Back in June, I posted the article, Is Craig Wright Satoshi Nakamoto? That's the wrong question to explain why I'm eager to see what emerges from Craig Wright's employer, nChain.
Short version: during Wright's botched 2016 "coming out" as Satoshi, one of the people who vouched for him was Jon Matonis. Matonis also made a statement that I found especially interesting, claiming that Wright had created a voluminous amount of research showing that Bitcoin could be (is?) Turing complete. Matonis expected this research to shift the cryptocurrency universe away from altcoins and back to bitcoin. Matonis' affirmation of Wright as Satoshi, coupled with his statement about Wright's research is why it piqued my interest when Matonis joined nChain earlier this year.
At the time, I searched the web, and found nothing recent that was particularly interesting about either Wright or nChain. The company's web site was pretty-much bare bones.
Today, however, I did a Google search for ["Craig Wright" nchain], and I found that Wright has now released a few publications and launched a blog. I found two posts in his blog that are especially interesting.
First, The Future of Bitcoin is Unlimited – Highlights of Craig Wright Speech has this youtube video.
Second, in Risk of SegWit – Mining Cartels, back in June, Wright explained his belief that today's Segwit fork changes the incentives of the bitcoin landscape in such a way that a 51% attack by a cartel of miners becomes progressively more likely as time passes.
According to Wright, a cartel of miners could participate in Segregated Witness for a period of time, and then suddenly stop accepting segwit blocks. If this happens, Wright says the miners would be free to use Segregated Witnesses' so-called “AnyOneCanSpend address” to (in his words): " instantly steal funds associated with all SegWit transactions in blocks they mined." He provides the following step by step outline as to how it might happen:
- Miners signal SegWit.
- A group of mining pools and companies with a joint hash rate in excess of 50% of the current network power form a cartel.
- The cartel group then stops signaling SegWit and returns to the network to the former bitcoin protocol.
- If a sufficient quantity of bitcoin is transacted using SegWit, the cartel would switch from SegWit to treat all transactions using the original protocol. Cartel members could then instantly use the “AnyOneCanSpend” address from SegWit to steal funds from the transactions in blocks they mined (especially any high-value block). To incentivize miners to join the cartel, the cartel could agree that each member distributes stolen funds from their attacked blocks to the whole the group in some proportion (for example, according to the hash rate each maintains.) No one miner or mining pool would need to itself have 51% of the hash rate in order to participate.
Correct? I don't know, but it gets worse. He also says that, unlike pre-SegWit bitcoin which gets more secure as time goes on - the longer that SegWit runs, the more profitable (i.e. enticing) this form of cartel attack would become.
But wait, there's more!
Wright goes on to say:
This is one of several hundred attack scenarios which SegWit could open. Under a SegWit regime, such attacks against the bitcoin network could work because the economics of the system would be changed; rather than illicit activity being discouraged, it would be encouraged under SegWit. This seems to be the aspect of the system that is least understood by Bitcoin Core developers and other proponents of SegWit.
In addition to his blog, the nChain web site has several papers by him under its Publications link:
- The illusion of scale in segregated witness
- Proof of Work as it relates to the theory of the firm
- The irrationality defense of paternalism
Looks like interesting reading, but I haven't gone through them yet.
So I still don't know and almost don't care whether Wright is Satoshi or not, but it looks like maybe he's starting to publish some of that voluminous research that Matonis talked about. What do you think? Did bitcoin just jump the shark when it activated SegWit? Are Wright, Matonis, and nChain getting ready to bring Matonis' 2016 statement to life?
Directly or indirectly, the work of Satoshi has already provided employment opportunities for tens of thousands of people around the globe and created over $7 billion of new blockchain wealth. The forthcoming research work from Dr Craig Wright can only be described as voluminous and highly technical.
At its essence, Bitcoin displaces the intermediary, or trusted third party, and there will be no sacred cows along the way. It will be methodical, scientific, and unforgiving in its ascent.
Going forward from here, Bitcoin-company board rooms and others throughout the financial ecosystem will be recalibrating business models as these applied developments realign the prevailing orthodoxy. Expect radically-new solutions that address specialized nodes and on-chain scalability, smart contracts that exploit a Turing complete Bitcoin, the impotence of tokenless blockchains, and a systematic decline in the quantity and value of alt-coins.
Oh, and speaking of Matonis, there's an interesting July 24 article from him on the company's blog, too: No Governance for Old Men: Coordinating Protocol Upgrades in the Future.