Talent and drive

A British court has decided firmly and colorfully that Craig Wright is not Satoshi. The general verdict was announced earlier, and the final document was published today.

Overall I’m impressed by two things.

1. Impressed by the comprehension and understanding of the judge, who clearly spent vast time and effort learning the details of the case and grasping what the experts were saying about programming.

2. Impressed by the futile hard work of Wright, who already has plenty of money and could have been happily retired for many years. Instead of sitting back and carefully enjoying his wealth, he’s been working amazingly hard and STUPIDLY to sue everyone in the realm of bitcoin, and to assemble forged documents and forged excuses.

Proves one of my perpetual points. Professional criminals are a specific type of person with a specific set of talents and drives. As with other vocations, the talent and drive fit together. An entertainer can’t stop acting. A designer can’t stop designing. A farmer can’t stop farming. A criminal can’t stop cheating and framing. Retirement is no fun.

He has an unquenchable need to DO EVERYTHING THE DISHONEST WAY, even when honesty is much easier and much less painful.

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The decision goes into tremendous detail on Wright’s forgeries, pinpointing 40 documents ranging from the original bitcoin whitepaper to various texts that supposedly proved Wright was doing certain things at certain times**. The prosecution ripped apart each of the forgeries, using the hacking and anti-hacking technologies that were supposedly Wright’s main expertise. He made his fortune by anti-hacking consulting work, but didn’t use any of his alleged knowledge in this area to make his own hacks convincing.

The judge’s summation is a memorable summation of ALL PROFESSIONAL CRIMINAL TYPES.

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Thus, Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Many of Dr Wright’s lies contained a grain of truth (which is sometimes said to be the mark of an accomplished liar), but there were many which did not and were outright lies. As soon as one lie was exposed, Dr Wright resorted to further lies and evasions. The final destination frequently turned out to be either Dr Wright blaming some other (often unidentified) person for his predicament, or what can only be described as technobabble delivered by him in the witness box.

Although as a person with expertise in IT security, Dr Wright must have thought his forgeries would provide convincing evidence to support his claim to be Satoshi or some other point of detail and would go undetected, the evidence shows, as I explain below and in the Appendix, that most of his forgeries turned out to be clumsy.

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The prosecution traced Wright’s activities meticulously and noticed one important NON-TECHNICAL inconsistency. Wright lives in Australia, and it looks like Satoshi was on the west coast of USA. (I think he was probably associated with Microsoft.)

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Both show Satoshi’s communications focused in the period from midnight through to 5pm-6pm in Sydney time, with the greatest concentrations in the period from 2am to 11am (highest at 4-5am).

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2am to 11am Sydney is 9am to 6pm in Calif and Wash.

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Personally I’m most tickled by one specific question:

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The concept of an unsigned integer is simple: it cannot be negative. Satoshi often used unsigned integers in the Bitcoin code, he commonly referenced them in his emails and they are used in the Bitcoin File Format (the subject of alleged copyright which Dr Wright claims to have authored). Searches undertaken by the Developers indicate they were used 294 times across the entirety of the original Bitcoin code and over 100 times in the original main.cpp, main.h and bignum.h. Their point was that Satoshi would not have forgotten what an unsigned integer was, even after 15 years.

The cross-examination proceeded as follows:

Q. Just out of curiosity, do you know what unsigned means in that?

A. I do. Basically it’s unsigned variable, it’s not an integer with —

Q. With what?

A. It’s larger. I’m not sure how — I mean, on the stand here, I’m not sure how I’d say it, but —

Q. Take a wild guess.

A. How I would describe it, I’m not quite sure. I know what it is.

Q. Okay.

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The last Okay is worthy of Perry Mason, for viewers who understand the point. Okay means “You just lost the whole case.” It’s like asking a farmer the difference between harrowing and farrowing, or asking a carpenter the difference between a screw and a nail.

I went through Satoshi’s source code last year and found it thoroughly familiar. I was writing a lot of C++ in those years. My coding style and comments were similar to Satoshi’s, so I could always see where he was going. Specifically, I was working with audio and graphics on PCs with comparatively slow processors and small memory compared to now, and without any of the helper modules and libraries that have become available in recent years. I constantly screwed around with binary formats, headers, and bitwise manipulation, the same tricks that Satoshi was using for different purposes.

Anyone who was working in those areas was INTIMATELY familiar with the various sizes of signed and unsigned ints, and the reasons for using unsigned ints instead of signed or floating numbers.

Programmers who learned later, or came from a more abstract background, would have used floats for everything as abstract math does. Now, with more powerful FPUs and GPUs, and abundant helper libraries, there’s simply no reason to delve into uchars and ushorts and ulongs.

I have no lawyering skills at all, so I never could have homed in on the ONE QUESTION that would expose Wright’s forgery in an instant. The prosecution clearly talked with people who had similar programming experience around the same time, and understood how unsigned integers were the One Crucial Question.

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** Irrelevant language footnote: These documents were meant to be the opposite of alibis. Instead of proving Wright was elsewhere (aliubi) they were supposed to prove he was here in the correct place and time. Criminals rarely try to prove this side of events, so there doesn’t seem to be a good antonym for alibi. Here is just hic. These statements were hics? No. Some web sources give in flagrante delicto, but that’s used by the prosecution, not by the defendant.