoned cryptographer Nicolas Courtois accompagnied Stuart McGurk of GQ Magazine during the failed Craig Wright signing sessions in April 2016.

The “Fuck off!” YouTube video, for those who can stomach it.

https://medium.com/media/5f8b8feed6a009486b6acf4da79daa51/href

May 2, 2016

“Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. He wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto before or after Wired and Gizmodo suspected him to be last year, and he still isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto after trying to reveal himself to be on his own blog and to The BBC, The Economist, GQ, Jon Matonis and Gavin Andresen.

There is a long and fraught history in Bitcoin of claims and counterclaims about who Satoshi is, and one would think that lessons had been learned and a high standard would be set for subsequent claims regarding Satoshi Nakamoto. The proof posted today by Wright and others does not meet any standard for identifying him as Nakamoto.” — Nik Cubrilovic on his blog

May 2, 2016

Martti Malmi was the first developer of Bitcoin next to Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Next to working on Bitcoin development, Martti was also the admin of bitcoin.org and he set up the first installment of Bitcoin Forum late 2009 (which later moved to bitcointalk.org).

The first time Martti spoke out about Craig Wright was in May 2016 already.

“It seems Craig Wright has proven he’s not Satoshi.”

Source: Twitter

May 2, 2016

Charlie Lee, founder of Litecoin, simply signed the Litecoin Genesis block, showing Craig Wright the way. At the moment of writing, December 2023, Craig Wright still never signed anything however, and based on his words and actions, his latest excuse is that he rather spends tens of millions of dollars in court rooms proving his identity (with 100s of forgeries), after which he will sign. Maybe. Because in September 2022 “Craig Wright Tells Court He ‘Stomped on the Hard Drive’ Containing Satoshi Wallet Keys”. Oops.

Source: Twitter

May 3, 2016

Make no mistake. Gavin Andresen indeed endorsed Craig Wright on a few occassions. But on many more occassions, starting May 3, 2016 he was very critical about Craig Wright. An (incomplete) overview:

“I’m starting to doubt myself and imagining clever ways you could have tricked me.” — email to Craig Wright, May 3, 2016

“Given his extreme efforts to avoid releasing a public signature, I’m starting to doubt that Craig actually possesses the key he claims he has, and he did somehow manage to trick me and, perhaps, has been deceiving people for many years.”

“Craig (with help) is lying to us all, perhaps for many years, perhaps with evidence he obtained somehow from the ‘real deal’, and has been backed into a corner from which he cannot escape. Perhaps there are no coins in the Tulip Trust, they were a mirage all along (have any ever been spent?). If I put on my ‘paranoid conspiracy theory’ hat, the length of the proof session could have all been a ruse to give an accomplice in a nearby room time to intercept the wifi and prepare a doctored version of Electrum that would verify any message containing ‘CSW’.”

“It is possible I was tricked, but it wouldn’t be an eclipse/hijack of the chain — I brought a list of the first 100 block’s keys with me and verified the public key against that list. That was the only connection to the chain.

A hijack of the wifi used to download Electrum is possible; if we were running an Electrum that reported ‘verified’ for any message ending with ‘CSW’ and not verified for anything else that would fit what happened. I didn’t bring checksums of Electrum downloads with me.” — Gavin to Hacking, Distributed, May 4, 2016

“The other possibility is he is a master scammer/fraudster who managed to trick some pretty smart people over a period of several years. In which case everybody except the victims of his fraud and law enforcement working on behalf of those victims should ignore him.” Gavin on his blog, November 12, 2016

“He certainly deceived me about what kind of blog post he was going to publish, and that gobbledygook proof that he published was certainly deception, if not an outright lie. So at the very least, that, I consider, you know, that — he bamboozled me there.”

“I’m not sure what to think. I am — I might have been bamboozled.

At a minimum, you still believe that Craig Wright was the brain child, the one who came up with the idea?

I have my doubts at this point.”— Gavin under oath in deposition, February 26, 2020

“I don’t believe in rewriting history, so I’m going to leave this post up. But in the seven years since I wrote it, a lot has happened, and I now know it was a mistake to trust Craig Wright as much as I did. I regret getting sucked into the “who is (or isn’t) Satoshi” game, and I refuse to play that game any more.” — Gavin on his blog, February 2023

November 18, 2016

Fair enough, it’s the title of an article. But that title says everything that needs to be said. Stuart McGurk and Nicolas Courtois (represented elsewhere in this article) were both witnesses of the totally failed Craig Wright signing sessions half a year earlier in 2016. This article describes their experience.

“Craig Wright: The Man Who Didn’t Invent Bitcoin”

Source: GQ Australia

July 24, 2018

Samson Mow, a hilariously sarcastic Faketoshi burn classic. One of my favorites ever on Twitter.

“I have to throw my support behind the CSW fork of $BCH. Faketoshi is without a doubt the most suitable scammer to lead the fake Bitcoin community.”

August 29, 2018

“The straw that broke the camel’s back was when at the dinner in Thailand, the night before the miner meeting that eventually led to the BSV/BCH split, CSW didn’t even know that Bitcoin addresses have a checksum built in.”

Roger Ver is talking here about an event the day before the infamous Bangkok Summit on August 30, 2018.

November 8, 2018

Roger Ver once more.

“It’s never easy to admit that you’ve been fooled, but maybe I’ve been fooled […] Some things Craig says, I think are really spot on, but other things, he has no clue what he’s talking about.”

Source: CCN

November 15, 2018

Emin Gün Sirer also has an entry in this overview in December 2015. But Emin is mostly remembered for and quoted with the “Craig touch”, a classic since 2018. Why a classic? Because we see this dynamic of “He brings the IQ down of any group he is in.” play out time and again, especially in his work, his interactions with his counsels and when he’s rambling in front of his little online fan club on Slack.

“I called out Craig Wright’s fraud way before the world knew about him. He has been obsessed with attacking my work ever since. His website background was our selfish mining paper.

Over the years, I’ve developed a good sense for the “Craig touch.” He brings the IQ down of any group he is in. That’s why there isn’t a single smart person behind BSV, the CoinGeek coin. That’s why the attacks are going to be super dumb.”

Source: Twitter

April 12, 2019

Craig Wright starts suing Bitcoin community members Adam Back, hodlonaut and Peter McCormack. This resulted in some serious backlash. One of the people speaking out was Changpeng Zhao (CZ), then CEO of Binance, one of world’s largest crypto currency exchanges. CZ was not bluffing, and on April 22, 2019 at 10:00 AM UTC, Craig Wright’s brainchild affinity fraud token BSV was indeed kicked from the Binance platform. One of the possible reasons given in their public announcement was “Evidence of unethical / fraudulent conduct”.

“Craig Wright is not Satoshi.

Anymore of this sh!t, we delist!”

Source: Twitter

A few days later, CZ explained the delisting on Twitter in more detail, and added “Craig Wright is fraud. […] Until then, everyone is Satoshi, except Craig Wright!”.

Source: Twitter

April 15, 2019

Kraken is another crypto currency exchange who delisted BSV. First they held a poll on Twitter:

Source: Twitter

Then Kraken explained in their public announcement:

“Over the last few months, the team behind Bitcoin SV have engaged in behaviour completely antithetical to everything we at Kraken and the wider crypto community stands for. It started with fraudulent claims, escalating to threats and legal action, with the BSV team suing a number of people speaking out against them. The threats made last week to individual members of the community were the last straw.

This aggression will not stand. Alongside other upstanding members of the community, and in consultation with more than 70,000 Kraken users, we have decided to delist Bitcoin SV.”

Who also added his 2sats in the discussion was Jesse Powell, Co-Founder and (then) CEO of Kraken. On April 21, 2019 he explained on Twitter:

“I think we, as a community, have shown that we will not tolerate bullies abusing the legal system as a means of shutting down dissenting opinions. Harassing and stealing from those who disagree with you is effectively a ban on free speech. Crypto is about open discourse.

Plenty of people have harassed CSW but AFAIK nobody has attempted to universally block CSW from making his claims or stating his opinions by way of force/abuse of the legal system. Harassment/trolling is universal online. You need thick skin if you are going to make great claims.

If the BSV community cared about maintaining exchange listings, it would have stepped up to denounce the lawsuit filed against Kraken, and lawsuits against our investors, business partners and clients. Unfortunately, the association with BSV has been net negative for our business.

The point was to give the community an opportunity to change our minds. The intent isn’t to cause clients issues but we said from the start that BSV didn’t meet listing requirements, and the business case for supporting it kept getting worse from there.”

April 16, 2019

More exchanges would follow. They make it no secret that they see Craig Wright as “causing trouble, destroying confidence” and:

“Low volumes aside, we are doing this to show solidarity against the toxic litigious environment in the BSV space.” — Bittylicious Exchange

April 18, 2019

Jameson Lopp, longtime Bitcoin developer, educator, author and Craig Wright critic, releases his research into Craig Wright as a longform article on the Bitcoin Magazine website called “Op Ed: How Many Wrongs Make a Wright?”.

“Craig S. Wright burst upon the Bitcoin scene in 2015 as a mysterious and controversial figure who claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

I actually crossed paths with him on Twitter several times in 2014 (when he used the now-deleted handle @dr_craig_wright), but I found most of his tweets difficult to follow and I generally dismissed him.”

July 6, 2019

“Apparently CSW has claimed in court that I cofounded Silk Road and worked “to allow assassination markets”. For the record: that is obviously a made up accusation.” Martti Malmi on Twitter

Martti’s thread eventually ends on August 28, 2019 with this tweet.

“Federal judge rejects Wright’s story and effectively calls him a liar.”

Source: Twitter

May 25, 2020

It cannot get any more Original Gangster as one or a group of the most early Bitcoin miners is speaking out about Craig Wright. But exactly this happened in May 2020.

“Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn’t have the keys used to sign this message.”

Source: Twitter

November 20, 2020

Jameson Lopp, troll.

Source: Twitter

October 31, 2022

Edward Snowden, with a classic Craig Wright burn for the history books.

“Dude can’t even commit fraud properly. Just embarrassing.”

Source: Twitter

March 24, 2023

Adam Back: “we are all satoshi”.

Source: Twitter

November 28, 2023

Out of the digital blue, Wei Dai (mentioned as the very first reference in the Bitcoin whitepaper “W. Dai, “b-money,” https://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, 1998”) pops up on Twitter. He was asked what he thought about Craig Wright.

“from what I’ve seen, it seems pretty unlikely that he’s Satoshi.”

Source: Twitter

That’s it, folks.

And as always, guys, thanks for reading!

Craig Wright And The Gangsters was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.