Dr. Craig Wright has, once again, legally asserted his claim to ownership of the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym. By extension, he is attempting to reclaim sovereignty over the copyright and other property rights which cover the bitcoin white paper, protocol and the database which the protocol enables.
Against that backdrop, a new round of anti-propertarian jeers have risen up from the collectivist counterculture of “the blockchain community,” including a freshly republished article from Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin. As the crypto commune passively retweets #DelistBSV for the second time in two years, the world has been given one more illustration of the utter lack of respect for property, competition, business standards and freedom of speech that are pervasive in the communal culture that has been forged by years of social engineering and purity tests among the enemies of the unbounded bitcoin protocol.
Buterin’s criticism opened with a number of mundane anecdotes about freedom of speech that could be comfortably scratched into a tenth grade civics quiz - nothing particularly groundbreaking or controversial. Where he deserves some real credit is in pointing out the distinction needed to understand the expectations of public spaces, even when there is debate about their private nature.
Theymos’ Soviet-style control of the “official” bitcoin narrative at a global hub for bitcoin discussion for many years, r/bitcoin, was an astute example. However, the “cancel culture” of bitcoin’s small blocker SJWs is pervasive because they have a fundamental problem with the notion of self-sovereignty, self-ownership, property rights and their extension to the notion of free speech.
These collectivists even seem to think they respect the ideas of property and sound money, but that is myth wrapped in a meme and currently smoldering on the altar of “social consensus” and communal ownership of bitcoin because “we are all Satoshi.”
Sorry. No. Satoshi is Satoshi. And you may not like Craig Wright, but he signed with Satoshi’s keys to Gavin Andresen with a freshly unboxed laptop and did similar signings for Jon Matonis, Ian Grigg, Stefan Matthews and Calvin Ayre - none of which would be easy to fool, and none of which have retracted their claims. However, the small blocker collectivists immediately thrust up a collective “REEEEE” due to Wright’s socially unacceptable brand of bitcoin maximalism, and the small block spin machine has shunned him ever since. Furthermore, they have ruthlessly attacked the livelihoods of everyone who has publicly stood by him.
This is obviously why Wright has refused further public signings without first re-establishing his rights to the property that was stolen. Small blockers don’t care about Satoshi, his keys or his rights. They care about their own wealth and power, and they see Wright as a threat to that. Hence, the unpopular path Wright has taken since: to legally establish and reassert his identity and ownership of his bitcoin properties.
On Property and Free Speech
Buterin, in an about-face to his advocacy for free and open discussion on Reddit, went on to praise the delisting of Bitcoin SV and the public shunning of Wright from the 2019 Deconomy conference specifically, but from other (debatably) public events generally. In an attempt to tightly tailor an acceptable narrative to easily triggered conference attendees, the man with the most grand, progressive and liberating vision for bitcoin was shunned from speaking at the event, and continues to be attacked across any media appearances where he is booked.
Furthermore, anyone willing to even have a peripheral business relationship with any brands affiliated to Wright are also attacked, ridiculed and threatened, showing that control of the social narrative is quite a bit more important than having an open mind in the crypto commune.
In curious contrast, the collectivists have embraced money launderers, pump & dumpers, looters and felons, but the words of the creator of bitcoin have been deemed too dangerous for computer scientists, software developers and progressive fintech entrepreneurs.
The real Satoshi has been effectively cancelled.
“Private property is redundant. ‘Public property’ is an oxymoron.” - Gustave De Molinari
Free speech is an extension of the ownership of one’s personhood, property and the right to the fruits of one’s intellectual and physical labor. Looters have wanted to steal bitcoin from Satoshi since the beginning. By 2011, they had succeeded.
- Satoshi was pushed out of Bitcoin.org: the website he created and administered.
- He had his source code moved from a private Sourceforge repo to the public Github repo, and was not given keys.
- The forums were moved from Bitcoin.org to BitcoinTalk, and Satoshi was not made a moderator.
- Satoshi’s GMX and Vistomail email services were hacked, stolen and used for malicious social engineering during the early block size scaling debate.
- Satoshi’s legacy was hijacked and spun to advocate for shadowy political views which he did not hold.
His final pseudonymous communication was in an email to Gavin Andresen, stating, “I wish you wouldn't keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle..." So Satoshi’s mentions of honest nodes consolidating into professional mining farms and using specialized equipment to mine in such a way to compete with Visa have been completely ignored.
His calls to build tokens, bootstrap pay-to-send email on chain, and the poker client he distributed in his original implementation have been erased away. But his tepid position on libertarian politics and a few brief mentions of central bank policy have been repurposed into the central narrative of a man who never wanted to be a “shadowy figure.”
So Satoshi was robbed, repackaged as a dark web hero and had his invention gutted. Upon his return, he was lambasted, and the culture turned their backs on him and the protocol he created for the world. If there is even a chance that Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, would he not be worth listening to? Or is his free speech too dangerous?
He is not asking for your money, nor for you to buy anything. In fact, rather than making money the way most do in the blockchain economy, he advocated for a reimplementation of the bitcoin protocol simply to prove a very costly point: Bitcoin can and does scale on chain!
This feat is no longer theoretical as Bitcoin SV (a complete and unbounded implementation of the bitcoin protocol) has done over 3,000 TPS on the mainnet; mined from the public mempool and secured with SHA256 hashed proof of work. Testnet figures have gone over 9,000 TPS, and the cloud-deployed, next generation Teranode implementation is capable of 50,000 transactions per second on a publicly available bitcoin blockchain.
Furthermore, the Turing complete “Game of Life” is playing on the BSV ledger today, and the complete, restored bitcoin stack has frictionless token protocols and applications creating very real communities and businesses on the blockchain right this moment - proving that the altcoins were ALWAYS unnecessary for scalability or special use cases. Bitcoin was always capable.
So ask yourself, again, why the man behind these ideas and successes should be shunned.
Perhaps we should consider Cobra’s words on the topic!
Let’s set aside the collective preconceptions about Dr. Craig Wright. You may not like his tone, timbre, choice of words or his general worldview. You may wish Satoshi was Szabo, Finney, May, Chaum or some other figurehead of the dark web.
But what if Wright was the man behind the name? What if you were lied to about all of the things that Wright has allegedly done or said? Did you verify the claims yourself? Or did you just trust the official narrative of people who have every incentive to lie to you about what they did to Satoshi? Do you really think that Gavin Andresen and Ian Grigg could be so easily fooled?
And if Craig is Satoshi, do you believe in Satoshi’s rights to his property? Would you perhaps listen for another moment about why he created bitcoin or what his vision is for his creation?
Or should there be yet another collectivist coup d’etat against the man everyone claims is owed a deep debt of gratitude for creating bitcoin?
To Conclude
People may have the right to shun people or ideas in many circumstances, but the actions of the shunners are not heroic. They are tragic. In fact, they have so far stopped the world from being able to benefit from the greatest tool for truth and freedom in the history of modern technology: the unbounded bitcoin protocol, and its inherent capability to disrupt the entire global economy.