Is Craig Wright Satoshi Nakamoto? That's the wrong question.

The slow-motion virtual soap opera of Satoshi Nakamoto's identity is hard to resist, but is there a more important question that was widely missed during Craig S. Wright's botched reveal in 2016?

Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

Background

It will surprise few here on steemit, but if you happen to be new to cryptocurrency, you should know that one of the long-standing cryptocurrency mysteries is the identity of Bitcoin's inventor. He/She/They released the whitepaper under the pseudonym, "Satoshi Nakamoto," but the public remains uncertain about the author's identity.

Over the years, a number of people have been identified as possible claimants to the title of "Satoshi," but most of those theories have been discredited, and none have been definitively verified. The most contentious person to be considered was almost certainly Craig S. Wright. In 2015, several media sources suggested that Wright was Satoshi, then in 2016, Wright himself made the claim, but botched the effort to provide cryptographic proof.

At that time (before I joined steemit), I wrote this blog post. Although I haven't drawn any new conclusions, I have read some things recently that make me think it might be worth reopening the discussion, but steering it in a different direction.

So here we go.

The Players

Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

First, I want to introduce the people who I think are important to the current discussion. In the absence of any sort of cryptographic or forensic proof, we need to look at the credibility of the people involved. As the title suggests, I think the question of whether Wright is or isn't Satoshi is far less important than another question, which I'll introduce in the next section, but it goes to his credibility, so I still want to cover the history.

Craig S. Wright

Dr. Wright has apparently been around bitcoin since at or near the beginning. If he's not Satoshi (or part of the Satoshi team), then he seems to be among the earliest of early adopters. In the press, he is a flamboyant character who alternates between grandiosity and reclusiveness. He claims multiple graduate degrees, and he was making invited speeches about bitcoin before all the Satoshi stuff cropped up. He certainly seems to have a serious level of technical credibility, but his public persona seems to be unreliable.

Joseph Vaughn-Perling

According to a web bio:

Joseph Vaughn Perling has been involved in security, privacy, identity management, forensics, law and business development spanning three decades. His involvement in alternative currencies bridges the physical and the virtual as the project lead of the Bitcoin Specie project and Managing Director of the New Liberty Dollar LLC. Joseph has almost 30 years of experience in the telecommunications and data processing industry and served on the board of directors for telecom companies as well as Senior Applications Architect, Staff Support Manager, Senior Computer Scientist, Computer Technologist, Chief Technical Officer, Computer Analyst and Technical and Software Consultant for Global Fortune 500 companies. Currently Mr. Vaughn-Perling is designing and implementing global communication infrastructure systems and the applications that power them including several in Financial Technology space.

Nick Szabo

According to Wikipedia:

Nick Szabo is a computer scientist, legal scholar and cryptographer known for his research in digital contracts and digital currency. He graduated from the University of Washington in 1989 with a degree in computer science.

The phrase and concept of "smart contracts" was developed by Szabo with the goal of bringing what he calls the "highly evolved" practices of contract law and practice to the design of electronic commerce protocols between strangers on the Internet. Smart contracts are a major feature of cryptocurrency and the programming language E.

He wrote a 1997 paper on the idea of smart contracts, and created a digitical currency known as "bit gold," in 1998, and he was one of the people who got painted by the "Satoshi" brush, but denied it. His work has apparently moved on to Ethereum.

Szabo's role is small in the current discussion, but I included him since he's a participant in the video panel down below.

Ian Grigg (@iang)

Grigg is an innovator whose work led to the idea of the "Ricardian Contract," defined by Wikipedia as follows:

"A Ricardian contract can be defined as a single document that is a) a contract offered by an issuer to holders, b) for a valuable right held by holders, and managed by the issuer, c) easily readable (like a contract on paper), d) readable by programs (parsable like a database), e) digitally signed, f) carrying the keys and server information, and g) allied with a unique and secure identifier."

It's not relevant to the current discussion, but Grigg also has some sort of advisory role for @dantheman's upcoming @eos platform.

Jon Matonis

Jon Matonis is a founding member of the Bitcoin Foundation. According to this bio, he:

is an e-money researcher and crypto economist focused on expanding the circulation of non-political digital currencies. His career has included senior influential posts at Sumitomo Bank, Visa, VeriSign, and Hushmail. Currently, he is Executive Director of the Bitcoin Foundation and also serves on its board. He is also a Contributing Editor of the digital currency news publication CoinDesk.

Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

Gavin Andresen

According to Wikipedia:

Gavin Andresen (born Gavin Bell) is a software developer best known for his involvement with Bitcoin. He is based in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Originally a developer of 3D graphics and virtual reality software, he became involved in developing products for the Bitcoin market in 2010, and by 2011 was designated by Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, as lead developer on Bitcoin Core, the reference implementation for Bitcoin client software. In 2012 he founded the Bitcoin Foundation to support and nurture the development of the Bitcoin currency, and by 2014 left his software development role to concentrate on his work with the Foundation.

To conclude this section, as noted in my blog post last year, Gavin Andresen, Jon Matonis, Joseph Vaughn-Perling, and Ian Grigg are all bitcoin insiders, and they were all convinced by indirect proofs that Wright was Satoshi. They've mostly stopped talking about it, but to my knowledge, none have retracted their statements. Additionally, Vaughn-Perling and Grigg went beyond that and claimed prior direct knowledge of Wright's role as Satoshi. Vaughn-Perling goes so far as to imply that he already knew Wright as Satoshi in 2005!

I met him at a conference in 2005, he wore the moniker. We discussed what became Bitcoin at great length. He knew all there was to know about Bitcoin in 2005, and he shared it with me. I did not learn his government-registered name until much later.

None of this is definitive, but given the technical prominence of these four, I am not willing to rule the possibility out.

Is Bitcoin Script Turing Complete?

Surprise. I'm not asking if Wright is Satoshi. Instead, I'd like to draw your attention to 16:34 on this video that was made shortly before the first time Wright was "outed" as Satoshi.

I made an approximate transcription:

BitcoinBelle: So, um, how is it that you feel about... obviously it's a peer to peer currency, and protocol that you don't want government involvement in...

Wright: I'm not... I mean... That's looking at it too small. Umm... Unfortunately, not many people seem to have knowledge of assembly code or Forth or anything like that any more and I listened to one of Nick's earlier talks and he was talking about limitations in machine code there's none of these limitations and in fact, we have a rather rich instruction set. It's just not well-defined yet. And then the next part is, we have Ethereum going out there saying we've got to build a new stack because we can't loop. But no one seems to realize that Forth actually does loop. You have to use a separate control stack. It's not like a lot of code forms where you actually have a single stack. Forth and Forth-like languages use a dual-stack architecture. So everything that we're talking about in derived contracts can actually be done directly in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin protocol. It's just going to take time for people to understand it.

BitcoinBelle: Since you mentioned Nick, then I'm going to allow him to respond to that...

Szabo: No... I have not heard that opinion before. I've never heard anybody call the bitcoin script Turing complete. And I don't believe that's accurate.

BitcoinBelle: He just said you're wrong.

Wright: The difference is the script itself isn't. What you can do is you have in Forth, a control loop, so the looping function is separate to the actual script itself.

Szabo: Yeah, that's an esoteric thing. If it's not Turing complete, then it's not a general purpose language like Ethereum....
...
...
Vaughn-Perling (apparently a diplomat ): "...It doesn't exist today. It is a possible future. Who knows if it will occur? But... both of these gentleman are correct."

If you're not familiar with the term "Turing Complete," this means that it's a programming language that is equivalent to a Turing Machine. In short, it can do any task that can be accomplished by a general purpose computer. A minimal Turing complete language must have the ability to execute loops and conditional (if/then) statements.

Turing completeness is one of the big advantages that Ethereum is believed to have over Bitcoin.

This video came to mind during last year's press coverage of Wright's botched "reveal," when he claimed to be Satoshi, but provided a transparently flawed cryptographic proof. The reason it came to mind was this article, by Jon Matonis. In the article, he says:

Directly or indirectly, the work of Satoshi has already provided employment opportunities for tens of thousands of people around the globe and created over $7 billion of new blockchain wealth. The forthcoming research work from Dr Craig Wright can only be described as voluminous and highly technical.

At its essence, Bitcoin displaces the intermediary, or trusted third party, and there will be no sacred cows along the way. It will be methodical, scientific, and unforgiving in its ascent.

Going forward from here, Bitcoin-company board rooms and others throughout the financial ecosystem will be recalibrating business models as these applied developments realign the prevailing orthodoxy. Expect radically-new solutions that address specialized nodes and on-chain scalability, smart contracts that exploit a Turing complete Bitcoin, the impotence of tokenless blockchains, and a systematic decline in the quantity and value of alt-coins.

Did you catch the phrase nestled in there? "a Turing complete Bitcoin?"

Image Source: Pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain

Now What?

I concluded my previous blog article as follows:

Is Wright Satoshi? Or part of a Satoshi team? Who knows? My guess is yes. When 4 different "insiders" all believe him, and two of them claim to have personal knowledge of his identity, it seems a stretch to call them all liars or dupes.

But I know less than Jon Snow, so that guess is basically just wild speculation. At any rate, it's an interesting question from the perspective of history and current events, but in practical terms, the answer isn't very useful. At this point, I'm far less interested in Wright's Satoshi-status than in the content of that "voluminous and highly technical" research.

Does Wright's exit from the stage mean that Matonis' expectations will go unfulfilled? Or is the anticipated technology realignment still on the horizon for Bitcoin?

And that's where things stood for the last year or so. My bigger question was and is, "Were Matonis and Wright correct about a Turing complete bitcoin?"

Accordingly, I've been intrigued reading article after article about Wright's company filing for hundreds of Bitcoin related patents in the intervening months. This anticipation was further piqued, when I read that - of all people - Jon Matonis has joined Wright's company, nChain.

Then, also recently, I followed a rabbit trail from @iang's introduction post's comments pointing to this article, where he wrote:

So here's the next fact: there will be no proof. Sorry about that folks, it's up to you to accept it, Satoshi is dead, and nobody is any longer able to read you the fairy tale that ends "and the Satoshii all lived happily ever after."

Craig S Wright was part of the Satoshi team way back when, and he isn't going to prove it. He was "contracted" to prove something back in the May 2016 circus, and the contract was breached. No new contract, no new proof, no more Satoshi.

...

What else that is relevant can I add? Satoshi Nakamoto was a team. The members haven't all been named, so as I said before, I won't, and it turns out there isn't even an authoritative set. Having said that, CSW was in.

And as far as I know, that's where things stand today. At this point, despite the botched cryptographic proof, I am probably willing to believe Grigg and VaughPerling when they say they have first hand knowledge of Wright's participation as Satoshi - while retaining a pinch of doubt, and a healthy dose of "does it really matter?"

Given the youtube presentation before Wright == Satoshi was even a question, the thing that I am far more curious and excited about is to see what, if anything, comes out of Wright, Matonis, nChain, and a year's worth of Bitcoin patent filings.

What do you think? Should we expect Wright, Matonis, and nChain to deliver:

radically-new solutions that address specialized nodes and on-chain scalability, smart contracts that exploit a Turing complete Bitcoin, the impotence of tokenless blockchains, and a systematic decline in the quantity and value of alt-coins.

???

Thank you for your time and attention. Here's a reward for anyone who made it this far:

Steve Palmer (@remlaps) is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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