Oh my Satoshi
Craig Wright on Medium

My opinions are my own. Eternal student & researcher; plugging Bitcoin from as long as it was lawyer, banker, economist, coder, investor, mathematician, & stats
Medium member since September 2018
Top writer in Bitcoin, Economics, Finance
Blog posts:
- OP Codes and the push to confuse.
- Iron and Steel
- Lightning is malleable… Steel is not
- Negotiable Instruments
- Money Must First Be Stable
- The myths of Bitcoin
- The cult of Decentralisation
- Limited change to bring stability
- Black Mirror
- Banking on Bitcoin
- The crypto-ring of Gyges
- Death and taxes, it is time to kill off mythical beasts
- The paradox of the Übermensch
- Vampire Securities from beyond the Wormhole
- Worm-a-nomics
- A diatribe on Bitcoin, Trust and the economy of security (redux)
- The Gamma Monstrosity & the Probability Deception
- Why Scaling on-Chain Works
- Misconceptions surrounding copyright
- Stable by design
- Trust and Risk
- Human rights and property
- The 1937 Crash
- Keynesian flaws.
- Equality
- Q&A/Written Interview
— The answers — Part 1
- Q&A/Written Interview
— The answers — Part 2
- Q&A/Written Interview
— The answers — Part 3
- Q&A/Written Interview
— The answers — Part 4
- Q&A/Written Interview
— The answers — Part 5
- Are the Poor Exploited?
- Dynamic disequilibria and the creation of criminal opportunity
- IoT and the coming Toaster-world
- Data World
- How Bitcoin Helps Reduce Poverty
- Economic Convergence
- Where Have all the Unskilled Jobs Gone?
- Hoarding and Bitcoin
- Simplicity in Bitcoin
- Why is Bitcoin Open Source?
- The postal acceptance rule in Bitcoin
- Defining smart contracts
- Bitcoin and Contracts
- Introduction
- The application, scope and limits of Letters of Indemnity in Bitcoin Contracts
- Bitcoin as a Notary
- The error in Coase
- Security in a world of IPv6 and Bitcoin
- The infinite-money fallacy
- The labour fallacy of Bitcoin value
- Hidden costs
- Scenario 1: Public Registry of an Asset
- Scenario 2: Creation and Registry of an Asset
- Scenario 3: Lease Contract
- Scenario 4: Rolling Contract
- Scenario 5: Contract Conditionality
- Creating a Smart Contract Registry
- Trust in Smart Contracts
- Security
- Personal Security Device
Phases of the Bitcoin system
The Bitcoin system may be broken down into the following “phases”:
(a) Mining;
(b) Holding Bitcoin; and
(c) Transferring Bitcoin.
→ 8 min read
Posted by Craig on Oct 20, 2018

Personal Security Device
The last week, another of the patent applications related to my papers received a grant. This research proposes a methodology to encrypt the content of a device (for instance, a laptop) without storing any keys on the device itself. The keys, or rather a piece of information (the message) needed to compute keys, are stored in another device (the smartphone). A new message is generated every time the content of the laptop is encrypted, so that every set of keys is used only once.
→ 8 min read
Posted by Craig on Oct 9, 2018

Security
Honestly I find it difficult to understand why people do not get the idea of why errors and low-quality software occur. All software development is an economic function. Every addition, a change comes with consequences, and thus, costs.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 8, 2018

Trust in Smart Contracts
Both electronic and paper documents are subject to tampering. The discovery of collisions has demonstrated that the process of signing a hash signature is not without its own vulnerabilities. In fact, the collision allows two versions of the document to be created with the same hash and thus same electronic signature. For now, SHA256 is considered secure, but, not all hash functions are.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 7, 2018

Scenario 5: Contract Conditionality
In this situation, Bob enters into a contract with a pool of builders to deliver a new property, and specifies a number of conditions within the contract that require independent sign-off (the first being the approval of the plans from the local planning authority).
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Posted by Craig on Oct 6, 2018

Scenario 4: Rolling Contract
In this situation, Bob decides to lease a laptop from Eve on a rolling annual basis, where he needs to provide two months’ notice to cancel the lease at the renewal date otherwise it will automatically roll-on.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 6, 2018
Scenario 3: Lease Contract
In this situation, Bob takes out a lease contract with Eve for a fixed term of three years. The terms of the contract will specify a number of payments (which are detailed within later posts) and are not covered here.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 6, 2018
Scenario 2: Creation and Registry of an Asset
This is a slightly enhanced version of scenario 1 where Bob wants to publish the asset onto the Blockchain, but doesn’t want to directly reveal his ownership.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 6, 2018

Scenario 1: Public Registry of an Asset
In this scenario, Bob decides to publish his ownership of an asset (e.g. his home) onto the Blockchain. Nothing else is done at this stage; it is simply an asset that may then get used in subsequent transactions (such as described in the use of Non-debt Lending).
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Posted by Craig on Oct 6, 2018

Creating a Smart Contract Registry
This post is the first in a series to describe a number of important methods that are needed in creating commercially viable contracts in Bitcoin (BCH).
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Posted by Craig on Oct 6, 2018

Hidden Costs
The flaw in stating that economic calculations cannot be conducted is the constant cry that not all costs can be calculated. This is true to an extent, but like all good sophisms, only to a degree.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 6, 2018

The labour fallacy of Bitcoin value
The error made in the argument that free movements of people will “take our jobs” is that of a fixed labour pie. This is the same fallacy we see used to justify the price of Bitcoin.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 5, 2018

The infinite-money fallacy
There is a mistaken notion that an infinite number of monkeys, if given time and an infinite number of sturdy (monkey-resistant) typewriters, will come up with any number of historical texts.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 4, 2018

Security in a world of IPv6 and Bitcoin
We are starting to move to IPv6 and the cloud. Right now, the uptake is minimal at best with very few early adopters for all of the hype. That said, the climate is changing. Soon, IP addresses will be on everything. More, Bitcoin (BCH) will be the exchange system for everything.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 3, 2018

The error in Coase
Ron Coase made several errors in his theory of transactional processes in economics. Most critically, he has failed to note the value of property.
Property rights include the right to have and use. The value of property includes the right to use and dispose. If this right is removed, then some of the value of the interest in property is also removed.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 2, 2018

Bitcoin as a Notary
I was forwarded one of the most ignorant concepts of what Bitcoin (and for that matter Blockchain) is about earlier today. This would be a part of the problems that are associated with the false idea that Code is law or that Code can ever be law.
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Posted by Craig on Oct 1, 2018

The application, scope and limits of Letters of Indemnity in Bitcoin Contracts
The Bill of Lading is a document unique document as its negotiability fulfils several purposes. These documents have led to a range of instruments and conventions within international trade. Arrangements which owe their basis of the negotiability of the Bill of Lading are now common place.
→ 28 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 30, 2018

Bitcoin and Contracts
There are a number of contractual issues that used to be associated with e-mail that apply to Bitcoin today. There were for example, numerous debates over the applicability of the postal rule for e-mail. When sending an e-mail, there are several potential moments of acceptance
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Posted by Craig on Sep 29, 2018

Defining smart contracts
When contrasting contractual principles, it is clear that where a contract is not required to be in writing, that little additional uncertainty could be created where the contract is completed electronically. In fact, it is clear that electronic evidence must hold greater weight than verbal evidence.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 28, 2018

The postal acceptance rule in Bitcoin
The postal acceptance rule states that where an acceptance is to be sent by post, the contract associated with that acceptance is considered as concluded at the moment of posting the letter, not when the letter is received (or in fact if the letter is received). If the offeror does not wish to conclude the contract through acceptance via the post, s/he may stipulate the form of acceptance.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 27, 2018

Why is Bitcoin Open Source?
To an extent all software is a black box. As a consequence, the quote concerning Bitcoin needing to be open source and a means to “free us from government” that is is commonly made is false and problematic. It may be true that Bitcoin works best as an open-source system, and some say this allows us to see that Bitcoin is secure (Popper will attest to the inability to determine anything absolutely), but this adds no value. That said, Bitcoin is money. The most critical aspect of money is trust, and for this to hold true, people need to understand that there is nothing hidden.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 26, 2018

Simplicity in Bitcoin
There is a small correlation between the effects of security and simplicity. This use of complexity for its own sake (See ETH, Core etc) will not add and may remove security. Likewise, simplicity for its own sake will not add security.
→ 5 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 25, 2018

Hoarding and Bitcoin
One of the fundamental arguments posed against Bitcoin is that it is deflationary in nature. The misinformed argument made by many prominent government economists is that this will result in hoarding. That is, individuals will irrationally stockpile large amounts of bitcoins as a cash balance.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 24, 2018

Where Have all the Unskilled Jobs Gone?
Let us for today imagine it is 20 years from now.
Two decades have passed from today. Imagine we are now and not looking forward, the present. The technology, just emerging at this point today will be old, superseded, and retro. Basically a quaint memory we all love to laugh at.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 23, 2018

Economic Convergence
The world of automation is already changing society.
Having a bent for maths and statistics, I decided to take a look at comparing a couple of the jobs with those we could expect to see in 20 years time.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 22, 2018

How Bitcoin Helps Reduce Poverty
Many love to say how fixing poverty is a simple matter of reallocation. It is not. It is better to make a richer world than to redistribute, the socialist ideal, and make us all equally poor.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 21, 2018

Data World
It is truly amazing that people still stick to the aged concept that data can be completely controlled from all angles. We have many people still remaining wary of using social media. Other who think anonymity is either desirable or possible. Note, privacy and anonymity are separate. A private and confidential system is not an anonymous system.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 20, 2018

IoT and the coming Toaster-world
The commodification of technology is what will drive the move to the cloud. It is what makes the entire structure of how some see Bitcoin, as a mesh of home nodes incredibly flawed.
→ 3 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 19, 2018

Dynamic disequilibria and the creation of criminal opportunity
The security industry and criminal activity feeds upon itself. Crime and entrepreneurship each create opportunities for the other. In this, new innovations are created allowing both the growth of new forms of criminal activity as well as the ensuing opportunities for alert security professionals.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 18, 2018

Are the Poor Exploited?
In 2012, the US trade with Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) came to a total of $48 billion [1] as a combination of both imports and export to the nations. This was mostly in the form of machinery and other capital equipment that could (if increased) help the African people develop. The trade with Africa accounts for a little less than 1.4% of the overall US trade to the world.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 17, 2018
Q&A/Written Interview — The answers — Part 1-5
I have been asked to do an AMA and will answer the questions posed to me. In total, I have been given a list of 60 questions. I will answer these over a few posts starting from the top and working down. My apologies for splitting this into several parts, but not to do so will leave me with less time than I have now. Today, our middle son went off to university leaving us just our daughter at home. This is itself a common occurrence. Parents go through this every day, and it is my second time. That said it reminds me how little time we have.
1. Part 1, Sep 16, 2018 ∙7 min read
2. Part 2, Sep 17, 2018 ∙12 min read
3. Part 3, Sep 18, 2018 ∙ 7 min read
4. Part 4, Sep 19, 2018 ∙12 min read
5. Part 5, Sep 20, 2018 ∙8 min read

Equality
Some argue that capitalism fails as it does not lead to equality. That is a fallacy we need to avoid. The only equality we can achieve is one of equal destitution and even that would be one beyond us. We are all equally poor and suffering or we are unequal.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 15, 2018

Keynesian flaws.
Now, it is generally taken [1] by rational economists without an agenda (and even most of the honest ones with an agenda) that unlike any expenditure being beneficial, that is, it miraculously leads to an increase in the source of “aggregate demand”; that rather than as Lord Keynes promoted in.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 14, 2018

The 1937 Crash
Social security was the start of a crash every bit as large as the 1929 stock market correction. Yet, this event seems to be overlooked and forgotten. This leaves us with a constant set of interventions and resulting crashes as a seemingly infrequent event that come only rarely and not with the changes in government policy that precede them.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 13, 2018

Human rights and property
The most fundamental of human rights is the right to hold property. There are many who would argue this but the reality is to be free we need to be able to control our lives. To choose how we wish to live and not be beholden to others we need to ensure that we follow a path that we can choose to control by ourselves. That is, on our own terms. To do this and to live our lives freely we need to be able to control our property and ensure the security and integrity of those rights.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 12, 2018

Trust and Risk
Security matters, but not so we can eliminate all risk, but so we can have trust. Even if we could eliminate nearly all risk (we cannot ever remove risk entirely) we would have to ask whether it was worth it to do so.
Risk IS quantifiable.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 11, 2018

Stable by design
We have a fundamental flaw within the developer led model of Bitcoin. This problem is the same in many aspects of software development today. We like to argue that we need to change and alter a system with the latest fashion and whims. The Silicon Valley mythology of App development has infiltrated into the idea of sound money changing the primary concept of Bitcoin, that of stable money into the “Shit-Show” of Ethereum. That is Pivot and change and pump and alter.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 10, 2018

Misconceptions surrounding copyright
Many think that when you pay a company to create something for you that you naturally own the copyright. This is not correct. Copyright requires an explicit transfer of rights.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 9, 2018

Why Scaling on-Chain Works
This is a very quick summary of why scaling on-chain works. In 2009, the effective limit in software was 32MB — although this was only due to the limits of the software. For a commercial server, this would not have been an issue. I will address this in the field of a commercial server, and I am sorry, I do not care about Raspberry Pi(e) or laptop nodes.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 8, 2018

The Gamma Monstrosity & the Probability Deception
For some time now, I have allowed people to continue with this foolish and unscientific notion of gamma in the Selfish Mining fallacy. In this rather extended article I intend to finally detail the key issues that surround this form of pseudo-mystic science. If we can call it science at all.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 8, 2018

A diatribe on Bitcoin, Trust and the economy of security (redux)
The most marketable goods are what become the media of exchange.
The statement above has held true for all time. When exploring the history of money and barter it was not cows and chickens that were exchanged. The farmer with an excess of chickens would exchange first for grain, butter or some other divisible good. Grain could be divided into small parcels. These parcels could be used to trade for other objects. It is impractical to think that anything larger than a small village engaged in social barter long-term. Even a small group, no larger than a few families starts to collate obligations. What would’ve actually occurred is the use of improvised currency.
Posted by Craig on Sep 7, 2018
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Posted by Craig on Sep 7, 2018

Worm-a-nomics
Or the invasion of the coin snatchers….
For every 1 BCH deposited (these are actually destroyed), 100 WHC are created (issued from the pre-mine PoS allocation — not created at all).
→ 5 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 7, 2018

Vampire Securities from beyond the Wormhole
It is common for Omni and Counterparty style tokens to say how they back the underlying security using the one that they parasitically sit upon.
→ 11 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 6, 2018

The paradox of the Übermensch
It is simple to be disappointed with the common person. I have written recently about the bandwagon fallacy. When I wrote about this the other day, I pointed out a variation of it that we now see, proof of social media. We can call this the Reddit effect, but it has infected much of society and not only crypto currency.
→ 7 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 5, 2018

Death and taxes, it is time to kill off mythical beasts
The reality is that bitcoin is extremely easy to tax. The simplest way is what occurs now. The two simplest taxes associated with a modern economy are a consumption tax and income tax. Modern income tax is paid directly to the government. As an employee, it is your responsibility to claim tax back. A consumption tax such as Australia’s GST or European VAT can be collected on sale and exchange.
→ 7 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 5, 2018

The crypto-ring of Gyges
Plato covered the problems of true anonymity in The Republic. In this story, he detailed a fictional character called Gyges of Lydia who found a magic ring that enabled him to escape all review with the ability to go completely invisible at will.
→ 4 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 2, 2018

Banking on Bitcoin
There is this myth around banking and bitcoin. Any quick search will show thousands of sites and people promoting the idea of “be your own bank”. This seems to become one of the catchphrases associated with bitcoin, however it is utterly false. Holding bitcoin as cash is not banking.
→ 3 min read
Posted by Craig on Sep 2, 2018

Black Mirror
There is an episode of Black Mirror called Nosedive that explains some of the reason for the creation of bitcoin as a proof of work system. As bitcoin has been growing up, the value has not been high enough to attract real corporate miners. The first of these has appeared.
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Posted by Craig on Sep 1, 2018

Limited change to bring stability
Something people fail to understand about bitcoin is it is intentionally limited in what it can do and how it can be changed. This is purposeful. Bitcoin is designed to be stable money and for that reason it is not designed to have new opcodes added outside the need for a few security based replacements or to be altered.
→ 6 min read
Posted by Craig on Aug 19, 2018

The cult of Decentralisation
Bitcoin was first announced in 2008. After the software went live in early 2009 an announcement reinforcing the statements of the white paper was issued on the P2P forum. This announcement heralded the first true implementation of Peer to Peer currency.
→ 7 min read
Posted by Craig on Aug 16, 2018

The myths of Bitcoin
Bitcoin is Peer to Peer electronic cash. This is it first and foremost. In this I am going to address a few of the myths around bitcoin. Before I do that, let me first set some terms and descriptive explanations.
→ 8 min read
Posted by Craig on Aug 14, 2018

Money Must First Be Stable
Many people often wonder why Bitcoin used a 10-minute interval. Bitcoin is configured to adjust to a 10-minute block interval. However, you will notice that the average time for a block on the actual network is around 560 seconds or 9.3 minutes. The reason for this difference from the stated 10 minutes is related to the growth of the network. For the conceivable future we can expect Bitcoin to grow on a near exponential path following the prediction rates in Moore’s law.
→ 8 min read
Posted by Craig on Aug 14, 2018

Negotiable Instruments
From Simmons v. London Joint Stock Bank [1]; the House of Lords overturned the lower court on appeal to set the definition of a negotiable instrument. This form of security is one, the property in which is acquired by any one who takes it “bona fide” and for value. This is perfected notwithstanding any defect of title in the person from whom the receiver took the instrument.
→ 5 min read
Posted by Craig on Jul 2, 2018

Lightning is malleable… Steel is not
A little-known fact is that even Bitcoin is a security. The mistake is thinking that this is the issue. Bitcoin is a security that is outside of the S.E.C.’s bailiwick. Bitcoin falls within a few extremely narrow exclusions in the law.
→ 14 min read
Posted by Craig on Jun 19, 2018

Iron and Steel
Iron is a pure chemical element as well as being a rather malleable metal. It may be better than many forms of metal we used in history, but it remains too soft or too brittle for many applications, and this is especially true in the case of tools and if you want a knife that is to be sharp.
→ 14 min read
Posted by Craig on Jun 9, 2018

OP Codes and the push to confuse.
A certain group of BTC Core developers have their (one day but not in my lifetime) sidechains that will enable OP_Codes that have been left broken in BTC (and which are working in BCH).
→ 2 min read
Posted by Craig on Jun 7, 2018

Why Selfish miners do not exist and never will
In the last few weeks, I have started simultaneously teaching people how bitcoin works for the first time in the last decade and have been tearing apart the selfish mining fallacy. Many believe what has been said so far is the entirety of my argument against selfish mining. I will say it is a long way away from the complete argument on how bitcoin works and why selfish mining is a failed strategy.
→ 17 min read
Posted by Marlow on Apr 10, 2018

The Myth of Anti-Competitive Pricing
Posner (1968: 1563–4) Upholds the position where diverse markets act outside the whims of individual players. The distinction comes from an argument that the pricing model of Oligopolists interacts in a manner that shows a level of dependence between the parties. The result is argued to be a collusive pricing model.
→ 13 min read
Posted by Adam Selene on Aug 3, 2017
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