Craig Wright Claims to Be Satoshi in Critical Response to CFTC on Ethereum

Published on by Coindesk | Published on

NChain chief scientist Craig Wright has criticized ethereum to a top U.S. regulator, while again claiming to be bitcoin's pseudonymous inventor, Satoshi Nakamoto.

"My name is Dr. Craig Wright and under the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto I completed a project I started in 1997 that was filed with the Australian government in part under an AusIndustry project registered with the Dept. of Innovation as BlackNet."

Wright first put forward the case that he was bitcoin's creator in late December 2015, offering up documentation to back up the claim.

Initial support from some quarters soon gave way to skepticism however, and he later said he would provide further evidence by moving bitcoin mined by Satoshi in the earliest days of the cryptocurrency.

In his reply to the CFTC, Wright went on to make a strident critique of the technology and governance of blockchain and smart contract platform ethereum.

The only way ethereum can scale is to alter its model to copy bitcoin, he added.

Wright also argued that decentralization is a myth, as the control of either bitcoin or ethereum is "Limited to those who run nodes and these are people running at large data centers and not home networks."

Twitter is, of course, buzzing about the CFTC response, with many skeptics calling for Wright to indeed prove his claim by moving Satoshi's bitcoin.

A few suggest they believe Wright is indeed Satoshi.

Wright is currently fighting a lawsuit alleging that he misappropriated billions of dollars'-worth of bitcoin from the estate of a former business partner.

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