"Bitcoin Whitepaper, Satoshi proof sessions with Gavin Andresen | Stefan Matthews | Ep. 19"

https://youtu.be/R03ypV9CsTc

 It was news to me that the banks were grabbing onto the blockchain as the foundation of a future ‘internet of value’.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

, I got an email from a Los Angeles lawyer called Jimmy Nguyen, from the firm Davis Wright Tremaine (self-described as ‘a one-stop shop for companies in entertainment, technology, advertising, sports and other industries’). Nguyen told me that they were looking to contract me to write the life of Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘My client has acquired life story rights ... from the true person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto – the creator of the bitcoin protocol,’ the lawyer wrote. ‘The story will be [of] great interest to the public and we expect the book project will generate significant publicity and media coverage once Satoshi’s true identity is revealed

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Stefan Matthews, an IT expert whom Wright had known for ten years, since they both worked for the online gambling site Centrebet. In those days, around 2007, Wright was often hired as a security analyst by such firms, deploying his skills as a computer scientist (and his experience as a hacker) to make life difficult for fraudsters.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

He said that Wright was always trying to get him interested in this new venture called bitcoin. He tried to sell him 50,000 coin for next to nothing, but Matthews wasn’t interested, he told me, because Wright was weird and the whole thing seemed a bit cranky.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Last year, (2014) when Wright was in financial trouble, he approached Matthews several times. By that time, Matthews had become friendly with Robert MacGregor, the founder and CEO of a Canada-based money-transfer firm called nTrust.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

After initial scepticism, and in spite of a slight aversion to Wright’s manner, MacGregor was persuaded, and struck a deal with Wright, signed on 29 June 2015. MacGregor says he felt sure that Wright was bitcoin’s legendary missing father, and he told me it was his idea, later in the drafting of the deal, to insist that Satoshi’s ‘life rights’ be included as part of the agreement.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

He said his father had worked for the NSA (he couldn’t explain this), but that, to this day, his mother thinks he worked for Nasa. ‘The few people I care about I care about a lot,’ he said, ‘and I care about the state of the world

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Craig: ‘I was always libertarian,’ he replied, and then he told me his father had more or less kidnapped him after his parents got divorced. He hated being told what to do – that was one of his main motivations. He believed in freedom, and in what freedom would come to mean, and he said his work would guarantee a future in which privacy was protected. ‘Where we are,’ he said, ‘is a place where people can be private and part of that privacy is to be someone other than who they were. Computing will allow you to start again, if you want to. And that is freedom.’ In fact he never stopped imagining different lives for himself.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Andrew O’Hagan · The Satoshi Affair · LRB 29 June 2016
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n13/andrew-o-hagan/the-satoshi-affair

None of this would have worked without bitcoin,’ Wright said, ‘but it’s a wheel and I want to build a car.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Ninjutsu

Wright’s​ father, Frederick Page Wright, was a forward scout in Vietnam, serving with the 8th Battalion of the Australian army. ‘He lost all his friends,’ Wright told me, ‘every single one of them’ – and before long he was drinking and being violent towards Wright’s mother, who eventually left him. Both Wright and his mother, when I went to meet her in Brisbane in March, told me about his father’s anger at his own mother: he sent all his army pay cheques home to her and she spent them while he was away. He also dreamed of a football career that never happened. ‘I have a chip on my shoulder,’ Wright said, ‘but his was bigger.’

‘Did you admire him?’

‘He never admired me. I was never fucking good enough. We played chess from when I was three or four and if I made a wrong move he’d wallop me. We clashed right from the beginning.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

A few weeks before the raid on Craig Wright’s house, ( Dic 2015), when his name still hadn’t ever been publicly associated with Satoshi Nakamoto, I got an email from a Los Angeles lawyer called Jimmy Nguyen, from the firm Davis Wright Tremaine (self-described as ‘a one-stop shop for companies in entertainment, technology, advertising, sports and other industries’). Nguyen told me that they were looking to contract me to write the life of Satoshi Nakamoto. ‘My client has acquired life story rights ... from the true person behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto – the creator of the bitcoin protocol,’ the lawyer wrote. ‘The story will be [of] great interest to the public and we expect the book project will generate significant publicity and media coverage once Satoshi’s true identity is revealed.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

. .., but Matthews had been busy at the time and didn’t read it for a while. He said that Wright was always trying to get him interested in this new venture called bitcoin. He tried to sell him 50,000 coin for next to nothing, but Matthews wasn’t interested, he told me, because Wright was weird and the whole thing seemed a bit cranky.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-af

I found him easier to talk to than I’d expected. He said his father had worked for the NSA (he couldn’t explain this), but that, to this day, his mother thinks he worked for Nasa. ‘The few people I care about I care about a lot,’ he said, ‘and I care about the state of the world. But there’s not much in between.’ He said he was happy I was writing about him because he wanted ‘to step into history’, but mainly because he wanted to tell the story of the brilliant people he had collaborated with. He and Ramona were both jet-lagged and anxious about things back home. ‘We should have been having our company’s Christmas party today,’ Ramona said.

MacGregor asked Wright if being a libertarian had influenced his work, or if the work had turned him into a libertarian. ‘I was always libertarian,’ he replied, and then he told me his father had more or less kidnapped him after his parents got divorced. He hated being told what to do – that was one of his main motivations. He believed in freedom, and in what freedom would come to mean, and he said his work would guarantee a future in which privacy was protected. ‘Where we are,’ he said, ‘is a place where people can be private and part of that privacy is to be someone other than who they were. Computing will allow you to start again, if you want to. And that is freedom.’ In fact he never stopped imagining different lives for himself. That afternoon he seemed preoccupied by the case people were making against his being Satoshi. He shook his head a lot and said he wished he could just get on in silence with his work. ‘If you want to stay sane through this, ignore Reddit,’ his wife told him.

The next day, 17 December (2015), we met again, in a private room in Claridge’s. You could see outside, over the rooftops, cranes garlanded in fairy lights. Ramona came in looking tired and totally fed up. From time to time, especially when exhausted, she would resent the hold these people had over them. ‘We have sold our souls,’ she said to me in a quiet moment.

MacGregor said he would spend the evening preparing paperwork to be signed by Wright the following day. This would effectively be the final signing over to nCrypt of the intellectual property held by Wright’s companies. This was the main plank in the deal. MacGregor was confident the work was ‘world historical’, that it would change the way we lived. He regularly described the blockchain as the greatest invention since the internet. He said that what the internet had done for communication, the blockchain would do for value.

MacGregor explained that Wright’s Australian companies were being signed over to nCrypt and that he’d extended an ‘olive branch’ to the ATO, which had responded quickly and positively. A lot of trouble with the ATO had to do with whether bitcoin was a commodity or a currency and how it should be taxed. It also had doubts about whether Wright’s companies had done as much research and development as they claimed, and whether they were therefore entitled to the tax rebates they had applied for. The ATO had said it couldn’t see where the spending was going. Some critics in the media claimed Wright’s companies had been set up only for the purpose of claiming rebates, though not even the ATO went that far.

Wright told me that thanks to the tax office they’d had to lay out all the research for their patents, which had been useful since the nCrypt team was in a hurry: the banks, now alert to cryptocurrencies and the effectiveness of the blockchain, are rushing to create their own versions.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

The boy had two great influences. The first was his grandfather Ronald Lyman, who his family claims received the first degree awarded by the Marconi School of Wireless in Australia, and who served in the army as a signals officer. They also say he later became a spy with the Australian security services. Craig’s favourite place was his grandfather’s basement, a paradise of early computing. ‘We’d sit there and look at these books of log tables,’ he told me. ‘I loved doing it.’ Captain Lyman had an old terminal and a Hayes 80-103A modem that they used to connect to the University of Melbourne’s network. To keep Craig quiet while he worked, Pop, as the children called him, would let him write code. ‘I found this community of hackers,’ Wright says, ‘and I worked out how to interact with them. I started building games and hacking other people’s games. In time, I’d be pulling apart hacker code, and eventually I did this for companies, to help them create defences against hackers.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

When he was 18, Wright joined the air force. ‘They locked me in a bunker,’ he told me, ‘and I worked on a bombing system. Smart bombs. We needed fast code, and I did that.’ When he was in his twenties a melanoma appeared on his back and he had several skin grafts. ‘This was after he got out of the air force,’ his mother told me, ‘and when he recovered he was off to university, and it’s been degrees, degrees, degrees since then.’ He went to the University of Queensland to study computer systems engineering. And over the following 25 years he would finish, or not finish, or finish and not do the graduation paperwork for degrees in digital forensics, nuclear physics, theology, management, network security, international commercial law and statistics. After our first full interview, he went home to work on an assignment for a new course he was taking at the University of London, a masters in quantitative finance.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

I’ve characterised Craig to colleagues and friends,’ Rob Jenkins, who worked with Wright in this period and now holds a senior position in Australia’s Westpac Bank, told me, ‘I’ve always described him as the most qualified person I’ve ever known. I’ve worked with other smart people but Craig has such a strong desire to pursue knowledge. He has passion. And bitcoin was just another one of those bright things he was talking about.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Muy recientemente ", dijo Wright. "Realmente no creía que fuera necesario publicarlo. Lo que creíamos es que podíamos dejarlo en duda: no tendríamos que firmar con las llaves privadas de Satoshi ni nada más. Tenemos cientos de patentes y artículos en curso (investigación desde el principio) y el próximo año vamos a empezar a publicarlos. Pensamos que la gente podía sospechar y la gente podía preguntar y podíamos dejarlo así ".

Very recently,’ Wright said. ‘I didn’t really believe it would need to come out. What we believed is that we could leave it in doubt – we wouldn’t have to sign using the Satoshi keys or anything else. We have hundreds of patents and papers in progress – research from the beginning – and in the next year we’re going to start releasing them. We thought people could suspect and people could query and we could leave it like that.’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n13/andrew-o-hagan/the-satoshi-affair

Dave Kleiman was to become the most important person in Wright’s professional life, the man he says helped him do Satoshi’s work. They met online: they visited the same cryptography forums and had interacted since 2003. Both men were interested in cyber security, digital forensics and the future of money, but Kleiman was a boy’s boy, an army veteran who loved contact sports and fast living. Five foot ten and weighing 200 pounds, he lived in Riviera Beach, Florida, and from 1986 to 1990 he was an army helicopter technician. When I looked into Kleiman’s life, I discovered he had also done computer forensics work for Homeland Security and the army. After active service he became a deputy in the Palm Beach County sheriff’s office. A motorcycle crash in 1995, when he was 28, left him in a wheelchair. Kleiman was a drug user and one source told me he was heavily into online gambling and various illicit activities; there is evidence he was associated with Silk Road, the online marketplace for all things illegal. After the accident he devoted himself to computers, and set up a company called Computer Forensics LLC.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

And you incentivise people to act by giving them the opportunity to earn something. It’s as Adam Smith says: it’s not through the goodness of the heart, it’s not the baker caring about you, it’s not the butcher caring about you, it’s them caring about their own families. Together, as he put it, the invisible hand controls the way society works.’‌‌

Traducción: en-es
Incentivas a las personas a actuar dándoles la oportunidad de ganar algo. Es como dice Adam Smith: no es por la bondad del corazón, no es el panadero que se preocupa por ti, no es el carnicero que se preocupa por ti, son ellos que se preocupan por sus propias familias. Juntos, como él dijo, la mano invisible controla la forma en que funciona la sociedad ".‌‌

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair