What Wright Actually Said At the Future of Bitcoin Conference on June 30th
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1_gxvx_QGo&t=17s
This is a continuation of In Defense of Craig Wright - Part I
I am just a nobody watching from the sidelines. I do not take a position on the segwit debate. But, I can see that Dr. Wright’s comments could use some interpretation for people who do not have the context of where he is coming from. I think it is difficult for him to explain complex things to people who don’t already have a strong background in that field, a problem common to scientists and mathematicians.
Here again is the link to a transcript of Wright’s lecture, made by someone who has a very low opinion of him. Wrights words are indented. My comments are not.
https://gist.github.com/harding/b7067d2943706e2e3d3f7aab539a67c5
Alright. So, first of all, what's this about. Anyone know their manga?
We have the genesis of a new century. So, that's what that's about. This is genesis of a new century.
Now current problem: we have seven (which is really four) sort of issues:
We have this little tiny scaling issue. Which is nothing. See that whole screen? That whole screen is payments. See that little pixel there? That's Bitcoin. That's what we are right now. We are right down there---that little tiny pixel is Bitcoin.
We are nothing. We like to think we're something right at the moment. We are not. If we want to be something, we need to scale and radically. Not offchain. Not moving some of the security into sidechains and splitting the model. We need to, right now, today, start scaling.
In two thousand and nine, we had more scalability than we do right now.
Ok, so Wright opens his lecture by pointing out that Bitcoin has not come nearly as far as he thinks it should have in eight years, and has even gone backwards in terms of scalability.
Problem. We have this idea; we have things that are being said; we have people changing the story; we have a lot of 1984 doublespeak. We have people telling us what we should believe. People lying to us about what shou... what everyone wants to think [sic].
He is referring to the mainstream media which defends the mainstream financial system of central banks and fiat currencies.
And we're going to change that narrative. Not because we want, well, an idea that someone has of an idea. But because we want scientific truth; we want evidence; we want facts; we want more.
What we need: we need the unseen. Everyone know, our famous little economist/journalist from France: "the seen and the unseen". Bastiat, who.... People considered him not an economist. In France, the philosophers said he was not an economist because he says things that are so obvious.
The seen and the unseen. We are seeing Bitcoin; we are not seeing the entire system. The entire system is everything we are competing with---which will crush us.
He is saying the empowered players in the mainstream economy will use every opportunity to try to capture or contain Bitcoin.
We have other things that we're trying to build into the system that will crush us. When we split Bitcoin into millions and millions of pegged systems. When we add inflation. When we create these sidechains that, by the way, are patented and are controlled and happened to be owned and happened to be managed and monitored. Then we give away the security model.
He is saying the greatest enemy to Bitcoin is the developers adding so many features that they lose sight of the original purpose and break the security model, allowing Bitcoin to be captured and defeated by outside interests.
If 100% of everything mines Bitcoin and controls Bitcoin, that's a security model that is hard; that no government can take over; that no company can take over; no one takes over. Bitcoin can scale. Right now.
The strongest security model, he believes is to be found in the most widespread adoption of Bitcoin and the largest number of miners.
[Slide showing tweet from Peter Todd: "How could a capacity upgrade do that? There's no upper limit to demand, and the Bitcoin protocol doesn't scale.]
What is it. Well we can't do that. There's no limit on demand. Good! I don't want a limit on demand. I want every person on this globe using not altcoins not whatever else; I want them using Bitcoin. I don't some bullshit argument about "oh, people will use it and it will be bad".
Very simple; very easy: good! When every single person on this globe pays for their cup of coffee---pays for their whatever they want---every day using one single central currency (and I'll say central; one distributed central currency) that is not controlled, that is hard money.
That's what Bitcoin is about: hard central [un]controlled, no one can change, money.
Not sure if he misspoke “controlled” or if the transcriber made an error. It is clear from the context that he meant “uncontrolled”. By hard, he means hard to attack. By “central” he means only one cryptocurrency to rule them all. No alt-coins, just Bitcoin.
The problem is central banks inflate. Who here actually knows what the genesis block message was about? Who's read the Times page? [Audience reply inaudible.] What happened in the page? What was being discussed? [Audience inaudible.]
Several times in this lecture Wright refers to things that the early developers of Bitcoin could know. Yes, someone could also read the Genesis block and pretend to know it. But given the context of everything else he says, I believe he is speaking from experience and memory. Here he is referring to the Newspaper Headline that Satoshi mined into the Genesis Block, and he is telling us why that was chosen.
They were considering buying the toxic assets. The government was saying, "the naughty banks who we've just given billions to refuse to change their business model and risk their money again, and if they don't do it, we're going to buy them and nationalize them." So, great, we're going to incentivize banks further to make crappier loans. What a great thing.
So the original Satoshi, even though he said almost nothing about economics or political theory in the Bitcoin papers and emails, did, by choosing this message for the Genesis Block, leave an artifact of his political beliefs like a foundation dedication stone in a building.
[Points to alleged Peter Todd quote.] No upper limit to scale. Good!
[New slide.] Economic game theoretic systems. This is what Bitcoin is about. It is economic.
Timing models; one vote per CPU. This is a republic; it is not a demagoguery. It is not where people get to yell and scream and lie. And very soon we're going to change that narrative. Very soon people are going to discover that when you start lying and when you troll, there are consequences.
This comment about Bitcoin being a republic not a demagoguery brings to mind the alleged fake Satoshi email from 2015 saying that two developers should not be able to turn the entire system without achieving consensus with the rest.
So. What is a node? A node is not every little tiny Raspberry Pi running everywhere. The machines running Bitcoin in 2009 were bigger than every single Raspberry Pi. The machines Hal [Finney] ran. The machines Bear [Ray Dillinger] ran. Everyone else who joined this thing at that point had bigger machines running these damn things [sic]. And now we have this idea that we can't run it on a little tiny insy winsy insignificant machine.
Who cares? What is more important: you having a copy of the block chain, or you having money that no one can manipulate. Honestly, start thinking. These whole utopian ideas of how you spend money are wrong.
Basically saying that expecting full Bitcoin nodes to run on tiny machines is unrealistic and unnecessary.
Economic fundamentals matter. Lightning doesn't work because nobody spends that way. I don't go over to [store name] and ask them to take a bag of carrots and give money. That's the bi-directional models. They don't work.
I don't go down the road in some big co-op, and go, "well, I've just made a box of widgets; how 'bout you give money for it and whatever else." Barter never really existed. Ever.
Wright is poking a stick at the fact that many of Bitcoins developers and promoters of various blockchain ideas really have not tested them in real markets. Blockchain projects in general are very heavy on theoretical high-falutin ideas that have not been tested and grounded in the real world of how people interact.
What we have now is a system that changes everything. Our new generation, our new genesis, is the creation of the first ever hard money. The first money that allows for freedom.
Gold was never hard because we never had it. When Nixon took America off the gold exchange standard, which wasn't a gold standard, do you know how much of that gold was actually there? [Inaudible audience responses.] About five percent. So they didn't actually have the gold they were backing their currency with.
Wright attacks the gold standard, but his argument is refuted by the reality that silver was the money of the masses for most of history, and they did in fact have it. But I digress….
[Side, SPV and merchants]
So SPV and merchants. Merchants give a [inaudible]. When you go and you pay a merchant they care that they get the payment. They're the ones who want zero-conf; they're the ones who know what they can and can't risk. When you pay a merchant, you don't care that your payment has or hasn't been accepted straight away. You care that you've handed the payment over and you've walked out the store with the goods, and you've got a receipt.
More than that, who cares? You're not going to want to sit there and validate that the merchant actually got paid. Really, you don't care.
His point is that the discussions concerning merchant payments and confirmations ignore the fact that it is the payee who needs the confirmation more than the payer, because the payee is the one letting you walk out the door with the goods.
So what we need: we need to move these silly ideas that we need split Bitcoin into little bits so that everyone can own their little bit of Bitcoin. "Everyone wants segwit" - 1984 segwit. Everyone does not want segwit. Everyone is being cowed.
1984 is a reference to Orwell’s book on the big government dystopia. He’s basically saying that the claim that “everyone” wants segwit is unverified propaganda that serves certain interests.
I'm sure everyone has seen the fun media about myself and my family. Well, here's the thing for you: I do have those degrees. That so-called PGP key to Mr. Maxwell, I would say, because the Australian tax office approached Blockstream and asked them about my affairs and dealings in May 2015.
The people involved in the tax office have been arrested. So, my taxes issues are zero. But there are some issues for other people about to come, because when you lie and when you say things that aren't true, there are consequences. And we're going to make sure that these consequences are going to hit these people hard.
Not sure what triggered the digression to defending his reputation. Some people and journalists have claimed that Wright put fake degrees on his linkedin page. Others have referenced the fact he was attacked by the Australian tax authorities at the same time he got doxed as evidence he is an evil person. He is saying that is not true, and in fact the agent(s) at the tax office that persecuted him is now in jail and the case against him has been dropped. (I have no confirmation of that, just explaining what he is talking about.) He is saying that those who have libeled him are going to be sued in the near future.
[Side, SegWit is NOT scale. Line chart allegedly comparing "Bitcoin vs SegWit"] Segwit is not scale. That [points to one line] is what get with a block size increase; that [points to other line] is what we get with segwit. If you have a 4 meg block; if you have a 16 meg block; you multiply it by 4. That is not scale. What you do to scale is increase the throughput, and you get more for a 4 meg block than you do any time that you have this split system that needs to be run that you can't really delete if you're a merchant or a financial organization.
Saying "oh, well, you can keep it," where the hell is the actual benefit of deleting that you can't delete?
Merchants and financial organizations are required to keep transaction records for seven years in most countries. He is saying that segwit doesn’t actually reduce the problem, because these organizations have to store the data anyway.
Each transaction requires more bandwidth. It's very simple: it takes more. The answers you've been given about how terrible all this is: run multi-threaded systems; stop arguing that it needs to be put on Raspberry Pis so that they can lie to you and tell that it needs to be moved off to other systems. It doesn't.
One of the things we, yes, we patent---I'm not afraid to say that. Unlike Greg [Maxwell?] and whatever else, we will choose what we do with our technology. That's not bad. I created things, I get to choose. My choice. I will put some out free. We will put some out otherwise. Our choice.
Here is the voice of Asperger Satoshi coming through again. He is frustrated that his invention is in danger of being diverted from its course. He is apparently filing patents in order to give him more control, and to do more things beyond Bitcoin, but related to Bitcoin.
But, at the end of the day, scale needs to happen---and it needs to happen now. And it's not quadratic due to these other problems they're saying.
[New slide, looks like screencap of GitHub showing a some lines of code in Bitcoin Core.]
Here's a thing no one's talking about: this quadratic scaling issue. It's added to Bitcoin. It is added. Follow the codebase. It is easy to fix. I know several, [such as] Bitcrust, Bitcoin Unlimited, and our team independently picked this out and fixed it. Our team did it in about three hours. That's sure scalability.
He is saying that someone added this quadratic scaling code after Satoshi left, but that it can be fixed, and that three different dev teams have come to the same conclusion on that.
Doing multithreading about putting things off to [unknown term; sounds like "Xeon fi cards"]... any idea how many sigops we can achieve now? Anyone? Five hundred thousand per second. That's scale. And yes, that's a $20,000 machine.
Quite frankly, I don't care about Raspberry Pis. If you have been in Bitcoin since 2009 and you can't afford a $20,000 node to help this network, piss off. [Audience applause.]
He is saying that Bitcoin nodes should be powerful specialized machines. The cost of $20,000 is not high enough to prevent decentralized mining.
And I will say that one again, if you will not do this; if you will not help this network; and if you will not take this thing that has given you financial sovereignty, you financial freedom, you financial independence, and help other people by spending a little bit of money on a decent network, fuck off! [More audience applause.]
Dr. Wright is clearly not impressed with the idea of using Rasberry Pi to run Bitcoin nodes!
[New slide, Scale is quadratic due to code flaws. Shows a diff with two added lines, one removed line in mempool management.]
That's it: O-2 [sic; slide says O(n^2)]. Poor code. Shit code. That's why we need competition. That's why, not just Core, anyone should be release their own and compete fairly.
He points out a bug introduced by Core, and shows how it can be fixed, and says that is what causes the scale to be quadratic [instead of exponential]. He is calling for competition in developing Bitcoin rather than a central authority. This is relevant, as he is not arguing that Satoshi should dictate the code. He is arguing for a free market competition in code development. This somewhat seems at odds with his earlier comments about patents, though.
If you make a better solution and you put it out to market, you compete fairly. Through competition, because people use your product. Not because you're cowed into... DDoS attacks or anything like that. Not because of all of that.
Bitcoin Unlimited found the flaw as well. Some of these thing that Unlimited have been doing [are] very innovated.
[New slide, Moore's Law is our friend]
At the end of the day, Moore's Law [is] our friend. The smallest transistor---well, I'm probably being superseded already, but I've got a paper coming out on this, and the editors picked out a mistake because I said a 2 nanometer transistor and it turns out there's now a 1 nanometer transistor.
When all this happened, people were arguing that because of quantum tunneling, this is impossible. "At six nanometers, it will never be done." Guess what? It's been done.
So stop this, "oh, we can't do it" and "oh, everything's bad" idea. The reality is we need to start being optimistic, positive, and build. Allow competition. Allow free access to code. Allow people to actually start competing. No building little walled bloody gardens.
[New slide, The original method was flood Control]
[Note: the following seems to be about transaction fees.]
Bitcoin... I've got lots of people saying this is bullshit. It's in the code: flood control. It worked. Why? Because of the value of it. It didn't work way back then, and people could've done these things, and Hal and Bear go their way and put this bloody cap in there.
Quite frankly, I'm disgusted with half the community. Anyone know who Bear is? Bear is Cryddit; that's his name on Reddit and whatever else. Bear was the third person involved, properly running nodes and whatever else. You can look up who he is; he's a friend of mine. So…
Here is another reference from his experience as Satoshi, relating who the first Bitcoin developers were in the order in which they came into the project.
One of the things that happened to him. He came on and started talking. Mr. Maxwell, others, ripped the shit out of him and he's gone back to being curmudgeon like I like being. He doesn't talk; he doesn't get involved anymore---and he's a shit hot coder. Better than anyone I have met in any of the core areas, by far, and he's no longer involved. Not because his ideas are shit but because people didn't like what he was saying; made death threats against him; added things against his family.
That's got to change.
Dr. Wright is quite unhappy with bullying by certain people in the Bitcoin development community, which he believes has driven away superior developers.
Flood control works. If you are getting a big block and someone's paying you to put transaction in there because we want 5 billion people using this, which miner is going to turn it away? If you get paid a little tiny amount per transaction, then you buy another hard drive and you take it.
This is capitalism. It is competition. It is brutal and ruthless and it works. If you can't keep up, bye-bye.
He’s saying that miners just need to buy bigger hard drives and put more transactions in each block. If your machines are underpowered, invest more money.
Segregated Witness, typical problem right now in this bloody industry. Scientific method: it doesn't exist. We just tell people, "this is what you're going to do." When you want a scientific process, you come up with an idea and then you test it.
He thinks that code changes like segwit should be tested and shown to be effective with real numbers in the field, instead of being forced upon the community by strong opinions alone.
Removing incentives. What incentive is there to be a miner of a little bit of a shitcoin settlement for everything else when you're getting money from everyone?
How does Coke make money sug