[Coinlive Talk] “Harder than Building Facebook or Google”: An Exclusive Interview with Dr. Craig Wright

• Always the controversial figure, Craig Wright has made headlines again recently with the conclusion of his court proceeding against Hodlonaut, of which Wright was ordered to pay compensation
• In this exclusive interview, Wright tells us that he plans to forward his vision of having 3 billion transactions per second on his blockchain
• He also insists that despite the negative publicity, he doesn’t care for “day traders” or “jobbers”, and that it will be up to people like himself to build a better blockchain

The crypto scene has indeed dominated headlines in recent times, from the collapse of Terra to the liquidation of hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and Binance’s massive chain exploit. Amidst the incessant brouhaha and hubbub, there is one name that strikes a chord with even veterans in the scene – Craig Wright, the alleged founder of Bitcoin who claims the pseudonym of mysterious persona Satoshi Nakamoto.

Wright first came forward with his claim in 2015 alongside the late American computer forensics analyst Dave Kleiman. He also obliged to interviews with BBC and The Economist in 2016, where he had allegedly “digitally signed messages using cryptographic keys created during the early days of Bitcoin’s development”.

The debate to Wright’s claims as Satoshi has been hotly disputed since then, with tech publication Wired running an editorial in 2016 which reported that Wright “may be a hoaxer”, pointing to inconsistencies in Wright’s statements such as his company Cloudcroft owning a supercomputer built by SGI, and that he had obtained a PhD from Charles Sturt University – both of which were quickly denied by the respective issuing parties.

Recently, pseudonymous user Hodlonaut triumphed in a court case for defamation against Wright, with the latter receiving a court order to pay a compensation of $348,257. Hodlonaut, whose real name is Magnus Granath, had made several scathing remarks beseeching Wright’s claim to be Satoshi, stating that Wright had “lied and cheated” in his efforts to prove himself to be Bitcoin’s founder.

Just last week, Oslo District Court Judge Helen Engebrigtsen ruled in favour of Granath, explaining that he “had sufficient factual grounds to claim that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto in March 2019”. Following the verdict, famous whistleblower and ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden clapped back at Wright, retorting that “Dude can’t even commit fraud properly. Just embarrassing.”

To find out more about what goes on within the mind of this controversial figure, we spoke to Wright himself in an exclusive closed-door interview.

“Bitcoin is not a new currency or anything like that – it's a micropayment system,” he says. “The advent of the Internet saw many problems with such payments, and it still does. Even now, credit cards don’t allow it. So, the big holy grail of the Internet has always been to allow payments of under a cent. That became an obsession for me.”

Coinlive's Interview with Craig Wright, who claims the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto

Wright also spoke of his numerous attempts to launch the successful product that we see today, going into details regarding his many courses taking in information security, numerous master’s degrees in computer science, and even law. While this certainly paints a picture of a man hard at work in what would otherwise be considered a labour of love, even that is hardly free of criticism.

Anonymous blogger PaintedFrog came forward in August this year claiming that he had found “substantial and deliberate plagiarism present in at least thirty of Wright’s Doctoral Thesis, including nearly all of Chapter 6.” PaintedFrog went further to provide detailed comparisons supporting his claim on his blog, alleging that many parts were stolen “literally or almost literally”, without any proper citation, even stating that mistakes and errors from the source material were lifted without correction.

Wright, who created Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision), a cryptocurrency that is purported to restore the original Bitcoin protocol as envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto, has harsh words for Bitcoin (BTC):

““BTC” is a bad copy of Bitcoin that is misleading and defrauding people into thinking that Bitcoin has something to do with this three-transaction a second system that’s designed to put people onto Lightning, which is actually a cryptocurrency. There’s no encryption in Bitcoin, no encryption on any blockchain. It’s not a cryptocurrency, it’s an electronic token system that acts as cash.”

On this, we went on to discuss what Wright’s vision (or “Satoshi’s Vision”) was for Bitcoin since its genesis.

“My original vision of Bitcoin was for it to be a small, fast, micropayments system,” he says firmly. “Today, next year, I don’t want to see a single block coming through that doesn’t have 10 gigabytes worth of transactions. By 2030, my long-term goal is to get a sustained level of around 3 billion transactions a second.”

Yet as Wright admits, doing so entails work. A lot of work.

“To do this and to move where we want to go now with Bitcoin means solving some of the most difficult computer science programme problems in human history,” he tells us.

“I mean, it’s harder than even building Facebook or Google from scratch. People don’t seem to realise what distributing over a wide global network of billions of transactions a second seamlessly with low latency of underwriting milliseconds means.”

Scalability has always formed a core part of the Blockchain Trilemma – that public blockchains can only guarantee two of three aspects simultaneously: security, decentralisation, or scalability. Indeed, even as Ethereum begins to prepare for a scalability leap that will take place in the Shanghai Upgrade slated to take place in 2023, many in the crypto community have already expressed concerns regarding Ethereum’s decentralisation.

As of now, upwards of 60% of Ethereum’s validator nodes are OFAC compliant and 64% of the world’s total staked ETH is held by 5 entities, as reported by crypto analytics firm Nansen. Lido Finance takes the lead by holding 31% of total staked ETH, followed by Unlabelled and Coinbase, who both hold 23% and 15% respectively.

Contrastingly, Bitcoin, or BTC, is widely believed to not just be the safest blockchain protocol, but also the most decentralised to the extent of preventing threats of a 51% attack, which occur when a single collective of miners manages to wrestle control of more than 50% of a chain’s computing power, allowing the group to cease transaction activity on the chain or reverse transactions.

Wright, however, is a firm opponent against the decentralisation of BTC.

“What is the ethos of decentralisation?” he says indignantly. “There’s no ethos of decentralisation in Bitcoin and the whitepaper, and the whole term is just complete B.S. I’m sorry, BTC is run by three people who control access to the node software. It’s managed and maintained by these three people who have a Stalinist idea of democracy. If you’re deciding, as a developer, on who wins and who loses, that’s centralisation.”

He goes even further to suggest that the concept of decentalisation is fabrication:

“It’s being sold to a few people who want to gamble,” he retorts. “If you’re not building something to scale, then you’re not building anything other than a Ponzi con job. All of the guys sitting there going ‘we’ve got boring apes and other such things.’ Big Deal. So What?”

At this, we quickly move the topic over to regulation on cryptocurrencies, which has quickly become a primary talking point for an increasing number of countries in the world. While countries like Singapore hold cryptocurrency at an arm’s length, Japan for instance, welcomes its broader inclusion. States are grappling to keep up with the expedient developments in the crypto space.

Aditya Narain, Deputy Director of the IMF’s Monetary and Capital Markets Department, said in a statement in September this year that “regulators are struggling to acquire the talent and skills to keep pace given the rapid pace of evolution of the crypto world.”

Wright, however, disputes this.

“The rules all exist,” he says confidently. “Bitcoin is not a cryptocurrency and it can be regulated. It IS regulated. The only thing stopping it, is the deception by people who lie about that to try and get it around states and governments.”

Moving forward, Wright also believes that BSV will be the reigning token, even above BTC and Ethereum, remarking:

“It will come down to people like myself and corporations to build something that is bigger, faster, and better. The reality is no one in the long term is going to use something like ETH or BTC”, he predicts. “They’re too slow and too expensive and too cumbersome.”

Closing off the interview, we asked Wright for some words addressed to his opponents and naysayers in the crypto community.

“If you’re just a day trader or a jobber, I don’t really care for you,” he says harshly. “Personally, I hope you never find out about the platform, so go ahead and keep buying BTC. Keep that promise that it’s going to go up a million – love to see you go broke. Stay in your teeny-weeny small blocks, and I will scale.”

“By the end of this decade, there won’t be a company, bank, or government that doesn’t integrate our product. Why? Because it will be cheaper, faster, better, and more secure. So have a nice day.”

This is an Op-ed article. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Readers should take the utmost precaution before making decisions in the crypto market. Coinlive is not responsible or liable for any content, accuracy or quality within the article or for any damage or loss to be caused by and in connection to it.