Satoshi Stupidity
This post was originally published on April 15, 2019, and sent to Messari Pro subscribers.
I’ve been on record saying that there’s a non-zero chance Craig Wright could be (part of) Satoshi. I’ve even written about it in my annual predictions posts as one of my favorite contrarian conspiracy theories. The theory goes as follows: if you were Satoshi, there’s a good chance you’d be somewhat narcissistic and anti-social. So the fact Craig is about as cuddly as a cactus is not necessarily disqualifying. He also fooled some pretty smart people along the way, both vocal believers (e.g. Gavin Andresen, although he later walked that back) and more sober executives (all off-record of course). We also know objectively that Craig was very early into BTC. Regardless of whether he actually is Satoshi, based on the early bitcoin population alone, he’s in the first 1,000 real users almost for sure.
To be honest, I’ve not really cared whether CSW (or any other individual) is actually Satoshi, because bitcoin has been bigger than any one person for a while now. We’re not sure which side of the big-block, small-block schism the real Satoshi would join, anyway, if he/she/they did emerge from the shadows. It’s been a parlor game to opine on Satoshi’s identity because wrong answers are not falsifiable. I’ve also written about Jim McCoy being Satoshi, and thought about the usual suspects like Hal Finney, Adam Back, Nick Szabo, etc. But “CSW is Satoshi” was a particularly fun pet conspiracy for me, and a complement to my other more thoughtful pieces, because:
- It riled the right people up
- I believe there’s a small probability I’m right
- Most importantly, it wasn’t an endorsement of Craig Wright as a human being.
On the contrary, time and again, CSW has proven himself to be a complete piece of shit, and I (along with most everyone else it seems) am rooting for him and his ilk to be marginalized and ultimately forgotten in this industry. What used to be a benign tumor and punch line, though, is a malignant beast that’s metastasized to threaten actual contributors to the community, perhaps most notably podcaster Peter McCormack, who deserves a Nobel prize in at least one category for this work of “GFY” art: