Quote from: gmaxwell on Today at 02:01:19 AM

In any case, I think it's important to realize that anyone can fall for a conman, that's what conmen do. We can be more or less vulnerable based on our attitudes and actions, but blaming victims for falling for a con doesn't protect anyone. To fall for a con you need only make one bad decision on one bad day. Everyone has a bad day now and again.

Magicians/clairvoyants etc have one basic principle: know your mark

Even experienced conmen themselves can be conned on this basis, the starting point is to get good information about what a person's strong beliefs or expectations are, then use that as a guide to devise the framework for a trick (all the more clever is to use crowd/group psychology to influence those expectations/beliefs in ways that 1-to-1 would not be reliable/viable)

and this of course means that courtroom officials can easily be conned, no-one is out of the question. it's quite easy to see how (particularly in the British courts) the overall culture of the justice system is designed to impress the casual observer with it's legitimacy, which of course shouldn't be necessary... why would simply dispensing justice not be enough?

Quote from: gmaxwell on Today at 02:01:19 AM

A few people, like me, carried on debunking Wright's claims but as individuals it carried little weight, were largely ignored by the public and media, and it's ultimately why I'm a target of Wright's lawsuits.

I don't mean to sound unsympathetic, but courts in the self-proclaimed civilized world can/will/have ignored what experts, the public and the media knew about disputes that end up in a courtroom. There is no good reason to believe that popular awareness of the facts would have averted Wright's lawsuits.

Quote from: gmaxwell on Today at 02:01:19 AM

As a whole the Bitcoin community (including the technical subcommunity) didn't act to counter Wright but just ignored him and let him fester, amassing strength and resources, exchanges went along and listed his scamcoin token -- pumping cash into his coffers. Would all these PR agencies and law firms be working for Wright, would these billionaire sponsers still be pumping money into him had it been established in the public consciousness that he was a con and a crook?

you have all, knowingly or not, entered into perhaps the highest strata of politics by way of working on this project. In essence, you guys woke a sleeping giant, kicked the hornets nest etc.

The clues that such apparently innocuous behavior pisses certain resourceful people off (i.e. open source software that turns powerful+profitable industries into landfill) were actually already there for all to see. Satoshi more than implied that he was seeking to usurp an entrenched and corrupt system, and we might argue that central banks are the most egregious such example, if not simply among the worst. I'm surprised the attacks have not yet been more fierce.

Call that victim-blaming, but I'm just saying what I'm seeing. I'm definitely not going for consolation, that's equally worthless to you all as my 20/20 hindsight.

Quote from: gmaxwell on Today at 02:01:19 AM

By comparison, Gavin played along: "I hereby promise and solemnly swear on pain of atomic wedgie that I will never ever work on or endorse any changes to the Bitcoin system that would enable any person or group to confiscate, blacklist, or devalue any other person or group's bitcoin."

...and what we have today is the latter person having an incompletely and late withdrawn endorsement of someone who's trying to confiscate coins

and so Gavin is definitely overdue that atomic wedgie

I don't know what rationale Wright claims for how he devised the list of people "he" is suing, but it's for sure curious to consider who he left out, and what the (real) reasons could be. Gavin and Mike Hearn are just about the only Bitcoin developers who ever got a hearing in major news outlets, and Gavin on more than one issue. If anyone is some kind of "face of Bitcoin" by the simplest/most superficial means, then one would assume that suing Gavin was more than worth a shot (surely the guiding principle of all overly-litigious efforts). Yet every divisive, controversial or publicly known figure is consistently absent from Wrights prosecutions.

Surely this latest (simple) argument that the (quoting the white paper: "electronic cash" Roll Eyes

) system should have made allowance for recovering users lost funds not have implicated the earliest contributors more than any others? Is it not they who progressively made that less possible? (despite the feature-not-bug reality)

and does that not implicate Gavin most of all in such a damages claim? Andresen was leading the earliest dev team in the original effort to (continue to Roll Eyes

) e.x.p.l.i.c.i.t.l.y make it increasingly more impossible for the developers to choose who should be assigned which money, for any reason, however arbitrary?

together:
1. the (heavily publicized by Wright) meeting between Wright and Andresen
2. the ~2 years direct relationship Satoshi had with Andresen before he went quiet

demonstrates that Wright has had many opportunities to speak directly with Gavin about this very issue, both before, during and long after these damages were "inflicted" (assuming on point 2 that you were to believe Wright's stories)

When you put this all together, I don't buy this interpretation of "greedy/bored billionaire bankrolls extravagantly disingenuous conman in convoluted court cases", that to me sounds like the real crime-caper movie plot.
That it's taken so long for an attack against the Bitcoin developer ecosystem to reach even this point may indicate that there is some fairly careful planning going on, and that we should all expect more.