The “faketoshi” wins in court
The way Bitcoin was launched is in perfect sync with the ideas of freedom and accessibility for all that it represents. With decentralization as a cornerstone, Bitcoin blockchain cannot have any owner, and that is why its creator Satoshi Nakamoto not only stayed anonymous, but also left the project when it was mature enough to evolve with the community. We still don’t know who Satoshi is, and probably we never will. What is quite certain though, he is not Craig Wright.
Australian IT scientist who has been claiming to be Satoshi since 2016 and who led the Bitcoin SV hard fork in 2018, Mr Wright has once again ridiculed himself by going to court against bitcoin.org – the first website to publish Bitcoin Core software. He demanded Bitcoin Whitepaper to be removed from the website for “copyright infringement”. Its webmaster known as Cobra attended the remote hearing, but refused to mount a defence, which led the court to award a default judgement in Mr Wright’s favour.
This farce is only showing the importance of decentralization and Bitcoin. As Cobra tweeted afterwards, “All your fiat based assets are ultimately secured by the same legal system that today made it illegal for me to host the Bitcoin whitepaper because a notorious liar swore before a judge that he’s Satoshi. A system where ‘justice’ depends on who’s got the bigger wallet.”
However, Bitcoin is not only the software, but also the network that runs it. And with over 11600 nodes running Bitcoin and less than 200 – Bitcoin SV, there’s no doubt that Mr Wright’s adventure might not have a bright future. BitcoinSV is a version of Bitcoin without any upgrades but one – block size can be inflated to an improbable 2 GB (Bitcoin average block size is 1.3 MB). This curious position was supposed to ensure Bitcoin scalability, but Mr Wright didn’t really get Satoshi’s vision on decentralization and ignored that a super-heavy blockchain cannot be joined by an average person/company without a datacenter in their backyard. This means that only a few nodes will be able to run it, and the system will become centralized and unsecure. Super-heavy blocks also take a lot of time to propagate across the network, which undermines the whole scalability argument.
Missing the scientific argument, Mr Wright prefers to double down on legal action. Bad news for him – Bitcoin is decentralized, and he cannot subpoena it to court. As to the Whitepaper, it is a humanity legacy and it cannot be removed on court’s order. We at DCenter too have its copy on our website, as do many other crypto enthusiasts around the globe. Good luck with that, Mr Wright.
