To build on my recent thread demonstrating that Craig's copy of the whitepaper with his name on was made by modifying the original http://bitcoin.org  whitepaper, here's some further reflections Craig's recent blog post about his recent legal letters. https://twitter.com/btckershi/status/1355404231189155840

Craig posted this yesterday, as a defence of his recent letters about the whitepaper, which prompted world-wide ridicule and defiance as people hosted it themselves.

https://craigwright.net/blog/bitcoin-blockchain-tech/bitcoin-white-paper-statement-of-jan-29-2021/ https://archive.is/96sR5 

A friend pointed out to me that this post sounds nothing like Craig's normal voice. It was possible written by a lawyer for him—your work @SimonCohen85 ?

Anyway, let's just pick through some of the text and explore it.

"Last week, I instructed my lawyers to send a series of formal legal letters to a very specific list of people and organisations who were hosting the Bitcoin white paper on their websites."

One of these was notably http://bitcoin.org 

In the letter to them, Craig asserted copyright over the Bitcoin whitepaper. The MANY MANY flaws with this argument have been pointed out by others already. e.g. The WP is covered as documentation by MIT. Craig cannot prove he is the author....

...his copyright claim in the US came too late. The US copyright office grant applications without checking veracity. Hence others have also registered exactly the same claim. etc. etc.

Nevertheless, as with my previous thread, now consider Craig's own claims from his own point of view.

Here is Craig's own narrative:

1) In 2008 he wrote the WP and published it on http://bitcoin.org 
2) He himself put " http://bitcoin.org " at the TOP of the whitepaper.

3) Craig then left the project and passed on the project, the name, the maintenance of the codebase, the http://bitcoin.org  domain to other people.
4) The developers of the project made changes that broke his original vision for it by deviating from the whitepaper.

5) He returns, and a decade after first publishing the whitepaper he asserts copyright and over a decade later claims copyright over the paper, on the basis that http://bitcoin.org  is wrongly passing itself off at Bitcoin.

The problem here is that not matter how badly Craig things (4) was—no matter how incompetent the Bitcoin devs have been in his eyes—the reality is that according to Craig's own narrative *he* passed the Bitcoin project onto other people.

So the Bitcoin github account, the name and domain name are not passing off as the real Bitcoin. They *are* the real Bitcoin: Craig passed it onto them. His substantive claim is simply that they broke the project.

Now, I don't personally accept the premises I adopted for this thought experiment. Craig is not Satoshi Nakamoto. His own narrative of this is false.

But, even assuming his own narrative is true, his claims are totally illogical and baseless.

Now skip down a bit in Craig's post. He claims:

"The Bitcoin system described in the white paper is not ambiguous. It is not open to interpretation. It is a peer-to-peer system of electronic cash."

Craig (or @SimonCohen85 ?) then jumps on the idea of Bitcoin being "cash" and being able to be used for “small casual transactions”.

The post claims that this is the key element of what makes Bitcoin Bitcoin.

But, this is clearly not the case. It is a misreading of the paper.

The part of the title Craig skipped over was that Bitcoin is "peer to peer".

Why is this significant?

The first line of the Abstract makes clear that being peer-to-peer means avoid a 3rd party:

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

The first line of the introduction picks up on exactly this point:

"Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments."

The rest of the first paragraph provides reasons why having a peer-to-peer system that doesn't rely on third parties is beneficial.

When writing any article or paper, a basic feature of an introduction is to demonstrate **why your research problem is relevant**.

The idea of making "small casual transactions" is simply one of these elements that support the value of having a peer-to-peer trustless cash system.

It's not the main point of the paper. It's a minor point playing a minor function in the introduction.

In support of this exegesis, Satoshi NEVER returns to the idea of micropayments in the Whitepaper.

But, he does return to the idea of trustlessness—because this is the key point of bitcoin:

Beginning of the second paragraph:

"What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,..."

§2, p. 2:

"A common solution is to introduce a trusted central authority, or mint, that checks every transaction for double spending.... The problem... is that... the entire money system depends on the company running the mint, with every transaction having to go through them"

§4, p3:

"To implement a distributed timestamp server on a *peer-to-peer basis*,..." (emphasis mine)

§8, p. 5, for Satoshi a weakness of SPV nodes is they're more trustful:

"While network nodes can verify transactions for themselves, the simplified method can be fooled by an attacker's fabricated transactions for as long as the attacker can continue to overpower the network."

§12, p. 8, finally summarises what (s/th)he(y) consider(s) the key argument of the whitepaper:

"We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust."

Now back to Craig. Near the end of his post he justifies his threatening legal letters like this:

"What I hoped to achieve by taking action against certain misusers of the white paper was to bring awareness to the Bitcoin system that is described within it,...

... and to distinguish the system from others using the Bitcoin name. I believe the white paper speaks for itself. Whether something is ‘Bitcoin’ or not can be easily checked with reference to the document."

He then claims the key feature of Bitcoin is this:

"My life’s work has been about creating a micropayment system: one that brings electronic cash to the Internet in the form of small-value micro- and even nano-transactions."

But as we've seen that is NOT the key idea of the whitepaper. It is merely something mentioned once.

Finally, Craig claims in his post that "Bitcoin SV is the Bitcoin system I described in the white paper."

There are many reasons why BSV is not the system described in the whitepaper, the key being it is not a "trustless" and "peer-to-peer" system.

The network model adopted by BSV is an increasingly centralised one, where there are effectively trusted third parties running mining nodes, and all other users are dependent upon them.

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