A catch up with the inventor of Bitcoin—Dr. Craig Wright

It’s always a pleasure to hear from Dr. Craig Wright, and last week, Nigel Smith checked in with the Bitcoin inventor to cover everything from the recent Kleiman v Wright trial to the current BSV ecosystem. 

Kleiman vs. Wright & COPA

Dr. Wright said the outcome of the trial was “very good” and that Ira Kleiman’s claim to be the only shareholder of W&K Info Defense Research LLC is a form of fraud and is blatantly false.

Moving on to the COPA case, Dr. Wright said that it won’t happen for “probably another year or more.” He defended taking people to court to settle issues, mentioning that Plato and Aristotle both promoted the idea as a means to understand the power of democracy and the Western legal system.

Dr. Wright described Twitter (and Facebook), one of the litigants on the COPA side, as the greatest threat to Western democracy outside of Russia and China getting together with weapons. He described recent tactics by COPA as nothing more than scammers delaying the end of their scams.

BTC as a Ponzi scheme and proof of stake

Describing BTC as a classic Ponzi scheme, Dr. Wright again pointed out that it makes no sense to buy and hold something because you think other people will buy and hold it. This is profit-seeking without work and operates in a very similar way to classic pyramid or Ponzi schemes.

Getting into proof-of-stake, Dr. Wright overlooked it as a way to stop competition. Whereas proof-of-work always allows for new entrants to innovate and come in and compete, proof of stake does not. Eventually, this leads to an oligarchy where the holders of the coins control the system with no way for new entrants to compete.

Elon Musk & Nick Szabo—Dr. Wright is not a fan

Dr. Wright isn’t one to shy away from slaughtering sacred cows, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk did not escape unscathed. Dr. Wright said he felt he was a con artist who is playing with us when he claims he wants to terraform Mars and put humans there.

Dismissing Elon’s claim that Nick Szabo contributed the most to the ideas behind Bitcoin, Dr. Wright claims that Szabo is incapable of coding and has a history of espousing amateur or debunked ideas such as digital gold.

The Lightning Network & BTC Core

Laying into the Lightning network, Dr. Wright describes how the U.K., European, and American legislation dictates that you need to keep records when processing transactions. However, Lightning is designed to lose records and make transactions anonymous. Therefore, by default, Lightning will violate the legislation which is due to be enforced this year.

Dr. Wright then reiterated what he said in 2008. He told Bitcoin would end up in data centers and that home users wouldn’t be able to run nodes. He emphasized the competitive nature of Bitcoin, the need to trust the market, and classical liberalism. He likened the BTC centralized planners to communists desiring to build a system they control while claiming to be libertarians who love freedom.

Smith agreed, calling the BTC core camp faux libertarians. Dr. Wright called them anarcho-collectivists behaving like cult members, pointing out the red laser eyes and groupthink in the BTC camp.

Students of Dr. Wright will be familiar with his disdain for the idea that code is law. He once again pointed out the need for the actual law, mentioning that if you were to operate a node in an anarchic system without law, a warlord could simply take your node and make it his.

Student Questions

Neil Smith then opened the podcast to students to ask questions. The following is a summary of them.

If you program shares for smart contracts, do you still need intermediaries for things like credit checks?

There will still be controls in place. Removing controls in the name of democratizing finance leads to crashes, after which we put the controls back.

What do you want to do with your money?

Dr. Wright wants to bring billions of people into the digital economy. He wants to do so not for altruistic reasons but because he is doing so for a profit. By getting these people online and using Bitcoin, Dr. Wright expects to make money while helping these people.

What do you see with Web 3.0 and metaverse?

Several patents on this concept have now been granted to Dr. Wright. He emphasized that the ownership of all of this needs to be sorted out properly. Using NFTs as an example, he mentioned that they have lots of potentials but that the current market is full of useless JPGs and other collectibles.

What do you think of BTC evolving into a hedge against inflation?

Dr. Wright said it’s not a hedge against inflation. It’s a risk asset, and as the interest rate increases, BTC goes down in value as people flock to bonds.

Ryan X. Charles’ new project

Ryan X. Charles joined the stream to talk about his new projects. The main theme of these projects is the Social Bitcoin Web (SBW). This is an attempt to fight back against the Silicon Valley censorship that is rife in today’s world.

Ryan noticed that this had gotten worse during the pandemic. He noticed the coordination of the social media companies in their censorship and decided to form a solution.

Ryan’s projects intend to implement an SPV wallet into the web. For example, one of the projects will allow you to copy videos rather than links to web pages, making them extremely difficult to censor. This will also have the ability to charge for the videos unless the user wants to make them free. This can get even more complex, with users licensing the video with the right to resell the video, etc.

“We’re going to redo the 1990s but with Bitcoin this time,” Ryan said.

Learn more about Bitcoin investments with this new ebook, Investing in Blockchain: Better data for a better world.

Watch: CoinGeek New York panel, Blockchain: The Future of Technology Building on Achievements of the Past

Source: Read Full Article