Bitcoin civil war and why Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto—The Jist features Kurt Wuckert Jr

Kurt Wuckert Jr. recently guested on the weekly show hosted by U.K.-based media The Jist, where he discussed a myriad of topics, including Dr. Craig Wright and why he’s under such intense attack, the Bitcoin civil war and why it centered on block size, El Salvador’s colossal mistake, how Mastercard has managed to manipulate an entire industry, and more.

Kurt began by describing Bitcoin as a protocol that allows a ruleset that creates a network that writes to a database. This allows its users to do whatever they want as long as the miners will accept it. Satoshi built Bitcoin as “peer-to-peer electronic cash” as he detailed in the white paper. 

On the market crash that followed the bull run in the first quarter of 2021 for the digital asset market, Kurt believes it’s all down to Tether and not the other microeconomic reasons analysts have been clinging onto.

This year, regulators have been going after Tether, but even when they close in on the project, they only give it a slap on the wrist, impose a small fine, and this is quickly swept under the rug. However, the effect these crackdowns had was a drying up of the printing of USDT. And once Tether wasn’t printing as much USDT, the bearish action went right up, stamping the allegations of market manipulation that have plagued the project for years.

Once again, the printing is back. “Tether prints, price goes back up,” he said.

The Bitcoin Civil War

Bitcoin SV is the product of the Bitcoin civil war in which those opposed to implementing Satoshi’s vision remained at BTC and some are now at BCH. Kurt narrated that this war stretches as far back as 2013, centering on how best to scale Bitcoin.

The BTC faction was adamant that the block size limit should remain unchanged and preferred to make fundamental changes to the protocol to allow transactions to occur through other channels, such as Lightning Network. This has also led to the rise of BTC on Ethereum as a wrapped token.

“There’s now more BTC on Ethereum than there is on Lightning Network. Think about that, it’s a weird one,” Kurt added.

Ironically, the smart contracts that attract users to Ethereum were first deployed on Bitcoin. However, early developers tinkered with the protocol from the moment Satoshi stepped away and subverted his original vision. Developers who had worked with Satoshi like Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn fought hard for Satoshi’s vision, but soon, the new faction led by the likes of Greg Maxwell had enough influence to kick them out and take over BTC.

This war led to the split in 2017 to two separate chains—BTC and BCH. The latter also faced a similar war for not fully implementing Satoshi’s vision, and ultimately, Bitcoin SV was born.

“Bitcoin SV is the version I support. It’s the roadmap towards restoring Satoshi’s vision of Bitcoin which frankly, we have not tried between 2010 and 2017. And if we believe Satoshi had any value at all, isn’t it worth trying his idea?” Kurt stated.

Big blockers abided by Satoshi’s vision of a fixed protocol, secured by proof of work. They understood that to scale Bitcoin, they had to increase the number of transactions per block. And with BTC’s hard-coded 1MB limit, you can only process 7 transactions per second. This isn’t even close to enough for global adoption.

With BSV’s unlimited block sizes, the network can scale to meet user needs. On slow days, the blocks may not be as big, but on days when there are spikes in usage, it can process terabyte-sized blocks with millions of transactions. 

The limited block sizes are the reason why BTC has had to turn to other solutions that put users’ funds at risk. The biggest thus far is the Lightning Network, which they claim fixes BTC’s scaling bottleneck.

“Lightning Network does not allow you to maintain the original protocol of Bitcoin. It requires a change in the way that signatures are handled in Bitcoin. And Satoshi described Bitcoin as a chain of digital signatures,” Kurt said.

For Lightning to work, the developers had to get rid of transaction malleability. To do this, they replaced the chain of signatures with a hash of witness data of signatures, a fundamental change to the Bitcoin protocol. 

Craig is Satoshi

Kurt also talked about Dr. Craig Wright, starting with how he was doxed in 2015, with Wired and Gizmodo running articles about him on the same day the Australian tax agency raided his former home.

Craig had denied being Satoshi for some time, preferring to keep a low profile to protect himself and his family. But soon enough, this wasn’t feasible anymore.

Craig then brought together some of the most influential people in the Bitcoin space to prove he was Satoshi. They included Gavin Andresen, who was at the time the head developer for Bitcoin Core, and Jon Matonis, who was at the time the head of the Bitcoin Foundation.

When Jon, Gavin, and the others attempted to tell the world that Craig indeed was Satoshi, they were instantly denounced by the BTC community. Gavin had to leave his position as lead developer and even had his keys revoked. 

“I believe firmly that Craig Wright was the creator of the Satoshi Nakamoto moniker, that he was the author of the whitepaper and was generally the architect of the Bitcoin system,” Kurt said.

Watch: Dr. Craig Wright’s keynote speech at CoinGeek New York conference, Set in Stone: What is a Commodity?

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