BSV and Other Laughs

I literally cannot believe I’m getting suckered into writing a longer-than-140-characters, somewhat serious, post about BSV.

Yet here we are after a 3x rally in less than a week catapulted the controversial asset to the fourth largest in crypto by "market cap."

Here’s what you need to know.

Background: There’s an ongoing legal battle in Florida between Craig Wright, who claims he’s Satoshi Nakamoto, and the estate of Craig's former business partner, Dave Kleiman. Decrypt has a good recap of the drama to date. The tl;dr is that the case has been a predictable circus, and the judge (and commentariat) believe Wright is lying about his creation of bitcoin, perjuring himself repeatedly, and dragging out proceedings as long as he possibly can. Bitcoin contributor and Casa CTO Jameson Lopp even compiled a list of all the evidence against Craig Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto.

At the same time, a small community of Wright supporters have rallied around his preferred fork of Bitcoin, BSV (Satoshi’s Vision), which is itself a fork of Bitcoin Cash. Coinmetrics did a good job of breaking down the differences earlier this year.

Since then, Wright has at various times threatened (promised?) to sell “his" $9 billion+ bitcoin stake (Satoshi’s addresses), and invest the proceeds into the development of BSV.

The BSV price seems to be rallying now because Wright finally provided the court in the Kleiman case a list of 16k+ BTC addresses he claims to have access to as "a third party provided the necessary information and key slice to unlock the encrypted file” containing all the address info. This third party Wright is referring to is the mysterious "bonded courier” he'd previously identified as necessary to accessing his stash, and whose very existence the court has called into question.

What you need to know: Three things are important for you to know and track.

1. We should be clear that Wright has given contradictory statements and submitted possibly forged documents throughout the case. The judge can’t stand him. But his latest stunt (and it is a stunt, barring some miraculous, disappointing surprise), drags out the proceedings for an additional 90 days, as the Kleiman estate must review the new evidence.
2. In the meantime, there’s all sorts of shenanigans the BSV community can pull and has been up to, including pumping the asset, likely planning to claim BSV from old bitcoin multi-sig addresses once those corresponding BTC are spent (thanks to a new proposed hard fork), and attacking the rival BCH chain. You have to give it to them, the BSV community comes up with some pretty novel ideas for heists. Especially clever if you’re hoping to settle a court case and cover a fine you wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford...without admitting you're not actually Satoshi. Come to think of it, there’s nothing I’d put past the inhabitants of the island of misfit crypto toys.
3. Look beyond the “market cap” ranking. It pains me that BSV has climbed so far up our coin rankings even though a huge chunk of its supply has never moved or been claimed (and likely never will be). CoinMetrics also has an excellent post on “fork uptake” which pegs the actual claimed supply of BSV (and BCH) at ~50% or less that of the parent BTC chain. That would still put BSV in the top 10 by market cap, but it’s not nearly as nauseating as top 3.

I’ve already spent too much time on this, and wasted a perfectly good morning.

But if you’re trading the news (which I neither do nor recommend), BSV is available for trading on several large exchanges (Bitfinex, Huobi, OKEx, Polo, and Bittrex).

Good luck with that. I’m staying the hell away.

-TBI