The master of narcissistic delusions reveals his true colors

Bitcoin origin mystery deepens

Recently, we have had a bizarre encounter with none other than the almost Dr. Craig S. Wright. Apparently, he has a degree of theology but did not bother completing his PhD in computer science unlike yours truly. That does not mean he is not a good computer scientist, but might indicate why he is obsessed with bizarre egocentric beliefs over reason. Might he also be overselling his CS skills? Probably.

Short story first, we argued and then he got banned on the LinkedIn platform. Sounds intriguing? Keep reading.

First off, I sympathize with his feelings about his possible contribution to Bitcoin being overlooked. He may as well be part of the original group of contributors, or he may have penned the bitcoin paper. These are all possibilities that are hard to prove since nobody else proved they wrote it either. Wright certainly possessed a key, and had a working relationship. My feeling is that Satoshi was a group identity, and they were somehow tied to NSA/DHS projects. More on that later, but I operate loosely on the assumption that Satoshi were somehow linked to Dave Kleiman, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney, and Wei Dai in some way. It makes sense that they were a pseudonymous group subtly mocking CIA with the Japanese name that means central intelligence, as if they are a secret spy agency, or maybe they just worked for NSA. Since Szabo advanced the Bit Gold proposal, and Wei Dai worked on a predecessor of bitcoin called b-money, and Finney was a good C coder, it’s likely they worked together to create Bitcoin and perhaps they got some help from Wright, too. Most people consider Wright to be an impostor, and he is intent on taking the bitcoin from Kleiman’s estate with lawsuits. Wright is said to have stolen the work from Kleiman. Perhaps he carried on with it, and had other people write it. I think it’s also suspicious that some of these people died. After understanding who Wright really is, this takes on a particularly dark sense.

I appreciated when Wright wrote that Bitcoin had to have low fees to succeed. That vibes with my Cypher design, so I contacted him, and he told me upfront, another cryptocurrency is not needed because Bitcoin can do trillions of transactions with L2 solutions. Or at least implied, not sure what he was referring to, because in reality, Bitcoin cannot really do many transactions, and mining is terribly wasteful, which every reasonable person agrees on. I later found out the hard way how far Wright is from reasonableness. He is known to be a bit delusional, and tends to deny reality when it does not suit his narcissistic views.

However, the administrator of a cryptocurrency has to take into account markets, society, and things like that. Not the case with Wright. After the post I appreciated he claimed that decentralization is not the purpose of Bitcoin. He claimed that just a few servers is enough (?), essentially defending a setup where a very small group of people (an oligarchy?) could control Bitcoin forever. If this sounds horrible, you are not alone.

On LinkedIn, someone commented that oligarchies may form in these markets, or something to that effect. As a follow up, I commented if they knew that capitalism causes oligarchy, and Wright went nuts. He had previously blamed Bitcoin community for being delusional libertarians that do not understand how the world works. And a good deal of his criticism was right. However, in response to me, he claimed that oligarchy is, wait for it, meritorious. He also blamed me for hating the rich and successful, that gini coefficient is meaningless and stupid, and scientific and business journal articles mean nothing, when I showed him that wealth distribution in cryptocurrency is even worse than traditional markets, and so on and on. He leveled so many insults against my person finally that I had to report and block him, and pooof he was gone from the platform, because apparently he kept up with his erratic behavior on the most professional social network even after his silly fight with me. Mr. Wright, they don’t let us fight to our hearts’ content even on Facebook nowadays. I suppose you detest that, since you probably align more with Trump and his ilk more than anyone, who like abusing people who disagree with your unethical views, but would like a free card to insult anyone unfairly.

Now imagine that Wright, thanks to a successful legal campaign, finally takes over Bitcoin IP. What kind of a world would that be? Would we really want digital currency to be controlled by someone who thinks oligarchies are just fine. The scary truth about Wright is that he is not only an egotistical person with some temper problems, but he is also an extremely selfish, greedy, and irrational person who would like to take control of the dominant cyrptocurrency on the planet, essentially controlling the future of finance. That is a scary proposition, not the least because Wright would gladly lend his support to the worst far right-wing oligarchs like Trump and his counterparts in the Western world, but because he would make sure that cryptocurrency serves the interests of the billionaire class, and most importantly to enrich himself, including owning future possible emissions of bitcoin, if he feels like it. That is because he doesn’t believe in decentralization. He just sees it as a fault tolerance feature. He doesn’t regard it as the essential property. Why, then, does he not design a consortium chain or just a synchronized database like what banks do? What fundamental advantage does that have in terms of currency?

Onwards to cryptographic techno fascism? I surely hope not.

Wright has also avowedly worked for a DHS project to track bitcoin users, and has boasted that he prevented a true cypherpunk revolution and barred the success of a more anonymous cryptocurrency that was emerging at the time by creating a dominant cryptocurrency. That does sound a bit sinister, doesn’t it? Was this game always rigged? Was this just a ruse to track down some people on the wanted list and fund operatives clandestinely? Was this an NSA project? I guess we will never know if those speculations are correct; certainly NSA would never admit to it if true. However, a darker possibility is that Wright was behind all this mafia-like, and made it such that he would be the world’s richest and most powerful man in the future. Coming from a clearly neo-reactionary, anti-democratic, extreme capitalist, far right-wing position, that does sound scary, it sounds like the imagination of a crypto Hitler. There, I had to say it, Mr. Wright is far worse than merely an impostor, he is also opposed to fair distribution and control of money, and logically allied with neo-feudalism; his inclination to feuding with me over a small comment may have revealed that.

#crypto #technofascism #cryptocurrency #bitcoin #satoshi #faketoshi #craigwright #bitcoincash #bch

A Surreal Feud with Craig S. Wright
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examachine

Eray Özkural has obtained his PhD in computer engineering from Bilkent University, Ankara. He has a deep and long-running interest in human-level AI. His name appears in the acknowledgements of Marvin Minsky's The Emotion Machine. He has collaborated briefly with the founder of algorithmic information theory Ray Solomonoff, and in response to a challenge he posed, invented Heuristic Algorithmic Memory, which is a long-term memory design for general-purpose machine learning. Some other researchers have been inspired by HAM and call the approach "Bayesian Program Learning". He has designed a next-generation general-purpose machine learning architecture. He is the recipient of 2015 Kurzweil Best AGI Idea Award for his theoretical contributions to universal induction. He has previously invented an FPGA virtualization scheme for Global Supercomputing, Inc. which was internationally patented. He has also proposed a cryptocurrency called Cypher, and an energy based currency which can drive green energy proliferation. You may find his blog at http://log.examachine.net and some of his free software projects at https://github.com/examachine/.

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