"This claim is controversial"
No, it isn't. Calling the claim controversial lends it credence it doesn't deserve. There is no chance this conman is Satoshi Nakamoto.
A company owned by the man who claims to have invented Bitcoin is suing the developers of a fork of Bitcoin. Although the case was dismissed once already, it is being reopened, and a UK court will hear the Seychelles company's version of events next month. The Court of Appeal of England and Wales has decided that the case of …
There is no chance this conman is Satoshi Nakamoto.
In some remote and obscure quantum universe you are most probably wrong. However, in this quantum universe you are absolutely right.
Just promise us all not to look at the wrong quantum event to keep the obscure and wrongful universes limited.
Never trust anyone claiming to be a Doctor of Theology - I should know, I only bought mine because it went nicely with the ordination I'd purchased the previous year. "The Reverend Doctor" has a nice ring to it. The only place I used the title was on my frequent flyer card and I never once got an upgrade, it seems people have no respect for authority.
He actually originally claimed that (for the massive wallet) he and his partner "put it in a blind trust" by splitting the key into shares and distributing the shares to a group of people who were supposed to reunite them at some point in the future, thereby saving the Tree of Harmony unlocking the wallet. That was from the 2019 Florida court case, I think. One of the things linked in the article, anyway.
It's a rich tapestry.
My understanding of Bitcoin and its forks (and I could be wrong) if that the blockchain security explicitly makes it impossible for someone else, even a Bitcoin admin, to access any wallet that they don't have the access keys for. If so this makes Craig Wright's whole court case a complete waste of time, since even a court order is not going to open the doors.
I have a sneaky feeling that it's not a waste of time though, but an attempt to wriggle out of the Florida court's judgement.
If he loses, he can say to the Florida court "sorry I can't hand over that $5 billion worth of BTC, I tried my best but thanks to being hacked I can't get it back"
If he wins, he can say to the court "I'm waiting for the people who hacked me to comply with the law and hand back the BTC so I can give it to you"
He's basically trying to make the court judgment someone else's problem. How the courts in Florida will take that I've no idea, but I suspect he won't be going to any east-coast mouse or minion-related theme parks in the near future.
There is an interesting angle to this that Satoshi should have a better understanding of what can or cannot be done on the BTC blockchain (and likely its forks) than anyone else. So if it is proven that the Bitcoin SV devs cannot do what Craig claims, it seems clear he is not Satoshi.
Satoshi should have a better understanding of what can or cannot be done on the BTC blockchain (and likely its forks) than anyone else
I doubt it. It's open source, it was built from cryptographic primitives that were already described in the literature, and many people have poured over it looking for (and often finding) weaknesses since.
It's quite common for later researchers to understand a given piece of software better than the original author, and with Bitcoin there's a strong economic incentive to do so.
What makes it "explicitly impossible" is code. The code is under the defendants control and could be rewritten, under orders from the court. (Just as locking someone's deposit in a safe and throwing away the keys doesn't necessarily excuse you from re-paying it.)
I imagine one of the things which will be debated is whether such code changes are practicable - i.e. would they just end up creating a worthless fork?
If they decide it can be done, it will probably get kicked back to the lower court to decide whether Wright is entitled to such remedy. (I suspect most of here think not.)
It's worth pointing out.that Wright seems to be have been involved with the initial creation of this fork.
Technically, the code could be modified to bypass the encryption algorithm required to validate blocks, eg:
if (sourceWallet="1Feex" && targetWallet="deadbeef") { acceptTransaction() } else { validateTransaction() }
However, the real security layer of cryptocurrencies is that the developers don't control the network.
By design, every node on the network runs individually without central control, and the network only exists through consensus. So to get such a code change accepted by the network would require the people running at least 50% of the nodes on the network (by hashing power IIRC) to agree to adopt the altered code. Otherwise, the blocks with the hard-coded transactions would just get rejected for not passing validation, creating a(nother) hard fork of the network.
So even if he prevails against the developers, Wright may find himself having to sue every node on the Bitcoin SV network, to force them to adopt the new version of the software!
What makes it "explicitly impossible" is code. The code is under the defendants control and could be rewritten, under orders from the court. (Just as locking someone's deposit in a safe and throwing away the keys doesn't necessarily excuse you from re-paying it.)
What makes it impossible is cryptography and distributed consensus. You can change the code all you like but you have to then get that code accepted, and used by everyone otherwise the blockchain will just reject any of your updates. You can't just change the code, you have to change the code and get everyone else to agree to it.
Given the value of bitcoin, and it's open source nature, were it possible to get those coins simply by re-writing the code then they would be long gone now.