Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? What is the Tulip Trust?
Introduction
Satoshi Nakamoto is the online username of the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. They released Bitcoin to the world on 9 January, 2009. The username Satoshi also released an article that described what Bitcoin is. The title is “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. This is known as the “Bitcoin whitepaper”.
In the whitepaper Satoshi describes rules and mechanisms that Bitcoin requires to be Bitcoin, such as Proof-of-Work. Proof-of-Work, or the competition between miners to write transactions to the Bitcoin blockchain as fast as they can, is described as essential to Bitcoin’s security. There are other rules such as a 50% decrease in miner block rewards every 200,000 blocks, commonly known as “the halvening”.
Most importantly though, Satoshi describes Bitcoin as the longest chain. Reading Satoshi’s comments on multiple chains is relevant to the reader of this article, because it is needed to understand Satoshi was not against hard forks to ensure Bitcoin’s safety.
A common misconception is that a “forked chain” cannot possibly be the original Bitcoin — however the whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto states that it can, with enough hashpower.
“The longest chain not only serves as proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came from the largest pool of CPU power. As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network, they’ll generate the longest chain and outpace attackers.” — Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Article’s goal
Today, on January 28th 2019, there are 3 networks that are using the Bitcoin name — Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin ABC, and Bitcoin SV. Bitcoin is a deeper concept than 7 letters forming a name. This article’s definitive answer is that Craig Wright is part of the Satoshi Nakamoto team that created Bitcoin, and that Bitcoin lives on as BitcoinSV.
The Past
This section will briefly overview Craig Wright’s past, his connections to the Australian Tax Office, and the release of the “Tulip Trust” document. These are all relevant to our conclusion.
Craig Wright is an Australian citizen, and he lived in Australia before moving to London in late 2015.
A transcript of an interview with Craig Wright and associates by the Australian Tax Office was released in 2014. The transcript raised eyebrows as there are mentions of “Bitcoins”. Here is an excerpt from page 6 of the Australian Tax Office document.
“There’s audit and ensuing disputes with the Tax Office regarding information defence ….. and Dr Wright personally back in 2009 and that dragged on for a couple of years. 2011, bitcoin was transferred overseas. R and D then conducted in the US under — by a joint venture company formed as ….. effectively info defence research LOC.”
Transcript here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2644012-20140218-Transcript-Redacted.html
The Info Defence Research LOC mentioned by the ATO is in reference to W&K Info Defense Research. According to public records from Florida, W&K was founded in Palm Beach County in 2011, with Dave Kleiman as its registered agent and Kleiman’s home address as its place of business. The purpose of the company was to mine Bitcoins. W&K is assumed to stand for “Wright & Kleiman”.
Satoshi Nakamoto isn’t a person, it was many people working together to build Bitcoin version 0.1. The assumed leader of team Satoshi Nakamoto is Craig Steven Wright.
Wright was at the center of a media frenzy in late 2015 after the release of an investigative article by Gizmodo.com titled “This Australian Says He and His Dead Friend Invented Bitcoin” that shows leaked emails as proof of Wright’s identity as Satoshi Nakamoto.
The article investigates Dave Kleiman, a paralyzed computer forensics expert from Florida who is also assumed to be part of team Satoshi Nakamoto as the main developer/coder. Kleiman passed away in 2013, but Dave’s brother Ira Kleiman is still attempting to sue Craig Wright for at least 300,000 bitcoins. The Kleiman v Wright lawsuit is still ongoing in U.S federal court, with news as recently as December 28, 2018 that Wright cannot dismiss the lawsuit and must respond.
https://www.coindesk.com/craig-wright-denied-attempt-to-dismiss-lawsuit-over-billions-in-bitcoin
The journalists at Gizmodo dug deep into Wright’s past — releasing leaked emails and a document they known as “The Tulip Trust”.
On the same day the article exposed the leaked documents, Craig Wright’s Australian home was raided by police. Reporters were at the scene attempting to get comment by Wright on the Gizmodo article and leaks, however Craig Wright was not home, but the reporters took photos of the police.
Craig Wright promptly deleted all of his social medias after the incident.
An entire book has been written on the next part of the story. It is called “The Satoshi Affair” by Andrew O’Hagan from June 2016. It is an action-packed story where Wright escaped from Australia by avoiding the police looking for him and taking an airplane to New Zealand. He then arranged for him and his family to move to London, where they currently live.
Read “The Satoshi Affair” here: http://www.ywesee.com/uploads/Ywesee/Andrew_O_Hagan_The_Satoshi_Affair_LRB_30_June_2016.pdf
6 months after the Gizmodo article and police raid, Craig Wright publicly stated in a BBC interview that he was involved in team Satoshi Nakamoto that created Bitcoin.
Interview link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DCAC1j2HTY
The interview took place on 2 May 2016 in London. This interview is where the term “Faketoshi” has come from, as the world at large rejected Wright’s claim on the title — stating that his “proof” of signing a PGP key could have been done by anybody who knew Satoshi.
Craig Wright tells the interviewer that he is revealing his identity for his family’s sake, so they do not have to hide his involvement in the creation of Bitcoin.
Since then, Craig Wright has become more publicly in Bitcoin by being in the Bitcoin Cash team, to avoid the SegWit upgrade. Disputes within Bitcoin Cash lead to another hard fork of BitcoinSV. You can read more about BitcoinSV’s goal here www.bitcoinsv.io and view their development roadmap here www.bitcoinsv.io/roadmap
The Tulip Trust
The Tulip Trust is a leaked document released on December 9, 2015. You can find the text here:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/2644014/Tulip-Trust-Redacted.pdf
The document is allegedly written by Dave Kleiman in 2011 and describes a Bitcoin trust fund of sum 1,100,111 Bitcoins “to be managed by at least three people but not more than seven at any time” and that the Bitcoins are to be returned to Craig Wright on January 1, 2020.
As aforementioned, Wright had encounters with the Australian Tax Office — who could’ve contacted the Australian Police to grant permission to raid Wright’s home on the charge of tax avoidance through Bitcoin. The Gizmodo article in which the “Tulip Trust” and emails were leaked prompted the Australian Federal Police to raid Wright’s home and offices on the same day.
There are two interesting occurrences within the document that further corroborate its authenticity.
The first is in the conditions:
The addition of such an obscure line to the Tulip Trust contract that mentions Adam Westwood of the ATO by name is reasonable given the struggles Wright has endured with Australian authorities.
The second occurrence is an incomplete sentence in the contract.
At a panel at the Bitcoin Investor Conference in 2015 in Las Vegas, Craig Wright is a panelist and answers question. The speech is informative, however there is a particular point raised by Dr Wright regarding the Tulip bubble of the 1600s.
https://youtu.be/LdvQTwjVmrE?t=2027 (Link should start at 33:47)
He said “Most people don’t realize the Tulip bubble wasn’t really a bubble, it was a reallocation of contracts. It was made from a contract to a swaption. By changing the contract to a swaption, by allowing government officials to get out of their contract they collapsed the price” He further describes the intrinsic value of Tulips in managing weed and foliage around castles.
This fits into the Tulip Trust’s incomplete sentence. BTC’s parabolic rise and subsequent fall does closely resemble the Tulip bubble’s chart.
Bitcoin Core’s chart could forever resemble the Tulip Bubble if a wealth transfer occurs to the developing BitcoinSV chain.
It’s likely that team Satoshi Nakamoto knew that the original Bitcoin chain may become slow, underdeveloped, or corrupted — which would require reallocation to a new and more suitable chain.
Craig Wright is to gain full ownership of the trust on January 1, 2020. It’s possible the Satoshi Nakamoto team created the trust to ensure the safety of Bitcoin, as 1.1 million Bitcoin is enough to fund development (nChain) but also to crash the value of BTC to $0 if it was misused. According to Twitter, Wright does not believe in price manipulation, as the only sustainable growth in price is through real usage and development.
The Present
BitcoinSV is developing at a blinding speed.
It is important to state that it does not even matter if Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakmoto at this point — as the BitcoinSV network is the only network in line with the Bitcoin whitepaper — therefore it is Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin. The foolish addition of SegWit to Bitcoin Core (BTC) disqualified it from being Satoshi’s Bitcoin, and similarly Bitcoin ABC is a deviant from the whitepaper.
Dr Craig Steven Wright is a professor and the Chief Scentist of nChain Group, which consists of 1) nChain Limited — focused on blockchain research and development; 2) nChain Holdings Limited — an intellectual property holding company for patents. Craig Wright has over 1100 patents on blockchain tech.
A few patents are browsable on Google Patents:
https://patents.google.com/?assignee=nchain+holdings&oq=nchain+holdings
nChain supports the BitcoinSV network, and allows for royalty-free use of it’s patents on the BSV network under their “Nakasendo SDK”. Patents have been filed for years but many are only coming into effect now.
nChain’s main partner is the largest Bitcoin mining company in the world — CoinGeek, owned by American gambling tycoon and billionaire Calvin Ayre. Squire mining is to acquire CoinGeek, making it the world’s biggest publicly traded Bitcoin mining company.
Coingeek and Squire merger: https://www.cryptoglobe.com/latest/2018/12/squire-mining-to-acquire-coingeek-making-it-the-largest-publicly-traded-bitcoin-miner/
BitcoinSV means business, and few know that giants such as Samsung are partnered with Squire Mining (CoinGeek) to bring the next generation of mining ASIC hardware to exclusively BitcoinSV.
Samsung announcement link: https://evertiq.com/design/44864
The simplest argument for Craig Wright being Satoshi is that BitcoinSV’s development is the only cryptocurrency developing what Satoshi described in the whitepaper.
Few people know that Bitcoin is capable of:
- Run smart-contracts like Ethereum (BSV roadmap for OP_code)
- Store images, sound and video on the BSV blockchain (possible already)
- Run decentralized oracles (neutral smart contracts)
The dominant chain theory states that the most competent coders and developers will be the first to migrate to the most suitably developing chain. So they have. In the past week there has been more development on BitcoinSV than Bitcoin’s 10 years combined.
Here is the entire Alice of Wonderland book stored on the BitcoinSV blockchain, forever, in a single transaction. It costed a fraction of a cent. https://alice.bitdb.network/
Here is a recording of Neil Armstrong’s famous quote as he stepped foot on the moon.
https://whatsonchain.com/tx/ce7286e599fa7ea7eef61a94796ffb4c3cf7191ccbc3ebe49d39ba3bdb8ea6ff
That’s not a regular website, it’s a blockchain explorer.
Click “Decode” to turn the 1s and 0s etched on the blockchain into sound.
BSV currently supports up to 100 KB OP_RETURN messages.
You can upload any file up to 100 KB on the blockchain using developer _unwriter’s site https://b.bitdb.network/
You pay the fee with BSV. Be warned, your file will be on chain for eternity!
There are many more projects released, such as the HandCash BSV wallet for iOS and Android. nChain owns a majority of HandCash, and has also developed www.cashport.io as an API for micro-payments. This API allows content creator such as Netflix to charge users on a per-second basis while streaming media. Essentially, if you watch half a movie — you would be charged for half a movie. Currently Netflix is charged monthly — as traditional payment providers such as VISA/Mastercard can’t handle the network traffic micropayments create. Netflix has a potential new market, as many individuals want to watch Netflix but assume, they will be too busy to “watch a full month of Netflix” and avoid buying a monthly subscription. The “on demand” business model will increase Netflix’s traffic as users watch what they have time for. The individual user will pay less-per-minute of streamed content, but the increased traffic by “casual watchers” will earn Netflix more profit than ever.
Last year, nChain held a 5 million pound competition for a tokenization protocol to allow digital property rights on the BSV blockchain. Tokenized won and is coming soon to BitcoinSV. You can read more on the protocol at www.tokenized.cash
Tokenization is the holy grail of blockchain technology, as it allows physical properties and intellectual properties ownership rights to be irrefutably transferred, stored and verified. A good article for simply explaining the significance of tokenization can be found here: https://medium.com/coinmonks/asset-tokenization-on-blockchain-explained-in-plain-english-f4e4b5e26a6d
Academics
Dr Wright’s academic history is unheard of, with 10 masters degrees, 3 PHDs and 1200+ papers written — Dr Wright is an embodiment of the “proof of work” concept he champions. Regardless of personal opinions on his character, Dr Wright’s academic achievements deserve respect. Academic documents can be found here: https://nchain.com/app/uploads/2017/12/Craig-Wright-Academic-Degrees-Certificates_2017.pdf
He holds 24 GIAC security certifications. They are among the hardest computer science security qualifications in the world. Dr Wright’s GIAC certifications are available to browse here: https://www.giac.org/certified-professional/craig-wright/107335
Upon being questioned by me on Twitter regarding his IQ — Dr Wright responded that he tested at 179 IQ.
Conclusion
The business partnerships of nChain, the filing of blockchain patents, and development of BitcoinSV are significant to show that Bitcoin is moving onward on it’s original whitepaper guidelines with a strong leadership.
The most likely reason for Satoshi Nakamoto’s disappearance is the patent filing and research conducted by Craig Wright in the past 10 years. While Bitcoin Core (Tulip) grew in market cap, Dr Wright and nChain conducted research and were provided a proof-of-concept that Bitcoin is reliable and safe to use by the whole world. It has been necessary to take the time to patent everything to avoid patent trolling before scaling Bitcoin to the world.
In conclusion, Craig Wright’s continual research and involvement in Bitcoin, his academic history, leadership at nChain, his wealth, and his self-admittance of being Satoshi make Dr Craig S. Wright the primary leader behind the team that created Bitcoin — Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin now lives on as BitcoinSV.
Extra
Here are some extra data feeds to follow:
1. http://ohmysatoshi.com — a website compiling information regarding Satoshi Nakamoto
2. Dr Wright’s twitter feed @ProfFaustus
3. Dr Wright’s papers and articles on blockchain