The big drama of the year: a three-way battle for the right to speak on Bitcoin

When it comes to interests, anyone can play the role of Satoshi Nakamoto.

On February 9, Dr. Craig S. Wright (hereinafter referred to as Ao Bencong) published his second article proving that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. The content attributed the reason why Satoshi Nakamoto has always existed anonymously in the past to "being engaged in court evidence collection and other roles in government departments, which do not allow him to disclose his identity."

Prior to this, he published a public statement called "Owen Satoshi's first public statement proving that he was Satoshi Nakamoto" ("Owen Satoshi's first post proving that he was Satoshi Nakamoto"), and soon after, he posted "evidence" that he was Satoshi Nakamoto on social media. But things did not go as he had imagined. Based on his previous behavior of claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto and criticizing Bitcoin, his self-declaration was met with disgust from most people.

A common anti-counterfeiting movement was launched in the industry. After industry insiders revealed that the evidence he provided had obvious signs of fraud, WikiLeaks became the mainstay of the anti-counterfeiting force against Craig Wright.

As the only evergreen cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has maintained its absolute dominant position since its birth - the number one in market value. An important reason for this is that its founder has never appeared in the public eye, which coincides with the decentralized freedom advocated by Bitcoin. It also achieves community consensus, protects the mysterious image of Satoshi Nakamoto, and maintains the decentralized nature of Bitcoin.

Of course, behind the formation of consensus, it is not surprising that the interests of various parties are involved. Those who contributed to the realization of Craig Wright's fraud scam, whether it is Amaury Séchet, the BCH core developer who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, or Matt Luongo, a foreign user who was mistakenly called the core developer of the Bitcoin core wallet and proposed to issue additional bitcoins, are all defenders of their own interests in this dispute.

Therefore, this war of words based on social media platforms is actually the beginning of three parties of Bitcoin stakeholders trying to seize control of Bitcoin.

The Bitcoin Core Camp

Betting on Lightning Network

Looking at the current situation, after the BCH fork, BCHABC led by Wu Jihan became the successor of BCH, and BCHSV led by Craig Wright evolved into the forked coin BSV. Bitcoin core seems to have not made a sound for a long time. BlockBeats learned that Bitcoin core will focus all its efforts on promoting the implementation of the Lightning Network.

In early February, wallets based on the Lightning Network began to appear on a large scale. According to industry insiders, wallets based on the Lightning Network have been launched in large numbers abroad, with more than a dozen companies joining the competition. Moreover, under the fierce competition, the products have been updated from the initial "ugly and difficult to use wallets" to the second stage wallets with good user experience and beautiful user interface.

The recent #LNTrustChain trend on Twitter has also created momentum for the Lightning Network.

A Twitter celebrity named hodlonaut wanted to test whether the Bitcoin community had trust, so he had an idea and said that he would send 100,000 satoshis (about 3.5 US dollars) to strangers who replied to his tweet through the Lightning Network.

The community turned this event into a torch relay, with each torchbearer adding a little satoshi to the next one. When the torch was passed to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, it completely ignited the enthusiasm of the entire community. The Lightning Network also became a big hit.

Even Domino's Pizza, the second largest pizza chain in the United States, has begun to accept the Lightning Network. On February 14, Domino's announced that there would be a 95% discount on payments using the Lightning Network, with a transaction fee of less than 1 cent, and pizzas would be delivered to your home within 30 minutes.

For users, the biggest advantage of Lightning Network wallets is that they can be compared to Alipay's seconds arrival speed, which greatly promotes daily use. At this stage, the types of wallets that have emerged include: wallets that control their own funds, custodial wallets, node hardware, point of sale (POS), and Lightning Network browser plug-ins similar to the Ethereum browser plug-in MetaMask.

At present, there are no products launched in China, so some people in the industry believe that lightning network wallets will explode this year. Solving the chronic problem of blockchain products being difficult to implement, the development of lightning network wallets will undoubtedly reach a certain height. Whether the ecological foundation of the initial lightning network can compete with DApp is also the key to Bitcoin core regaining its voice.

Will Bitcoin be issued in larger quantities?

In the public's perception, the battle for the right to speak on Bitcoin was initiated by the always high-profile Craig Wright, but the fact is not so. It seems more like it was intentional by the other two factions.

Last week, at the Satoshi’s Roundtable, someone proposed to increase the total amount of Bitcoin issued and stop the halving of mining block rewards every four years to ensure that miners have sufficient economic incentives and to ensure the security and continuation of the Bitcoin chain. The statement was made by Twitter user Matt Luongo.

This has caused a lot of opposition in the industry, and relevant practitioners have questioned it. But the user also said on Twitter, "I am the one who said that one day we may have to increase the upper limit of Bitcoin supply." The long-term prospects of Bitcoin in the secondary market are unpredictable, and it is impossible to predict whether the demand for Bitcoin transactions will increase or decrease in the future, let alone what the value of Bitcoin will be at that time and how often it will be traded.

From the above, Matt Luongo believes that Bitcoin may eventually become a settlement chain that only supports large transactions, and all small transactions of Bitcoin will be transferred to the secondary market. Because the team selling tokens cannot control the market, all promises about prices are unreliable.

While causing controversy, Matt Luongo’s remarks were widely circulated in China with the label “Bitcoin Core’s next goal is to issue more Bitcoins, modify the 21 million upper limit, and stop halving.” Matt Luongo’s Twitter account description states his identity as “Founder @thesis_co, where we build @keep_project and @fold_app.”

If we examine the voices of the majority of the industry, the answer of the opponents is nothing more than that the issuance of additional coins means the breakdown of consensus. Once this balance, which has long been maintained by the mysterious existence of Satoshi Nakamoto, is broken, the mysterious aura of Bitcoin compared to other encrypted digital currencies will also be lost.

In addition to industry insiders, Jeff Liu, head of PeckShield's Silicon Valley R&D Center, also expressed his opposition to the issuance of additional Bitcoin on January 12. He believes that the total issuance of Bitcoin is capped at 21 million, which is a fundamental feature, and the possibility of the community reaching a consensus to change this feature is very small.

Jeff believes that the development of the Lightning Network will increase the total number of Bitcoin users and will not reduce the transaction volume on the Bitcoin chain. There are other ways to ensure the income of miners, such as increasing the length of Bitcoin blocks to expand transaction capacity.

Matt Luongo, who was mistakenly named as a core developer of Bitcoin Core, also posted a screenshot of the media, hoping that someone in the Chinese Bitcoin community could correct the relevant mistakes. This absurd mistake of misattribution seems to be unintentional, but the power of subsequent dissemination is enough to show that the Bitcoin Core faction has never been absent from the struggle for control of Bitcoin.

BCH ABC Camp

The New Satoshi Nakamoto

Since Jihan Wu and Satoshi Wright turned against each other, the original believers of Bitcoin have officially split from 2 factions to 3 factions - Bitcoin core wallet, BCHABC led by Jihan Wu, and BSV led by Satoshi Wright.

As an ally of Craig Wright, Wu Jihan and Craig Wright were on the same front, and they both opposed Bitcoin Core’s Lightning Network. Although the reasons were completely opposite: Wu Jihan believed that the Lightning Network would lead to the centralization of Bitcoin, while Craig Wright believed that the Lightning Network would make Bitcoin out of regulation.

It is not difficult to see that Wu Jihan and Craig Wright are in an absolutely opposite state of values. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why the two later parted ways.

For the old rival BCH, even if Craig Wright is full of loopholes, he will still have followers, and once the public opinion position is lost, it is difficult to recover. Then, BCH core developer Amaury Séchet publicly claimed that he was Satoshi Nakamoto and gave a digital signature, claiming that this could prove his identity.

A netizen named Mark Ludenburg said that this was an ECDSA signature. He attached a piece of code and combined it with the signature and hash value given by Amaury to verify that the signature was consistent with the public key of the Genesis block.

BlockBeats ran this code and the result was True.

But in fact, this does not completely prove that what Amaury said is true. Gregory Maxwell, a developer of Bitcoin core, once said on StackExchange that signatures can be forged and anyone can impersonate Satoshi Nakamoto.

Chief competitor Satoshi Wright also criticized Amaury on Twitter, saying that he did not even understand the most basic logic of Bitcoin.

Who is Amaury Séchet?

Amaury Séchet has been active in various BCH activities as the chief developer of Bitcoin ABC and is one of the main figures in external publicity on behalf of BCH. In August 2018, Amaury Séchet was kicked out of the BCH Slack community because of his proposal to reduce transaction time by using the "pre-consensus" framework, which Craig Wright strongly opposed.

As the chief developer of Bitcoin ABC, many of Amaury’s suggestions have been adopted. For example, shortly after he proposed deploying the new BCH address format, BTC.com wallet and Stash wallet announced the adoption of the new address format one after another.

Moreover, he put forward his own views on many controversies encountered in the development of BTC ecosystem, such as the substantial increase in block capacity, how to standardize sorting to promote BCH expansion, changing the address format of Bitcoin Cash, changing the irreversibility of losses caused by erroneous transfers, and the loss of original block network effects due to cryptocurrency forks.

Whether Amaury is the real Satoshi Nakamoto is still an unsolved mystery, but what is certain is that after the fork, the price of BCH is nearly double that of BSV, but the reality is that the Bitcoin ABC team, which got the title of BCH, has not made any substantial progress.

But even so, BCH is still one of the strongest contenders in the battle for control of Bitcoin. No one knows what other trump cards Wu Jihan has.

BSV’s Camp

Craig Wright’s “Fighting Again and Again”

As the "loser" in the November hash rate war, Craig Wright did not seem to be affected much. The BSV network represented by him is now more active than BCH ABC.

As always, the evidence that Craig Wright claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto was always dug up by netizens to prove that he was fake, and this time was no exception. Within a few days, netizens on Reddit dug up evidence of paper fraud. For details, please refer to "If your fraud level is not high enough, you can't be Satoshi Nakamoto"

Not only that, Twitter celebrity WikiLeaks created a repository on Github that records evidence of 6 frauds committed by Wright, as well as 13 articles describing experts in different fields who said that Wright is a liar, with Vitalik Buterin alone criticizing Wright 3 times.

In addition to Craig Wright's repeated failures in claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, he is indeed trying hard to create an identity that is consistent with Satoshi Nakamoto.

"I like to wear suits and ties. This is my choice, and it is a normal decision that matches my wealth." He emphasized that he is not short of money and does not care about wealth, which is consistent with Satoshi Nakamoto's indifference to money. He said that his profession is court accusation and evidence collection, and he was once called an "influential spy."

Therefore, he designed and invented Bitcoin to end the need for such a career, and the ultimate goal was to provide or track the traces of funds for the CIA Special Operations Division. This is consistent with Craig Wright's slogan of making Bitcoin serve the world government, but it is unknown whether this was the original purpose of Satoshi Nakamoto's creation of Bitcoin.

BSV’s Active Ecosystem

Although people still don’t believe that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, the BSV network he represents has been very active recently.

On January 25, a clock application appeared on BSV. This was the first time that dynamic information appeared on the Bitcoin blockchain. Many people believed that this clock was of great significance, indicating that BSV could already carry web page code, which had never happened before. If HTML code can be put on the chain, the application will be endless.

Sure enough, since the appearance of the clock, new applications have appeared on BSV almost every few days, including audio and small games, and even the classic Super Mario. Compared with BTC Core and BCH ABC network, BSV focuses more on applications, and several developers are always trying to put something new on the chain.

Some experts believe that putting HTML code into the blockchain is not a desirable behavior and is very unsafe. In this case, virus code can also be put into the blockchain, which is a huge security risk for users.

However, in the eyes of BSV, these are not big deals. Putting the code on the chain is just a prelude. Their ultimate goal is to make the Internet a side chain of Bitcoin.

The Internet has been developed for 20 years and has greatly facilitated people's lives, but it still has some problems, such as the most serious trust problem. At the CoinGeek conference on November 30 last year, Craig Wright proposed a new project called "Metanet", the purpose of which is to build an Internet based on blockchain, a new value network.

At the CoinGeek conference, Craig Wright used a used car example to explain his idea. When buying a used car online, the merchant tells the buyer all the information about the car, but the buyer may not believe it because the trust issue is too serious and the buyer cannot verify what the merchant says. However, on the blockchain, different groups will record how many times a used car has been repaired, how long it has been used, and where it has had an accident. Buyers will not have any trust issues at all because the information on the chain is cross-verified and difficult to forge.

In Craig Wright's view, this is the real purpose of Bitcoin. Transmitting compressed data through Bitcoin transactions can change the way the Internet works, which is more efficient and secure than the current Internet.

The battle over who is Satoshi Nakamoto 2.0 has begun. The old Bitcoin core team wants to rely on the Lightning Network to maintain Satoshi Nakamoto's wishes. BSV represented by Craig Wright wants to make the Internet a side chain of Bitcoin. The BCH ABC team is not willing to lag behind, and prestigious developers have also stepped forward to join the battle.

After the bubbles of various altcoins burst, at the beginning of 2019, everyone's attention was focused on the originator of cryptocurrency. Did this set the tone for the whole year?

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(Source: Blockchain Rhythm)