Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Project Anastasia: Bitcoiners Against Identity Theft [re: Craig Wright scam]
by
nullius
on 04/02/2020, 16:34:23 UTC
⭐ Merited by JayJuanGee (1)
I heard Wright replied he complying with the latest requests from the court because aliens impregnated him with his courtier'scourier's goat-baby.  ... or something like that?

Anyone have any details?

A few days ago, I started preparing for this thread an analysis of some of Wright’s earlier public arguments*—including a string of illogical twists by which he claimed, in effect, that people who demanded a Satoshi signature from him were somehow violating his financial privacy (!).

You may understand why I am sincerely confused about whether you are only being sarcastic, or I should really check the news.



(* To avoid the usual strategic mistake of point-by-point debunking of Wright’s claims beyond the unmet threshold question, I intend to narrow my analysis to (1) Wright’s nonsensical excuses for not meeting that threshold, and (2) Wright’s overt motive of turning Bitcoin into an instrument of financial mass-surveillance.)



I have intend a detailed reply to some of the earlier posts, including to JayJuanGee re “open source”.  TL;DW version of a longer essay, intersecting with another subject that I have always sought an appropriate moment to write about:

Copyright vs. Plagiarism vs. the Theft of an Author’s Identity

I would NOT proclaim that the identity theft angle is any kind of slam dunk... there can be some implied permission to attempt to steal the name and to copy whatever the fuck you like because the whole project is open source, including the name Satoshi Nakamoto...

Craig Wright takes this open source to another level...

“Open source” is only a copyright issue.  Whereas the confusion of plagiarism and copyright violation is a pet peeve of mine, one which I believe is deliberately promulgated by the copyright lobby.  Even the Cypherpunks Public License embodies this confusion, for which reason I have always disliked it.

For an extreme illustration of the difference in concepts:  The complete works of William Shakespeare are in the public domain.  You can legally copy them as much as you want, under any existing copyright law in the world.  But if you claim Shakespeare’s work as your own, under the byline of your name, then you can and will be expelled from university, have your university degrees retroactively revoked, and/or be fired from any type of intellectual job.  —And if you claim to be Shakespeare—not even the psychic reincarnation of Shakespeare, but William Shakespeare in the flesh!—then you should be committed to an asylum for the insane.

To extend that confusion from authorship credit to the theft of an author’s identity does no one any good.  Satoshi’s identity is a question of fact, not a legal question amenable to arguments over the licensing of copyrighted works.  Wright’s theft of Satoshi’s identity is factually false, and legally fraudulent (easily hitting all five traditional elements of common-law fraud, and any reasonable statutory definition of fraud that I can imagine).  The copyright status and licensing of Bitcoin’s source code is totally irrelevant—except insofar as Wright’s attempt to claim some IP rights over Bitcoin is predicated on his identity theft.