Whitepaper recreation proof package

In my previous post I described how I recreated the Bitcoin whitepaper as an exercise and an experiment to help contextualize and properly interpret potential claims by fraudsters. Specifically, since the whitepaper can be manually reverse-engineered from the PDF to a matching OpenOffice source document, possession of such source documents is not proof of being or having any relation to Satoshi Nakamoto.

In this post I'll disclose (part of) the recreated source document itself, along with instructions for independent verification of its validity. I realize that by calling it a "proof package" I'm evoking the notorious "Sartre blog post" which Craig Wright tried to pass off as proof he had signed a message with the block 9 key, but you'll find this proof package actually does what it says on the label; no deception involved.

Recreating the Bitcoin whitepaper (competently)

If you're not familiar with Craig Wright, the notorious Australian who for many years has claimed to be Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto (a claim which has been widely and thoroughly debunked and discredited), first of all: congratulations. Consider skipping this article and happily moving on with your life.

If you're still here, you probably also know that a recurring part of Wright's claims is that he authored the Bitcoin whitepaper, and to corroborate this claim he has presented various supposed "drafts" of it. These "drafts" are usually just the whitepaper itself but edited to say Wright's name instead of Satoshi, usually with backdated metadata, and sometimes even printed out with coffee stains on them to look older. But they all have in common that they were rather incompetently created and the deception was quickly uncovered whenever subjected to forensic analysis.

This all raises a somewhat more important question though: what if a competent Faketoshi appeared, with forged documents that were much harder to debunk? How hard would it be to take the Bitcoin whitepaper and create credible precursors and/or source documents in support of some narrative?

Private Presentations Aren't Proof, part 2: Explaining the fake key signing video

As a follow-up to the previous article about Craig Wright's supposed key signings, last year I produced a short proof-of-concept video showing a similar seemingly legitimate key signing with Satoshi's genesis block key. It was fake of course, which most people immediately understood, but it might be informative to go through exactly how it was faked, so as to highlight the kinds of tricks used and what to watch out for when scrutinizing this kind of evidence.

Private Presentations Aren't Proof

Sometimes we're not comfortable drawing conclusions until all the dots have been sufficiently connected. Let's see if we can do that for one of the more annoying open "mysteries" surrounding Craig Wright: how did he pull off the private key signings?

MtGox payout guide and calculator

As there is a lot of confusion surrounding how the MtGox civil rehabilitation distribution will happen, here is an attempt to share my understanding of things, and an interactive calculator for estimating your possible payouts.

Earlier MtGox payouts? No thanks to CoinLab

The MtGox civil rehabilitation trustee recently submitted a draft rehabilitation plan for distributing the assets of MtGox. The plan is not final and is currently being reviewed by the Japanese court, following which it will also need to be voted on by all creditors, and after that the practical matters of registering for payouts needs to happen, so this does not mean payouts are imminent or that the trustee is about to dump coins on the market. This always has to be explicitly pointed out as some so-called journalists love spreading FUD about this for clicks.

The 80,000 stolen MtGox bitcoins

I've recently been repeatedly asked about the theft of 80,000 BTC from MtGox in early 2011, as initially reported in a 2016 The Daily Beast article, and specifically how it relates to the address 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF. Rather than address every question individually, I will briefly summarize what's known about this in a blog post.