Hey guys, welcome back to the Bitcoin Magazine podcast.
I'm Dave.
And I'm Graham.
When we first reached out to Jameson Lopp for our first episode, we wanted to talk to
him about being digitally private.
But we also found out around the same time, Lopp was about to publish a op-ed with Bitcoin
Magazine.
In it, he disproves the claim that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.
But then our editors and our legal team were like, no, no, not yet.
Craig Wright is handing out libel lawsuits left and right.
It's not ready.
Just let us come through it.
We will come back to you when you're ready to reach out to him again.
So we waited and when the op-ed finally dropped, we got Lopp back on the line and we talked
to him for close to an hour.
That's right.
And for anyone who doesn't live on crypto Twitter, here's sort of the background.
Jameson Lopp, obviously a well-known figure in the space.
He's a former Bitcoin engineer amongst a digital privacy advocate, that sort of thing.
He's been compiling this information for several years and in it, he's disproving Craig Wright's
claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto.
Lopp published all this info in the op-ed and if you haven't given it a read, check
it out.
There's a link in our show notes, but be warned, it's extensive.
Very extensive.
So for time's sake, we're going to skip the news today and we're going to jump right into
our interview with Jameson.
Here it is.
Jameson, before we jump into the article, can you give us a little background on your
history with Craig?
Well, like most people, I really started paying more attention to him in I think 2015 when
he had the whole media blitz coming out as Satoshi.
Though I don't know at what point I realized that I had actually interacted with him a
few times before that, I think in 2014 on Twitter and basically everything he was saying
back then seemed kind of like nonsense or gibberish to me and so I generally did not
pay that much attention to him, though eventually he ended up deleting that Twitter account
along with a number of other of his sort of online postings after the whole media blitz
happened and I was fairly skeptical as most people were and figured, oh, this is just
going to be another short term thing that's going to go down in the annals of Bitcoin
history and most people are going to forget about it, but then the years kept dragging
on and he just managed to keep coming back with new things and staying in the limelight
and so that's what eventually led me to basically do a lot of my own research and end up compiling
a lot of information to try to make it easier for people to understand what has actually
been going on.
Right.
And you've met him before, right?
That's right.
We met in person at the, I believe 2017 Bitcoin or the Future of Bitcoin conference in Arnhem
and I had no idea he was going to be there.
He was actually a surprise appearance.
He wasn't slated to be a speaker or anything, but I think some other speaker, I think it,
I don't know if it was like John Matonis or someone else who was slated to speak, basically
got up on stage and then said, I see the rest of my time to Craig Wright and then he went
off on an hour long rant about all kinds of stuff and of course that was the conference
also where Bitcoin ABC was announced and it really kind of started the ball rolling on
the whole Bitcoin cash fork.
So what was your impression of him when you met him?
He was more personable face to face when he didn't have a camera on him or when he wasn't
up on stage in front of a bunch of other people, but it was still very challenging to actually
have technical conversation with him because he would throw out a lot of terms that almost
nobody understood and looking back on these things, it's really a kind of like techno
babble, trying to confuse people by making yourself seem like you're a lot smarter than
everyone else.
And if you try to dig down and question him on these things and say, hey, you're saying
this in a way that I don't really understand, can you break it down for me?
That's when he tends to get more incredulous and just be like, well, you need to go do
your own research if you don't understand what I'm talking about.
And I think that's kind of the hallmark of someone who's trying to fool a lot of people
is that they're not able to explain things simply and then when you ask them to do so,
they get really righteous, like self-righteous about it and use tactics such as things like
I don't have the time to explain these things to you to basically brush you off.
Yeah, it all seems very Trump like to me.
Do you think that the success of Trump in 2016 and everything that we've seen leading
up to today sort of was a catalyst for Craig Wright to sort of adopt that mentality and
use it to his advantage?
Yeah, I don't know if he has directly gotten these ideas from observing Trump.
I think it's kind of a larger scale change that we're seeing in the general conversation
just due to the way that information disseminates these days over the internet where it is possible
for you to decry a lot of things as being fake news and basically overwhelming people
with misinformation because I think in the early days, there were a lot of optimists
who thought, well, the internet is going to bring power to truth and it will enable everyone
to speak the truth.
But I think that what a lot of people did not foresee was that it was actually also
going to make it a lot easier to spread lies and misinformation and so now we have a real
problem in general with distinguishing signal from noise and actually distinguishing what
information is relevant or reputable and that's why it's so easy for people to become basically
sophisticated internet marketers and disseminate their own narrative even if it may not be
true.
Right.
I think that's a good lead in to talking about the article which we both agree is very important
and it was timely.
Your op-ed is massive and I'm still trying to kind of process all of it and honestly
I've had to reread parts at least 10 times or more.
How on earth did you go about writing this thing?
It actually started out over a year ago where I wasn't really writing, I was just compiling
and archiving information because I saw a pattern with Craig where he would make statements
about the medium to long-term future.
Very bold assertive statements, confidence-inspiring statements and I realized that almost none
of these things were actually coming true but he was banking on the fact that nobody
was going to call him out on it because by the time a year or more had passed he would
have moved on and be making other different bold assertive statements about what was going
to happen a year from now.
Because I had already seen that he had this tendency to try to delete his tracks and cover
up old information by trying to scrub it off the internet, I figured, hey, it should be
fairly low cost for me to just start archiving everything and then if this pattern does continue
as I anticipate that it probably will, then I'll just be able to resurrect all of this
archived information and point out to everybody to say, look, this is his MO, you should expect
that he will continue to do this and therefore you should not place a lot of confidence in
the things that he is saying.
And so it just started with archiving all this information and then it ended up being
not just me but a number of other people in the community were also doing their own research
and publishing things and so I started archiving all of that, just creating a massive Google
document with everything and then near the end of 2018 I started trying to actually categorize
things and create a theme of saying, these are the main characteristics that we're seeing
from him and here's all the evidence showing that these are his characteristic attributes
of what he is doing over the years and I ended up going a lot further back in history as
well and trying to figure out, well, how long has he really had this modus operandi and
as far as I can tell, it seems like decades but of course a lot of that really early history
stuff got cut out and we mainly focused on the Bitcoin era history.
You lay out several things that we know and can prove that he's not Satoshi.
What would you say are the most important or the most glaringly obvious?
The most glaringly obvious are the actual, I think, things around the protocol itself.
I think the simplest one being like the base 58 address stuff where he didn't seem to understand
which characters were allowed or not allowed in base 58 and that one is particularly glaring
because Satoshi invented the base 58 character encoding.
So you would imagine that the inventor of that encoding would understand why certain
characters were not allowed.
There are a lot of other things that are just like contradictory statements between what
Satoshi said and things Craig have said.
I think one of the ones that I really liked was, I think it was actually on video or audio
recording where he had said he only sent bitcoins to Hal and Zuko and at the time that was what
was known as public information and then maybe a year or so later Mike Kern actually came
out and published a bunch of private emails between himself and Satoshi that showed that
Satoshi had actually sent a decent number of bitcoins back and forth with Mike Kern.
And so that was interesting to see if Craig was Satoshi, you would think that he would
know about that unpublished transaction information.
And Jameson, one I'm thinking of right now was the different online posting time behaviors
between Satoshi and Craig.
Can you sort of explain that, how you compiled that?
Yeah, that one I would say is not as strong evidence.
It's more, it's another signal, but in and of itself, it is not hard proof.
It is technically possible that Craig was operating to kind of like split online personas
and very meticulously only posting from the Satoshi account during hours that seem to
match with the like Eastern standard time zone and then posting as Craig Wright under
hours that match the Eastern Australian time zone.
But the main point there being that if you aggregate up all of the timestamps of public
activity by either one of them, meaning like blog posts and code commits and forum posts,
there's a pretty clear gap where it would lead you to believe that the Satoshi entity
was sleeping during periods that someone who lived on the East Coast of America would sleep
and Craig was sleeping during periods of time that you expect someone living in Eastern
Australia would speak or would sleep.
And you know, the whole sleep thing, it's an inferred piece of data.
It is the lack of data, it's the inactivity, the lack of activity during those hours that
leads you to infer that someone is sleeping, but of course we can't prove that they were
sleeping during that time.
Right.
It sounds like somebody would have to be incredibly smart and dedicated and disciplined to do
something like that and your evidence sort of leads us to believe that he doesn't have
that capacity.
That's more of a comment, sorry.
So Jameson, you said that Satoshi's identity doesn't really matter.
If that's true, why are we still sitting here talking about this whole fiasco?
Well, because it is a curiosity for a lot of people, Satoshi has become a mythical,
almost like God-like figure.
Someone who has created this incredibly robust system that is threatening to central banks
globally and potentially even threatening to nation states in some regards.
And so, you know, people revere Satoshi for a number of reasons.
And it's also a fascinating story that they were able to have such amazing operational
security that no one has been able to find them.
I think this is true for a number of cases of, you know, people, for example, like fugitives
who have gone on the run and managed not to be found for decades.
Those type of stories are interesting to people simply because it's so hard to stay off the
grid and not be found.
And then, of course, there's also just the aspect that there is decent evidence that
Satoshi may be a billionaire in Bitcoin terms, and yet they have never spent any of that
money, which is another major question of why would someone who is so wealthy not actually
make use of any of that wealth?
So what does Craig have to gain from this whole thing, then?
What do you think his end game is here?
Because it seems like he's doing way more damage to himself than good.
Yeah, the end game, I mean, you can get very speculative about what the end game is.
The only thing that I'm fairly sure of is that, you know, he's just trying to keep the
ball rolling.
We could speculate as to why he ended up doing these things that he has done over the past
number of years.
It seems that it was, you know, just trying to keep the ball rolling from other activities.
We are aware of, for example, like the Australian tax office fraud, where he was assessed, I
think, some pretty steep penalties for trying to take advantage of tax rebates that ended
up being rejected by the Australian tax office.
And who knows what other activities he may have been doing where he was privately posing
as Satoshi back in the day in order to get various types of investments.
And so, if we believe like the public things that Enchain and Craig have said, publicly,
they say that their end game is to assert, you know, intellectual property rights over
various pieces of the ecosystem, and, you know, perhaps they're going to be patent trolling
or perhaps they just want to prohibit other actors in the ecosystem from doing certain
things.
One of the explanations that was given in the Satoshi affair was that they were going
to try to package up and sell all of this intellectual property for a huge sum of money.
But I think at this point, that's fairly unlikely given, you know, how poor his reputation is.
So yeah, I mean, it's not clear, you know, how he is making money at this point in time.
You know, we have some evidence and statements that he made a decent amount of money during
his initial coming out as Satoshi, but, you know, is Enchain actually a profitable company?
I highly doubt it.
Is their end game more on the legal side of trying to, you know, charge money for use
of intellectual property or sue people for use of intellectual property?
Really hard to say.
There even could be a much deeper game where I think that it's quite possible that everything
that Craig is doing is kind of a smoke screen and that, you know, the real man behind the
curtain has a completely different objective.
But you know, this is once again getting highly speculative.
Right.
That was going to lead me to my next question.
What's Calvin Air's role in all this?
The only thing that we have a pretty decent idea about is that he seems to be bankrolling
a lot of it.
And, you know, there is pretty strong evidence that Calvin Air has very deep pockets.
He has made hundreds of millions of dollars from his offshore gambling empire over the
years.
And, you know, what do you do when you have that much money?
And I imagine he probably has difficulty actually using that money in a number of different
countries.
I know that I believe various United States authorities seized something like 70 million
dollars in assets from him over the years, which is probably only a small amount to him.
But it seems like he would be very well positioned to take advantage of, you know, censorship
resistant crypto assets.
And perhaps he wants to use those in his various online platforms to make it more difficult
for authorities to interfere with his operations.
And perhaps he also can kind of as a double whammy improve the fungibility of his assets
by pouring a lot of them through mining operations and essentially getting freshly minted coins
coming out of these electrical burning stations, essentially.
And I guess this sort of plays into the recent news that Craig filed copyright on Satoshi's
white paper.
Why do you think it took him so long?
I mean, to me, it seems like that would have been a good first move.
I think the simplest explanation is that he just thought of it.
I mean, that, you know, he's just trying to keep the ball rolling and, you know, whether
or not it was even Craig who thought of it is hard to say, you know, the Jimmy Nguyen,
for example, is, I think, a patent attorney or at least a former patent attorney and has
done a lot of stuff in IP law.
And so who knows which of his employees ideas it might have actually been, but, you know,
they found an interesting legal loophole where the copyright office does not actually perform
any scrutiny or due diligence or, you know, verification, as it were, on these claims.
The copyright office just assumes that if someone fraudulently makes a claim on a copyright,
then the real copyright holder will come along and the issue will get settled in court.
And of course, that becomes really tricky because we're pretty sure that Satoshi is
not going to sue anybody in court over copyright.
That's a good point.
Do you think that it's important for the real Satoshi to reveal himself soon?
If you do, how would he go about doing that?
I mean, I don't think that the real Satoshi should ever reveal their identity.
That would create, I think, far more problems and of course would be pretty horrible for,
I think, Satoshi's future life.
If Satoshi is even still alive.
Is there any-
Honestly?
Yeah.
So if anything, if Satoshi was going to take any action, I would prefer to just see, you
know, a signed cryptographic message, for example, from the transaction that we know
Satoshi sent to Hal, Satoshi could sign a message from the addresses that contained
the UTXOs that were spent to send to Hal Finney, I think in block nine.
But you know, that would be similar, in fact, to what we saw recently where an anonymous
person signed a message using a Bitcoin address that has appeared in some of the legal filings
in the Kleiman lawsuit, where it appeared that Craig had made a statement to a lawyer
of his several years ago that the, I believe it was the Tulip Trust held a bunch of Bitcoin
in like a dozen or two dozen different addresses.
And we've now seen that there is cryptographic evidence that whoever controls one of those
addresses is quite adamant that they are not Satoshi and not Craig, right?
I'm going to shift gears a little bit here.
Let's go back to the article.
I just want to ask you, you know, what do you think the impact of your article, what
impact do you think it will have on the Bitcoin community and the future of Bitcoin?
Well, I doubt that I changed too many people's minds.
If anything, I may have just shown people that there's more evidence than they were
aware of in the first place, and it most likely strengthened people's resolve one way or another,
where I've seen a lot of the negative feedback of the people who are Craig Wright believers,
if you will, manage to come up with all kinds of excuses of why the information in my article
is not factual or at least not provable or whatever.
One of my favorite ones actually was that nothing in my article should be believed because
it's an opinion editorial article, therefore everything in it is not a provable fact.
That was one of the funniest, I guess, logical hoops that somebody jumps through.
But basically what I wanted to do with this is just have a well thought out and easily
findable comprehensive piece in the future so that if anyone does come into this space
and starts hearing stuff about Craig and is trying to do their own research and figure
out what they should believe, that hopefully this will save them a lot of time.
Good.
Is there anything that you didn't mention in the article?
There were a lot of things that didn't get mentioned.
Most of them were his non-Bitcoin history.
There was also a lot of other evidence that was less about his activities in Bitcoin and
more about his character that some of the editors and lawyers decided was too much,
I guess, on the side of character attack rather than factual statements about his Satoshi
claims.
He's been a busy guy for the past several years and there's a lot more out there that
would probably sway people one way or another to believe that he's a credible person.
Without getting into detail for legal reasons, are there any resources that you could point
our listeners to researches further?
We linked to a number of them at the very bottom of the article.
There's stopcraigright.com.
There is a plethora of Reddit posts by a contrarian on the BTC subreddit, for example, where he
has a lot of other back history of Craig's activities.
Whether or not that's even really important for people to spend their time doing, I would
say probably not.
Right.
It's catch 22, like you mentioned.
I'm curious, have his lawyers reached out to you?
I have not been contacted by any legal representation.
The only reason that I can figure that that would be the case is because I'm a United
States citizen.
As far as I can tell, Craig has been poked and prodded by a lot of people, but it seems
like the only ones that he has had his lawyers actually file actions against are not American
citizens.
Most likely, that is a result of the, I believe it was the Speech Act of 2010, where President
Obama basically made it illegal for people in the UK to do what Craig is doing.
The term for that is, I believe, called libel tourism, where he's taking advantage of the
fact that the UK has almost the exact opposite type of libel laws as America, which give
a lot more power to the plaintiff who is making a claim that someone has libelled them.
The burden of proof is actually on the defendant in the UK, whereas in United States, the burden
of proof is on the plaintiff who is saying, this person libelled me.
As a result of just a number of legal conversations that I have had with a variety of different
lawyers, the laws in America protect me, that speech law protects me against any actions
in the UK itself.
In general, there's an extra level of protection, at least from the American standpoint, because
Craig is well known enough that he would be considered a public figure, and the burden
of proof for libel against public figure is even higher in America, where it has to be
shown that the person making the defamatory statements actually knows that what they're
saying is incorrect and is doing it with malice, and it's very, very difficult to prove that.
I think that I've done a pretty good job citing all of my sources in the article that show
that yes, the article is biased.
I obviously have my own beliefs and conclusions about what I'm trying to drive home here,
but everything that I put into the article is backed up with evidence.
Without even saying his name, we work closely with the gentleman from Bedford.
We're watching that closely, and we wish him the best, but that's why we asked that question
because it just seems like lawsuits are getting thrown out left and right, so we're really
happy to hear that nothing's come your way yet.
Yeah.
I saw a tweet you commented to, Peter, too.
I think it might have been yesterday, and I do hope he's taking it as seriously as he
needs to be.
Right?
Yeah.
I don't envy him.
Is there anyone else in the community, or maybe even outside of it, that if you're detracting
from one person, is there someone who's worth actually paying attention to and following
in lieu of this kind of stuff?
I don't think that there's any one person, and I think that that's how it should be.
I think that if you're going to try to follow the evolution of this space, then you need
to diversify the perspectives that you're ingesting.
One of the biggest problems that I have, not just with Craig, but with any single leader
type figure, including myself, is I don't want myself to become in this position either.
Each person is unique and has their own perspective of what Bitcoin is and what Bitcoin should
be.
One of the reasons why I got involved in this project in the first place is because I felt
like the concept of money itself belongs to humanity at large, and therefore it makes
sense for it to be an open source project where anyone who cares enough can contribute.
That basically means that if you want to try to get a grasp of what the meat space consensus
is for Bitcoin and how it should evolve, then you need to diversify the opinions that you're
ingesting.
You need to be listening to developers.
You need to be listening to the business owners.
You need to be listening to the folks on the ground in third world countries, for example,
who are living with monetary systems that are completely broken.
We need to figure out how we can best cater to as many of these people as possible.
You find that, I guess, subset, that overlap of what are the attributes that are going
to be most helpful for most of these people.
Is there anything you're working on right now that you weren't working on the last time
we talked to you about that you're particularly excited about or working towards, I guess?
In general, I'm trying to put the whole Craig Wright thing behind me.
I'm sure that Craig will continue with his machinations and manage to find novel new
ways to get a lot of media attention.
From a marketing standpoint, the whole copyright thing was, you've got to give him credit,
it was a very shrewd use of resources where I think he spent $55.
As a result, he got major, major media attention with this $55 expenditure and maybe a few
hours of actual paperwork and filling things out.
I think that that's the type of thing we can continue to expect.
Like you said, it's like that Trump-like exploitation where, on one hand, you can decry a lot of
the media as fake news whenever whatever they're saying doesn't go along with your narrative,
but then you can just do these such outrageous and outlandish things that it's so captivating
that media organizations can't help but publish it because they know that they're going to
get a lot of clicks.
They know they're going to get a lot of advertising revenue by doing that.
It is a really vicious catch-22 type of situation.
I wish I had a solution for that.
I think at this point, a lot of the conversations that I am seeing where people are talking
about Craig, they're like, can we please stop talking about Craig?
I don't know how you do that.
The only thing that I can do is try to stop talking about him as much as possible.
Jameson, Bitcoin 2019 is right around the corner.
Do you think there's a possibility that Craig's going to be there?
I really don't know.
You never know where he's going to show up.
It would be interesting though because I think there was like a dichotomy or something a
year or so ago when Vitalik basically stood up and was calling him out, but I guess one
of the things that I'm more concerned about is various events and organizations and media.
In fact, that are consciously making the decision to interview him or people in his organization
under the guise of, well, we want to present everyone's opinions and we're not biased and
we just want to put the information out there for people to consume.
I've seen a number of different events and organizations do that and I think it's once
again kind of letting him exploit that anti-censorship aspect that a lot of people in the system
are so interested in where people seem to have a problem differentiating between censorship
by authorities and freedom of association, AKA like self-censorship.
If we believe that everyone has the right to decide who they're interacting with, then
it's perfectly fine for individuals or organizations to decide that they don't want to interact
with someone and they don't want to give that person any attention because they think it's
a waste of their time and resources.
So it kind of goes hand in hand with I guess some of the contention around the delisting
of the BSV asset on a number of exchanges where some people decry that as censorship
and others say, well, you know what?
They really brought it upon themselves and have created so much of a headache that various
organizations don't want to deal with it and that's why they're removing it and they have
the right to do that because it's their platform, it's their property.
So I just wish that more people would agree that it's okay to ostracize people who have
shown themselves to be toxic and threatening to the community because you basically show
them the door, you say, you can leave and don't come back and we don't want to have
anything to do with you.
That is what I would like to see happen in general, but of course, I can't force anyone
to do that.
It's up to each individual and organization to decide what they're comfortable with in
the first place.
The last question I have for you is, do you have any privacy updates for us?
Have you improved it any more than you already have leveled up?
Not particularly.
On the privacy side, I think the only way to really to level up again or at least to
do each major leveling up of privacy basically requires you destroying everything that you
have and starting over again from scratch.
Maybe in a few years.
Oh yeah.
Hey, Jameson, last one you can answer in one word if you want, but what is reason four?
I found that very mysterious.
Reason number four.
I wish that I had an answer to that and in fact, I have been in communication with someone
who was in the Royal Australian Air Force in the 90s, but unfortunately, they were not
able to get any further information on the specifics for that as well.
I'm trying to see, this person reached out to me and basically said that it sounded to
them like reason four is discharged due to a training failure, which in this case would
have been a failure to pass his exams.
So that person was also telling me that it's likely that he would have been simultaneously
enlisted but still effectively living as a civilian and that the Australian Air Force
would have been paying for his university fees and giving him a small allowance maybe
for rent or whatever.
So it's still very hard to say what the actual reasoning is.
There were a number of pages in that area of the records that were redacted, including
like a letter from Craig and I suspected some of that probably has the specific information
of why he was discharged and why he was not allowed to come back, but we'll probably never
know.
Love it.
But yeah, spooky.
The Bitcoin Magazine podcast is a BTC media produced podcast on the Let's Talk Bitcoin
Network.
Today's episode was produced by myself and Dave, theme music provided by Billy Sly from
the Crypto Cantina.
A very special thanks to our guests, Jameson Lopp and of course, Satoshi Nakamoto, we are
eternally grateful.
Visit bitcoinmagazine.com for more in-depth news, analysis and resources about the most
successful peer-to-peer currency and make sure to follow us on Twitter at Bitcoin Magazine.
You can find more engaging crypto podcasts over at letstalkbitcoin.com and you can follow
them on Twitter at the LTV network for all the latest episodes.
Be sure to subscribe to the show on the Apple podcast app, Spotify or wherever else you
get your podcasts.
And if you've got the time, please leave us a review.
Really helps us improve the show and reach new listeners.
Thanks for tuning in, guys.
We'll see you next time.