WBD013 Audio Transcription
Is Craig Wright Satoshi? No!
Interview date: Friday 20th April
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Craig Wright. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
Outside of the Satoshi question, in this interview I discuss with Craig on-chain scaling and his work on projects to grow and expand Bitcoin Cash. He is aggressively pursuing patents in this area, something which is questionable in a largely open source community.
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Morning, Craig. How are you today?
Craig Wright: I'm very well. I think it's afternoon already over here.
Peter McCormack: Yeah it is, I hadn't even noticed. It's because I left this morning. Thank you for agreeing to do an interview with me; we've been talking for a while. When preparing for my interviews, I always do a lot of research on the people, find out as much information as I can about them. With you, you have the most information of anyone and I couldn't get through it all, but from my reading there's two areas of information that it falls into.
There is a whole bunch of stuff around business and what you're doing with nChain and your whitepapers that you're writing, and then there is the other side which are the character assassinations and people calling you a fraud. Outside of that, following you on Twitter, I have seen you're just a normal guy who likes a whiskey, is a family man.
Craig Wright: I don't know about "a" whiskey, more like several!
Peter McCormack: And good whiskies. Because a lot of people have probably got their opinion on you based on secondary information, I think it would be good for people to understand who you are as a person and what your motivations are.
Craig Wright: That's fairly simple; I'm basically boring as batshit. I study, I work, I have my family and I have Bitcoin; that's it; that's fairly much my life. There's a bit of gardening chucked in there with my family, there's doing crazy things with my family and all the normal family side of things. That's fairly much it outside of study and work. So, on top of that, I study. I am currently doing a Doctor of Law and a PhD in Applied Mathematics simultaneously; one of those here in England and one of those in Paris, so I travel back and forwards for that reason. And then I work and that's about it.
Peter McCormack: What is work to you?
Craig Wright: Work to me is research and development. I helped found a company over here called nChain. nChain is designed to propagate and grow Bitcoin, and by Bitcoin now I mean cash, because Bitcoin has always been cash and will only ever work if it has that monetary value as cash; not digital beanie babies, not anything else. In that end, we seek to capture a lot of intellectual property. I know many people aren't really open to that concept, but the reality is I don't want to see 50 million forms of money, because money doesn't work when there are 50 million forms of money.
I know the arguments, "We can make it simpler and reduce friction" and whatever else, but that doesn't matter. When you go to a shop, you pay for something in cash and then you don't want to sit there flobbing about trying to decide which form. One of the best things in Europe that happened was a universal currency. A lot of governments complain about this and say how bad it is, like Greece; but the reality is, it's actually opened things up and allowed trade on a much larger scale than it ever happened before.
If you remember, going back in the 1990s around Europe when there were still other currencies, it was actually very difficult; you had to change every time you went across the border. In Europe, it's not like Australia. In Australia, going across the border, well that just doesn't happen. In Europe, going across the border is something you get three times on a train trip.
Peter McCormack: Right, so when you say 50 million currencies, you're referring to the range of different cryptocurrencies out there.
Craig Wright: We are, yes.
Peter McCormack: Especially in the monetary terms, we have Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ethereum, essentially Dash. Would you say you are a Bitcoin maximalist?
Craig Wright: I have always been a Bitcoin maximalist. There are still some archives of my old Twitter, I probably shouldn't have deleted all that stuff, but at the time it was an interesting part of my life. There were debates, even with people like Peter Todd and Adam Back, and they used to insult me because I was a maximalist back in 2013 and 2014. I'm sure they want to forget that I even existed back then, but unfortunately archive.is still has copies of all those Twitter conversations.
Peter McCormack: Well actually, from my research, your background goes way before 2013.
Craig Wright: That's correct.
Peter McCormack: I'm not going to ask the obvious questions, but what I would like to know from you and what you can answer is, when did you first start getting involved in Bitcoin and what is it about you that drew you to it?
Craig Wright: The answer to that isn't probably the one you want. The answer that I'll give is the first companies I had to do with Bitcoin were in 2009. I had one where I was trying to sell the idea to Gaming and other corporations; some of those people now work for me or with me. That was in January 2009.
Peter McCormack: What were you trying to sell to them?
Craig Wright: The concept of a monetary token that was independent, wasn't like Liberty Reserve, wasn't any of these other things. I then started another company later that year to do with research into Bitcoin; that was in May 2009. The first one was Information Defence in January 2009, the second was Integers. Integers was set up as a research organisation. Unfortunately that was my first run in with the government to do with Bitcoin.
I had a number of research projects and I claimed those under the Research and Development Fund. I didn't end up getting the money due. The incident was one where I'd placed a research application and under Australian law, people don't realise this, but if you don't claim research, you're breaking the law. So, this is something people don't get. If you do research and you don't put it into the R&D forms, then you have actually criminally breached the law. So, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. As soon as you do it, you are targeted, and I'll say that very simply.
I eventually came through several rounds of court and tribunal work to have the ATO accept everything but one claim. Out of all the claims, they didn't accept $52 which I could have fought on, but it just wasn't even worth one hour of lawyer to fight the last $52 which gave them their wonderful victory saying, "Over a $1.1 million claim, we have managed to stop $52". The interesting thing there is my accountants found another $30,000 that I was allowed to claim to offset the $52. So, I ended up theoretically better ahead. I received a payment from the government of $110,000 after that when they closed the settlement and that went through the court.
Unfortunately, the total cost was $1.3 million, so a very pyrrhic victory. I get to say how I beat the man and I'm pretty sure the man actually beat me, because if you think about getting $110,000 for $1.3 million in legal and accounting fees, you didn't really win.
Peter McCormack: What was the impact then on your life at that time?
Craig Wright: It was horrible. If you think about it, trying to fund lawyers and accountants and everything like this, we had Clayton Utz were a lawyer firm that we had, we had Ernst & Young and KPMG, etc, throughout many of these phases. So, where people even make claims about running all this stuff and whatever else, no one has taken the time to understand that with those companies, we had two main accountants; we had internal bookkeepers, we had a CFO, we had bookkeepers and accountants, we had Ernst & Young as our internal auditors, we had KPMG as external and filing parties.
All these so-called things that I was doing, I didn't do anything; like most scientists, I just signed cheques and watched the money go out the door.
Peter McCormack: Between 2009 and now, we're approaching nine and a half years, we're approaching ten years really, a lot has happened, a lot has happened with you; various ways to look at it. How do you make sense of the last ten years yourself and especially recently? I asked you before we started you must have developed some thick skin. How have you changed and how do you make sense of everything?
Craig Wright: Very much, I was very much a different person in some ways. Some parts of me were the same, I've always been a bit of a dick and I'll stay a bit of a dick. I don't know if you've seen the Team America thing, I posted it a few times myself. There are three types of people in this world: there's dicks, arseholes and pussies. I prefer to be a dick.
Peter McCormack: In what way are you a dick?
Craig Wright: If we can say it, dicks fuck people but it's better to be fucked by a dick than it is to be shit on by an arsehole.
Peter McCormack: You mean in business terms, you will happily be a capitalist?
Craig Wright: Yes, I'm a very happy capitalist. I believe in competition; I believe competition drives growth and helps the world come out of poverty and does more than anything else has in delivering poverty away from everyone on Earth. The reality is socialism doesn't work, community-type ideas where we all sing kumbaya and hug and whatever else don't work. The best way is capitalism.
Yes, that leads to things like envy, but envy can actually be positive if we look at in the right way. If we look at another person and go, "That bastard has more than I have, I want what he has", and if we have the right framework and we start teaching people that's not a bad thing, as long as you actually realise that you don't sit on your arse and do nothing, you risk what you have, you find a way of actually doing something that allows you to one day have all that person has.
Peter McCormack: What I see there is an attitude that probably many people have, some people won't overtly say it, but it probably does not fit the picture of a hero Satoshi that people have thought of. Do you think this is why possibly people maybe have an issue with you?
Craig Wright: In part. There's a lot of people who want this false idea and the unreal hero. I'm sorry I'm not going to be that. The reality is, if you look at people in history, they're not what you actually believe. Gandhi wasn't a saint, Gandhi spent more on flying in with helicopters on taxpayer money than would have been required to actually feed the people he went out to see. People don't like to see this, people don't like to see that the strategies put by in Nehru in India basically killed millions, if not tens of millions of people.
The whole idea of let's be self-sufficient, let's grow our own grain, let's thresh it, let's make our own cloth took what Gandhi said was this country that just creates stuff and gets paid money. That's what he actually said, Gandhi said about England, "We have this vibrant economy, this economy that creates goods and services, and all the English give us is money". Of course, if you're poor, all money does is buy you food, buy you shelter, buy you things that you need to survive. What he did was he isolated the country. Nehru followed those ideals and in isolating, the amount of grain that they had went down, the ability to trade internationally diminished, and overall India went from a state of lowering poverty into one of destitution.
In that period from the 1950s and 1960s, India crashed. It crashed because they abandoned capitalism, grabbed this false idea of socialism from the lies that they saw of the Soviet Union and the little fake villages and things. They made women destitute, they took people who were actually starting to have a modern outlook on life and drove them back 100 years. They took women and forced them to live in the house; they took women and made them second-class citizens. That's the hero? If that's what people see as a hero, I don't want to be one.
Peter McCormack: What are the misconceptions people have of you as a person?
Craig Wright: Most people see the concept of the rich producer businessman now as something that should be shunned. They see greed, they see nothing but this guy wants money. Yes, I've got lots of money; so what? The reality is, people don't seek money just for money; they seek it for doing something. I'll say I want more, but not because I want more money in the way that people see it; I want to be able to do more, I want to be able to create more, lead more, have more, more say, more ability to guide and change things, a more competitive open society, one where we actually teach people that it is good to compete.
When you go into the Olympics or any sporting match, people understand that competition is good. When you look at the Olympics, you don't sit there and go, "Wouldn't it be nice if they all joined hands and ran la-di-da to the end?" What we see is people striving, people trying to get that little bit more, and in the last 100 years of organised sport, we have seen what some people will say is a total waste, but at the same time we have seen tremendous gains in what humanity can show that we can do right to the limits of what we are capable of.
These people who now run less than 10 seconds for 100 metres, we couldn't do that 100 years ago; better training, better nutrition and everything that comes from that. If you think about it, it's not just some guy ran nine point whatever seconds; it's the nutrition involved with that, that helps everyone globally. We now know how protein helps us better, we now know the mix of carbohydrates that are better; not because some government official decided to find that, but because competitive sports people wanted a fraction of a second as a gain.
Peter McCormack: But do you think people disagree with this view that you have?
Craig Wright: Most people disagree with this.
Peter McCormack: Put it another way, do you think as an outspoken person there are any fair criticisms of you?
Craig Wright: Of course there are. I told you, I'm not the nicest guy on Earth; I could be many things that would make me seem nicer. I could --
Peter McCormack: Why don't you then?
Craig Wright: Time and effort.
Peter McCormack: Is it really that much effort? If you want to create more and you want to do more and you want to grow Bitcoin Cash which you believe is the real Bitcoin, do you not believe if people liked you more and believed you more, they would be more supportive? Could you actually be alienating people with this attitude?
Craig Wright: Of course. Some will be alienated, but at the same time no matter how liked I am, there's going to be people who hate what I'm doing. The very concept --
Peter McCormack: That's a different point.
Craig Wright: No, it's actually related. If I was to do that, there will be people who hate my method anyway, and at the same time, then I have to put a lot of time and effort into explaining to people where the marginal benefit is actually low.
Peter McCormack: Why does it take more effort just to handle things in a different way, in a nicer way?
Craig Wright: How many people are there want to talk to you? How many people do you have to sit down with and explain? One-on-one I can talk to people fairly well, but when you're trying to talk to a group all of whom are yelling and screaming saying, "I want this. I want this answer", here's another thing for you: why should they have that answer?
Peter McCormack: I've read a lot of articles about you and I've seen a lot of your posts, and I've seen a lot of attacks similar to what I've seen with Roger. I wonder if, over time, there's more a shift in your personality that's happened because of these attacks, and you've become dismissive more of people maybe and just don't care.
Craig Wright: That's part of being thick-skinned, isn't it? If you care more, then you react differently. To become thicker-skinned, you have to treat people differently; you have to have a different attitude. So, what you're talking about is, how do you survive, how do you survive when you're standing in front of people and doing things? You can say maybe I should do X, Y or Z, but the reality is we're all human and I have primary goals first.
Like it or not, I produce patents, I produce intellectual property, and much of that will go into Bitcoin Cash for free; it will be available for people to use. The very simple answer to that is if you don't like it, don't use it.
Peter McCormack: Let's talk about Bitcoin Cash. As somebody who came into the space more seriously about 18 months ago, I came in during the scaling debate. At first, I thought Bitcoin Cash made sense and then I read a lot about off-chain scaling and that also made sense. I actually see a solid argument for both, but they seem to be two sides of a different coin; whereas one is more about decentralisation and community ownership which is Bitcoin, and one seems to be more commercial and have centralisation which is Bitcoin Cash.
Can you explain from your side, as somebody who's been involved in Bitcoin since the very start, why you believe in Bitcoin Cash? Can you also then conversely tell me the issues you therefore have with the current implementation of BitCore?
Craig Wright: Core is not diversified, is not decentralised and Lightning is even less so. The reality is, if you're talking about a system that very few people can access, use and which doesn't scale, then you're thinking about digital gold/digital beanie babies. The reality of the scenario is not cash, it is not a system that globally people can incorporate into their daily spending patterns; it is a system that allows a few people to trade a digital asset, especially a few people trading a digital asset on an exchange where the reality is none of that moves off the exchange. It allows gambling, it allows speculation and it allows a few people to have a dream of winning big and getting a Lamborghini and all the rest. The reality of that is not what Bitcoin is about.
This is not a community thing; Bitcoin Cash is. The truth of the matter is there is no scaling limit to Bitcoin, there never was. Back in 2010, there was a post on Bitcoin Talk talking about data centres and eventually that's what will be. In that period, looking at scaling, 50,000 to 100,000 nodes maybe, there will be mining, mining pools, banks, etc, and that's really what's going to happen. This idea that banks will disappear is bunk; it will never happen. Bitcoin does not remove banks; banks offer credit.
If you want to start a business, then that's going to still be a requirement, and over time people are going to have more and more need. So, we're going to have different ways of credit, market versus bank-based finance, and I would see more market-based finance in the future, but it still doesn't dismiss the need for other things; it doesn't get rid of government either, because a government can easily say, "We want to be paid in US dollars" and they can change the tax rates, they can change whatever else. What it gives us is a short-term win where people can start actually trading globally. The only way we get any win is if people trade globally.
Peter McCormack: Where I struggle with the whole scaling debate is each side has a number of clearly intelligent, smart people who have a view on scaling and a criticism of the alternative to scaling, whereby they're quite binary; one's right and one's wrong. Why can't both be right and be different implementations and why can't both parties just do their own thing?
Craig Wright: Because there is no scaling via things like Lightning if you have the block size. Economics; very simple, it comes to economics. If you limit the amount of scaling, you have a way of forcing sidechains. If you limit the amount of scaling, you can force Lightning Network. The truth of the matter is, on-chain scaling is many, many, many times better, more efficient, more cost-effective than Lightning or sidechains ever will be.
Peter McCormack: What is the criticism of on-chain scaling then? If you are looking from their side, what's the criticism?
Craig Wright: Companies; their argument is everyone should be equal. The world is not a place where everyone is equal; it never will be. No one will ever become a basketballer when they're 3 foot 2, no matter how much they want to.
Peter McCormack: So, with on-chain scaling, we have to forget about someone like me wanting to have a node at my house, we're talking about --
Craig Wright: No, you don't but you have to --
Peter McCormack: Realistically?
Craig Wright: No, you don't. You have to accept the fact that even now, your node doesn't help the network. Nodes mine. If you want to be a miner, fine; you can run that up and you can be a non-profitable miner if you want to. You can pay money for that privilege.
Peter McCormack: Not all nodes mine.
Craig Wright: All nodes mine. If you read the definition of a node in the whitepaper, nodes create and propagate blocks.
Peter McCormack: We have full nodes which aren't really mining, right?
Craig Wright: No. Full nodes, if you read the definition in the whitepaper, create and propagate blocks.
Peter McCormack: From the whitepaper, but we have nodes which aren't creating blocks; they exist, right.
Craig Wright: You have nodes that are not full Bitcoin nodes.
Peter McCormack: Yes. Sorry, yes.
Craig Wright: You have what people have tried to tell you matters. The simple fact of the matter is, miners get the block within 2 seconds; home nodes get it within 43. By the time your home-user node has verified, the miners have moved on; you never help.
Peter McCormack: Before I ask my next question, what was your opinion on SegWit2x?
Craig Wright: Are we talking about SegWit or 2x?
Peter McCormack: Both.
Craig Wright: They're two things.
Peter McCormack: Well, I know you're anti-SegWit.
Craig Wright: 2x was a very, very small increase that was put there as a compromise and was a bait and switch and just shows how disingenuous these people were. SegWit is old technology, it is basically an access chain. I will put out some examples of books where it was documented. Going back to the 1990s, it was originally proposed by Mastercard Inset. It didn't take off because it is horrible technology.
Peter McCormack: From my limited knowledge and my experience, what it seems to me is that if you entrust the network with just miners, you're entrusting the network with people who have an economic incentive for the network and protocol to be designed in a way that suits them. It appeared that the nodes which weren't miners were able to block SegWit2x, because they had enough of a control over the network to stop the miners receiving their rewards.
Craig Wright: Totally incorrect.
Peter McCormack: That didn't happen? User-activated soft fork didn't happen or the threat of it?
Craig Wright: The threat impacted miners because they were told lies and believed lies.
Peter McCormack: Yes.
Craig Wright: The truth of the matter is in any small-world graph, the miners always win.
Peter McCormack: Why was there worry from the miners and why did it collapse then, because it felt like the user-activated soft fork was a real threat?
Craig Wright: I believe people were told it was a real threat. Until I started actually telling people how networks are constructed in Bitcoin, no one actually understood what even a small-world graph or a new complete graph was. It's a rather new concept in network theory; it goes back to Newman and Strogatz and others only from the last 20 years. In network theory and design, that's fairly new. There's a lot of material and things like epidemiology, but the truth of the matter is this is something that most computer scientists don't understand.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so we do have Bitcoin Cash and we do have Bitcoin.
Craig Wright: Yes.
Peter McCormack: How do you see this playing out? You've been teasing things out that big things are going to be happening in 2018. How do you see this playing out?
Craig Wright: I see we're coming up to May in a month and I'm going to be announcing a whole lot of things at the CoinGate Conference. I think this is going to be very interesting, because we have times and dates and everything like that.
Peter McCormack: Anything you can tell us now?
Craig Wright: I will tell you that Ethereum will be basically a sidechain for Bitcoin Cash. I can tell you Dash will be a sidechain for Bitcoin Cash.
Peter McCormack: How? I don't understand.
Craig Wright: You'll have to wait.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: I can subsume everything into it and this lovely thing called a patent means it can't work the other way. You can do it and you can set up your own little system and you can do it non-commercially and that's the whole point. You can compete non-commercially and non-commercial competition doesn't get you funding from banks or venture capitalists or anything else.
Peter McCormack: Is this why you've aggressively pursued patents and quite proudly pursued patents?
Craig Wright: Yes. It enables us to actually lock things into Bitcoin Cash. You've seen Jimmy and others talk about the fact that we're going to allow free access on Bitcoin Cash. We get to help drive people to Bitcoin Cash. We have a number of things like a certain large email and search provider has put out how they're going to do certain things using blockchain. Unfortunately, what they're talking about we've actually patented.
Peter McCormack: For Bitcoin Cash to be the success you want it to be, does it have to have a greater market cap value than Bitcoin?
Craig Wright: It will eventually.
Peter McCormack: Eventually?
Craig Wright: But that's not the aim; that's where people go wrong. I'm not going to try and pump these things; that will come naturally.
Peter McCormack: No, of course. But what I'm getting at is that Bitcoin is currently, and I see it as the base layer currency for all of crypto.
Craig Wright: Except it's not a currency anymore; that's your problem.
Peter McCormack: Well…
Craig Wright: You can't use it as cash; it's not a currency.
Peter McCormack: You can, you can use it as cash but the argument is that it's a slower cash. I bought things with Bitcoin and with Bitcoin Cash. I bought miners, S9s from Jihan with Bitcoin Cash and I've transferred money with Bitcoin. Right now, there is a negligible difference in cost and speed.
Craig Wright: Not right now, the sort of bottleneck over the weekend has just pushed that up again.
Peter McCormack: Generally speaking.
Craig Wright: And this is the problem and use.
Peter McCormack: When both networks are efficient, there's a negligible difference in the two, but Bitcoin is seen as the base currency for crypto in that if Bitcoin --
Craig Wright: You mean Bitcoin Core; they're both Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Do you know how I challenge you on that? There was a time when you were blocking people for calling Bitcoin Cash Bcash and I haven't called it Bcash and I won't because I know it's going to piss you off. At the same time, I believe the rebranding of Bitcoin as Bitcoin Core has been a direct strategy for people in Bitcoin Cash to discredit it.
Craig Wright: Is there RBF in Bitcoin?
Peter McCormack: Excuse me?
Craig Wright: Replace By Fees, was that in Bitcoin, yes or no?
Peter McCormack: I can't answer that question.
Craig Wright: Simple answer is no, it was added by Peter Todd and others and it totally destroys zeroconf. Next question: was there SegWit in Bitcoin?
Peter McCormack: I think the point I'm trying to make is different; is that --
Craig Wright: Is Bitcoin a chain of digital signatures?
Peter McCormack: Bitcoin to me, again I've limited technical knowledge, but Bitcoin for me is the state of whatever the protocol is in, how it's been developed. Now, it was referred to as Bitcoin.
Craig Wright: So, basically what you're saying is, if a bunch of developers choose that it is no longer what was set in stone, to make a quote from the early Bitcointalk forums, as a protocol that will always be the same to be Bitcoin, then it is no longer set in stone and it is now fungible.
Peter McCormack: It is the same chain -- for example, on Coinbase it's the same chain it has been for a long time.
Craig Wright: Bitcoin Cash is the same chain.
Peter McCormack: It's a fork of the chain.
Craig Wright: Actually they're both a fork of the chain.
Peter McCormack: I understand that, but it's the Bitcoin that everyone knows as Bitcoin and always has been.
Craig Wright: No it's not, because there is no SegWit in Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: We're arguing on minute details. The point I'm trying to make is that --
Craig Wright: It's not a minute detail. You completely alter the economics of the system, you alter the game theoretic structure of the system, you alter the code, you change the fact that you can have a secure payment in seconds and it is no longer Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Whose job is it to decide that, because it feels like --
Craig Wright: There is a whitepaper out there saying, "Oh, well, it's no longer valid". Well, if you want to change the whitepaper, if you want to change all those things that defined Bitcoin, create an altcoin and compete.
Peter McCormack: Isn't the whitepaper just an original plan?
Craig Wright: No.
Peter McCormack: I wrote an article. I think --
Craig Wright: No, the whitepaper was actually put down and the comment was the protocol was set in stone.
Peter McCormack: Okay, we're jumping around here but I believe the name, calling it Bitcoin Core, was a strategic decision to discredit it as being Bitcoin; it was to create a rivalry and have something to attack.
Craig Wright: It's not something to attack, it's called competition. Competition is fair.
Peter McCormack: But nobody else calls it Bitcoin Core really outside of the people inside Bitcoin Cash.
Craig Wright: Adam Back called it Bitcoin Core.
Peter McCormack: One person.
Craig Wright: The actual project is called Bitcoin Core.
Peter McCormack: The majority of people --
Craig Wright: The majority of trolls.
Peter McCormack: It's not called Bitcoin Core on Coinbase.
Craig Wright: There are something like 10 million people who use Bitcoin. The number of trolls and others who do all this stuff are minimal. The number of people out there, running around caring are less than 1%.
Peter McCormack: Why hasn't a single exchange changed its name to Bitcoin Core, so we have Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash?
Craig Wright: I don't really care what exchanges do and we'll see what happens over time.
Peter McCormack: That's where the brand is.
Craig Wright: But there's no brand. I'm sorry this is an open-source project.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: I have an intellectual property law degree and it's not a brand. It was never put as a trademark; it is not a brand. So, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, no one complains about those.
Peter McCormack: But do you not think it's hypocritical to be calling it Bitcoin Core, but to be upset when people call --
Craig Wright: I think it is the more honest answer. I think the truth of the matter is, it is Bitcoin Core; it is a fork of Bitcoin. It is one that has different things added that diverge from the original vision of Bitcoin. That is not what has happened in Bitcoin Cash; Bitcoin Cash follows the original vision. Bitcoin Core --
Peter McCormack: Why can't the original vision change?
Craig Wright: Then it is no longer something that is the original, is it?
Peter McCormack: Well --
Craig Wright: You're saying if we fork off and we change the vision, why can't it be the same? If you fork the vision, then you've forked.
Peter McCormack: So, again from my limited understanding, I actually wrote something and I said, "Satoshi's no longer relevant unless Satoshi comes out and proves who they are". Therefore, the original vision is no longer relevant because the original Satoshi isn't here to defend it.
Craig Wright: Then you come out, it's very simple. E=mc2 is still original as a formula and Einstein's not here to defend it.
Peter McCormack: That's very different.
Craig Wright: No, it's not very different. It's not perfect, it's not there, it doesn't account for gravitational forces; so, no. At the end of the day, you have something and you're trying to move the goalposts; it's very simple. You want to basically capture something without competing, you want to say we should do this even though we want to change. We want to tell people a different vision. We want to change that vision; we want to alter it. We want people who still believe Bitcoin is about cash, about freedom to the world, about giving people access to money in any place; South America, India, China, South Africa, Rhodesia, I don't care -- or Zimbabwe now, I keep saying Rhodesia. That's what it's about.
Peter McCormack: I understand what you're saying. We're jumping around and I want to go back to the point on the whitepaper, because how do we know that Satoshi would not like the Lightning Network? We don't know; he might, she might, they might?
Craig Wright: Of course we would. If you actually go and read posts and forums and whatever else, it was discussed, the whole payment channel idea was, and there were many conversations in 2009 and 2010 that go back to conversations that are still available with credit and even hell, some of those --
Peter McCormack: But that's eight years ago. We have eight more years of expansion of knowledge.
Craig Wright: We have eight years of a really crappy network that has gotten nowhere. We have something that is even less proposed and less fundamentally secure and less scalable than different payment channels that were discussed with Mike Hearn. So, back in 2010 there were discussions with Mike Hearn about past payment networks, including high frequency trading networks, etc. Lightning is not even a fraction of a percent towards what those discussions with Mike Hearn were and yet you're saying this crippled, centralised, slow network that requires people to be online, that basically fails if a node ever goes offline, is somehow superior?
Peter McCormack: If you're right, why has the adoption of Bitcoin Cash not been more rapid?
Craig Wright: Because we have to actually build. The problem over the last few years is people have been caring about Moon Lambos and looking at splitting and playing with prices, of making ICOs that are basically scamcoins. The truth of the matter is, we haven't been building.
Peter McCormack: Hold on, I think that's a distraction from the question. I think that's --
Craig Wright: No, it's not.
Peter McCormack: I think it's irrelevant. If you're saying the original vision still works, if the original vision still works and scaling is just an increase to the block size, then it doesn't sound to me like there really is that much work to roll out the Bitcoin Cash Network as the original vision. Therefore, what's the hold up?
Craig Wright: So, we have a world of developers who want to leave their mark. This has been the problem with Core, this is still the problem with certain aspects of even Bitcoin Cash or others. It is very simple just to remove a block cap, very simple. But then what have you done? You go up to people, you find them and you say, "I've made this really convoluted difficult thing that no one can understand. Look how smart and brilliant I am. I have some special new algorithm that incrementally finds what the miners want so that instead of doing something simple like charging a small amount of money and only doing what is profitable, we can centrally plan and manage as a technocrat the entire economy". To many people that's actually an attractive position.
If you listen to some of the core proponents, like Peter Todd for instance, they want to be technocrats and they will tell you how special they are, they will tell you, "We need complex solutions because this is a complex problem".
Peter McCormack: Hold on. That's not the answer to the question I asked.
Craig Wright: It is.
Peter McCormack: You're talking about what you would call Bitcoin Core.
Craig Wright: I'm talking about Bitcoin full stop, everywhere.
Peter McCormack: But that's not my --
Craig Wright: All of the people, even in BU we have many people who want a complex answer.
Peter McCormack: With all due respect, that's not answering the question I asked. My question to you is Bitcoin Cash is the original vision and it delivers a peer-to-peer cash system, my question to you is what is stopping adoption? I don't understand why then the answer to that question is a criticism of Bitcoin.
Craig Wright: Because you wouldn't let me finish.
Peter McCormack: It shouldn't be really a part of the answer.
Craig Wright: It is part of the answer.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: If you want to hear the full lot then…
Peter McCormack: Go on, yes. But I want to hear about Bitcoin Cash; what's stopping the adoption? I'm interested in both of those. By the way, for transparency --
Craig Wright: I'm not talking about Bitcoin Core necessarily; I'm talking about Bitcoin Cash as well.
Peter McCormack: For transparency, because I told you I mine, I have a switcher and I mine both. So, I'm trying, as somebody who interviews, to try and sit on the fence as much as possible; I'm not here just to attack. But I want to know what is stopping the adoption of Bitcoin Cash.
Craig Wright: Right now, even with Bitcoin Cash, we have developers who want to leave a mark.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: We have this idea it needs to be a developer community; it's not going to be long term.
Peter McCormack: So, you can't find developers.
Craig Wright: I can find developers, we've got them. The difference is it's going to move and change. Miners will start buying their own development teams, not to change the protocol but to get an edge, to make it slightly faster, to propagate better, to find that little bit of an edge that makes them money. That's where the future's going to go and that's where development teams will go.
At the same time, the other side that's been ignored is simplicity. How many wallets do you see that my grandmother, who's 96 or 97 now, I think she's just had a birthday so 97, would actually want to use?
Peter McCormack: This is an area I would not disagree with you on. I'm actually actively writing a post on how we've gone backwards in usability with crypto; not just wallets, the whole crypto thing is ridiculously complicated.
Craig Wright: Exactly.
Peter McCormack: Anybody who wants to use Ethereum and then has to use MyEtherWallet, I cannot believe, I feel we're in the Dark Ages then. That I won't disagree with you on.
Craig Wright: That's the problem; everyone's been focused on this, "I want to leave my mark on Bitcoin" and caring about all these silly things, these, "I can make a slightly better whatever else" instead of the simple answer. The simple thing that they need to do is make simpler access, simpler wallets, simpler ways of using.
Peter McCormack: That said, the fork was coming up to a year ago. There is enough money in the pockets of people involved in Bitcoin Cash and the companies involved to fund developers who will develop in the way that your vision is.
Craig Wright: Correct.
Peter McCormack: I think one of the issues with adoption is possibly a brand issue and brand is relevant.
Craig Wright: I disagree; it's the seen and the unseen. What you haven't seen is what we're funding, what we're doing.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: Until now, we haven't been out there telling people about that. This year is going to change a lot of that. The reality is, we have been building solutions, we have been working with other companies that we invest in, we have invested in people like ZB and HandCash and others who will create simple solutions and deliver those simple solutions. We have helped a number of companies like yours by investing them, and eventually they'll integrate more and more features and be simpler to use. We have intellectual property and technology that allows things like payment of streaming media, so a YouTube that you pay for in micro-fractions of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, in particular, every second that you watch.
Now, you can see these things weren't there, but that's because we had to develop them first and no, I haven't been out there saying what we've been doing; I've been researching and you can go back and you've found that I've been involved in all this stuff for many years and no one's known what the hell I've been doing. Well, our first patents have been awarded and there are going to be many, many more. Not only do we get to steer things towards Bitcoin Cash, but we get to block people like Bank of America and IBM who would capture some of this market.
So, the difference is, who do you want to trust more; Bank of America or someone who will give it freely to Bitcoin Cash.
Peter McCormack: I think I would want to trust somebody who will give it freely to anyone.
Craig Wright: Unfortunately, that's never going to happen. The whole point of doing this is to create a one thing. Millions of different cryptos --
Peter McCormack: Are you Bitcoin Cash maximalist?
Craig Wright: Yeah, I'm a Bitcoin as cash maximalist.
Peter McCormack: Okay. So, there is no scenario where both can exist?
Craig Wright: Long term, no.
Peter McCormack: Because I find that I believe both can exist actually. Ideally there would be one.
Craig Wright: Let's explore that for a second.
Peter McCormack: Yes.
Craig Wright: If everything I'm doing comes to fruition and we have Bitcoin Cash as a dynamic and credibly open payment network that also has smart contracting and all the value, and actually because of SegWit, is more secure than Bitcoin, BTC Core, why would you pay high fees? Any significant use of Bitcoin Core will result in high fees; why would you pay those high fees to put something into something that is actually less secure?
Peter McCormack: I'm not going to argue the security, because I think both networks are secure.
Craig Wright: Even if it's 1% less?
Peter McCormack: I can't prove it and I can't say --
Craig Wright: Say it's equal.
Peter McCormack: If it's equal, then it depends on multiple points, but at the moment --
Craig Wright: So, you're going to pay money to move it from something that is equally secure to something that is less secure?
Peter McCormack: I'm not going to argue the security point, because I can't give you an answer to that, but what I know is --
Craig Wright: Look past security.
Peter McCormack: No, I'm going to ask --
Craig Wright: Equally secure to equally secure, but paying money each way for that transaction.
Peter McCormack: So, I use both and, for example, I bought miners from Bitmain. I also pay my mining bills out in the US and I'm also a trader. So, I use both and my experience on transferring money and paying, the differences to me are negligible; I don't notice a time difference really. There was a short amount of time with Bitcoin at one point I noticed, but it didn't affect my experience and there's a negligible cost. But --
Craig Wright: That's because not many people are using it.
Peter McCormack: Well, no, no.
Craig Wright: If a million more people came in and started using, then people would say the spam has gone up and it would grind to a halt.
Peter McCormack: I'll tell you where my difference is, and you'll have to accept my view on this. I trust Bitcoin more than I trust Bitcoin Cash and I'll tell you, the reason I trust Bitcoin more than I trust Bitcoin Cash is I trust the people behind Bitcoin more than I trust the people behind Bitcoin Cash. Let me expand on that. I'm hopefully going to be interviewing Roger and I will be completely honest and open with him, but I do believe his attacks on Bitcoin are over the top and I believe --
Craig Wright: You mean compared to the attacks on people from many of the Core members?
Peter McCormack: They go both ways.
Craig Wright: Or Samson Mow?
Peter McCormack: They go both ways; I've seen it both ways and I'm not going to say one is worse than the other. I just feel like I trust Bitcoin just a bit more, but also on your side, it's been really interesting meeting you actually, but you have definitely left question marks, which you know you've done, about who you are, your background and also you admit you act like a dick, so sometimes you can be antagonistic.
Craig Wright: At least I don't act like an asshole.
Peter McCormack: I know, I know but just for some people, they're going to find you harder and Roger and the projects you're doing, I think it's certain people are going to find it something they won't want to be involved in, based on personalities.
Craig Wright: Here's the thing; it doesn't matter.
Peter McCormack: Yes, it does.
Craig Wright: If you're one of these people in a remittance conduit in the Philippines to other places in Asia, you don't care. If you're in South Africa, trading in Zimbabwe and going back and working as a cleaner, you don't care.
Peter McCormack: But it does matter because you asked me, so you wanted my opinion.
Craig Wright: No, I didn't actually.
Peter McCormack: No, you did; you asked me. You said what would I do and which would I use, and I told you and I told you why. I get the other argument. If you create a system which is faster and cheaper and gets rolled out in other countries, people are going to use it.
Craig Wright: That's not actually what I asked you. I asked if you had a choice between two that were equal, would you pay money to have one stored in BTC even if your fees are large?
Peter McCormack: Equally secure, and the answer I gave you was based around I don't disagree with one of the points you're making, but I think Bitcoin Cash has a brand issue based on the fact that it's attacking Bitcoin.
Craig Wright: You mean the fact that for every person who actually says anything in Bitcoin Cash, there are probably 10,000 paid trolls. And I'll say that because it's very simple; you can actually look at the accounts. I used to do forensics and they're paid trolls; these are people who are linked to known paid accounts. So you're saying that attacks from someone saying something about brand name versus attacks paid by sometimes illegally-funded Twitter trolling and Reddit trolling and whatever else --
Peter McCormack: This is the stuff I've never really gone into, because actually, do you know what, it's kind of playground stuff. Both sides appear to be attacking each other and both sides appear to be censoring information and both sides appear to be trolling and I choose not to get -- well, I say I choose not to; I put my own stuff out there and opinions. Everyone comes back to the same arguments, everyone comes back to, "Oh, but they do this" and you must admit it is a bit playground-like.
Craig Wright: I really don't care. I don't care what you think of me, I don't care if you love me or hate me or anything like this. What I'm going to do, and we're starting this now, we're going to roll out Bitcoin Cash in Africa and I'm going over to places like Rwanda and other not-so-fun holiday locations this year for that reason. We're going to have it rolled out to places in South America and Asia and we're going to make sure that people on low-end phones, people who have access to very little can use Bitcoin Cash.
Peter McCormack: That's actually a really interesting point I'd like to explore, because it's something Roger brings up as well. What is it that Bitcoin Cash is bringing to these communities and how's it going to help them? Help me understand.
Craig Wright: At the moment, some people in the South Africa to Zimbabwe corridor lose 40% of their monthly earnings moving back and forwards between money. There is no currency in Zimbabwe at the moment, none. The government, after their debacle, gave up.
Peter McCormack: Hyperinflation, yes.
Craig Wright: They just said screw it and stopped money. You have these places around these southern areas in Africa and central Africa where corruption takes away money, taxes take away money, just the exchange of money to be able to be used takes away your money. We have people who work hard and I'm not talking about what we think of in the West as working hard; I'm talking about work hard seven days, basically around the clock.
I don't know if you've seen how maids live in places like Singapore and whatever else who come over from the Philippines, they have shit lives. They send money back. They sometimes work many, many months. I don't know if you've seen at New Year's in China, there is the biggest migration of people anywhere on the globe. It happens because people go in and out just to visit their family for one time in a year.
Peter McCormack: I'm aware of it from the cruise industry. In my old advertising world, I used to work with a leading cruise company and they had the migrants who would go onto the ships, work round the clock to earn enough money to take home and support their family. So, I'm aware of economic situations. But how will Bitcoin Cash be rolled out into Africa and how will it help these people? Do they all have mobile phones, is that a situation?
Craig Wright: 83% of people in Africa have smartphones now or access to them.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: We're looking at a place whereby SMS, simple messaging or even early phones, people can now have access. They don't need to run a full node; they don't need to do all this stuff. None of this, "They can't be part of Bitcoin because they don't have a high-end computer". All they need is the ability to send a transaction, to hold their own keys to be safe.
Peter McCormack: You're looking to give a form of money, form of cash to these people in Africa?
Craig Wright: Yes and South America.
Peter McCormack: South America.
Craig Wright: And Asia. The reality is, the West doesn't need Bitcoin; it doesn't need another speculative asset. Many people in the world can't live right now; they don't have anything right now. All this, "We want to get Moon Lambos" and whatever else sounds great. The reality is, we have billions, not millions, billions of people who are suffering.
Peter McCormack: In fairness though, you've put out pictures of you with a Lambo.
Craig Wright: Yes, I had a hired Lambo that wasn't actually my own one.
Peter McCormack: But you've talked about sports cars and a nice house.
Craig Wright: So what? This is part of the reward for doing these things; I'm a capitalist.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but then if you're a capitalist then you're contradicting yourself because then you're --
Craig Wright: No, you're not; this is the problem people get. The fact that you create value is what the reward is for. Capitalism doesn't mean that you are fully altruistic and sit there on your arse doing nothing, no.
Peter McCormack: No, sorry. It seems that at one point you're arguing for helping people with no money.
Craig Wright: You help people by creating something that has value.
Peter McCormack: I know, but then you're also then criticising the speculation of a free and open market.
Craig Wright: No, I'm not criticising an open market. I'm criticising a closed market, a controlled market, one where technocrats get to decide. There's a big difference; I love free markets, I want competition. If you guys in Bitcoin Core want to compete the crap out of me, go for it.
Peter McCormack: So there's nothing wrong and essentially, we can't have an issue with Moon Lambos or these means; we can't have an issue with it because that's the --
Craig Wright: I have an issue with why people are doing it; the fact that they believe they can sit in their pyjamas and make money doing nothing.
Peter McCormack: I don't think there's many people who actually think like that. From my experience --
Craig Wright: I've seen Reddit.
Peter McCormack: A few people might. My experience in the trading community, most of the people who are making money are working very hard to be good traders.
Craig Wright: I'm not against speculators.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: This is where people go wrong. I don't think speculators should be discredited or whatever else; I'm all for speculators. I used to work on a stock exchange, but I believe people need to look at all the aspects of this. Speculation is good; it has a benefit. Without market makers and others --
Peter McCormack: It brings capital into the markets.
Craig Wright: Exactly. That's not an issue; I don't have a problem there. But, and here's the big but: if you lose money, don't whine.
Peter McCormack: I couldn't disagree with that. Okay, sorry just going back to that point though, helping people in countries, talk me through the use case of somebody living in Africa, how Bitcoin Cash is going to help them.
Craig Wright: Fraction of a cent, near instantaneous, ability to move your money from where you earn it to home, to monitor what you're doing, to see what your family has, to control access, to share access, to be able to have money that instantaneously appears in the hands of your family.
Peter McCormack: So, it's the mobility of money.
Craig Wright: It is the mobility, it is the velocity, it is the fungibility.
Peter McCormack: Do you see it as a scenario where somebody earns it in one country, sends it to another country, low fees.
Craig Wright: Instant.
Peter McCormack: Instant, low fees and then can change it into their local currency?
Craig Wright: At first, yes.
Peter McCormack: Because Bitcoin Cash has a volatility issue.
Craig Wright: Bitcoin Cash has a volatility issue, so does Bitcoin Core.
Peter McCormack: That's what I'm saying, like all cryptos.
Craig Wright: Do you realise, if we look at the British pound, it last year went from $2.02 at its highest, which was up from $1.60, down to $1.08?
Peter McCormack: I don't remember the British pound being $2.02 last year.
Craig Wright: It went up to that before the Brexit issue.
Peter McCormack: Are you sure?
Craig Wright: I am sure. And it went down to $1.08. I remember $1.08 because I woke up and there was £100,000 in my trading account, yes I trade, because I'd set a stupid low level at $1.12 and overnight there was a flash crash and…
Peter McCormack: I travel to the States nearly every month and I don't remember a single time; but, you know, so be it.
Craig Wright: That's looking at the individual fluctuations.
Peter McCormack: That only affects you if you're travelling internationally. £1 still buys a £1 --
Craig Wright: No, that's not correct.
Peter McCormack: Pretty much.
Craig Wright: If you want to buy a car.
Peter McCormack: Okay, on certain scenarios, but the volatility of crypto is slightly more dangerous than the volatility of the pound.
Craig Wright: Because we have very little, yes.
Peter McCormack: Yes, of course.
Craig Wright: But that's how you actually capture things like if you're going to be a trader, we can use speculators. You're going to have people who short and people who set up options and other things. Imagine if, as a merchant, you can actually have a series of options or other derivatives tied to the actual coin so that you know that this is my maximum downside loss and this is my upside loss and you can actually start predicting.
Peter McCormack: What I think I'm getting to though is that for Bitcoin Cash to be successful, doesn't it need to have a more stable price?
Craig Wright: That will actually come with yes and no. We can also tie instantaneous exchange and access at the same time.
Peter McCormack: Fine. That's fine if people want to instantaneously change it. Wow, we've already done an hour and I haven't even barely looked at my screen. I've got hundreds of questions I haven't asked. Conscious of that, we've got about another 15 minutes, and I just want to cover a couple of specific things. So, your first goal is to have five billion people come to know about and access Bitcoin, the cash implementation.
Craig Wright: Correct.
Peter McCormack: What's goal two?
Craig Wright: Goal two is having them use it.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: Goal three is basically having them use it as their first choice of money.
Peter McCormack: Which you think can happen?
Craig Wright: Yes, but I don't have the same timeframe as people.
Peter McCormack: Okay, well you said five years.
Craig Wright: Goal one is five years.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: Goal three there is 20 to 25 years.
Peter McCormack: I think we're going to have to do this again another time, because I've got so many questions. But the only other area, and I'm sure there's a limit to how much you could talk about, but I've obviously read around the Kleiman lawsuit, and I know there's going to be things you can and can't answer. I'm aware you guys became in touch with each other around 2003 on a cryptography forum; is that correct?
Craig Wright: I'd actually met Dave, talked to Dave before then.
Peter McCormack: So, you'd met him, okay. You became friends?
Craig Wright: We became friends, yes. You can have friends online; you can have some very close ones.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, yeah.
Craig Wright: Dave was a very close friend of mine.
Peter McCormack: Did you ever actually meet in person?
Craig Wright: Yes, we have.
Peter McCormack: You did and got on well?
Craig Wright: We got on house on fire type well.
Peter McCormack: I believe obviously his death affected you.
Craig Wright: Very much. He was my best friend and I might be a curmudgeon, but even curmudgeons end up having people that they care about.
Peter McCormack: But you are now in a situation where his brother has activated a lawsuit. So, rather than just start throwing questions at you, what can you say about this and what are you willing to talk about?
Craig Wright: I will quite simply say that we will answer the lawsuit, we will put out affidavits and depositions and we will release information that is true as the course of the lawsuit goes on.
Peter McCormack: This is where it all gets interesting though. What it got interesting for me is reading the lawsuit in that, subject to it all being true and correct, you were obviously involved in Bitcoin very early on.
Craig Wright: I've been involved in Bitcoin a long time, I'm not going to hide that, yes. It's been my life for many years.
Peter McCormack: Do you feel that things are going to have to come out in the lawsuit that are going to change people's opinion of you?
Craig Wright: Unfortunately, yes.
Peter McCormack: Do you think in a positive way or a negative way?
Craig Wright: Both.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Craig Wright: Some people who hate me will like me and some people who like me will hate me; some people won't care and there'll be something between for many others.
Peter McCormack: I think we should probably speak about that another time then.
Craig Wright: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Okay. Last thing I want to talk about, obviously thank you for agreeing to see me and I've really this and enjoyed doing the research as well. I think sometimes people forget behind each person is a person, a human living their life, and attacks are difficult, attacks hurt. You're often labelled a fraud which is quite an accusation.
Craig Wright: It's not really an accusation; it's just a term. What is fraud? I've got a law degree, fraud is very simple to define; it's someone trying to gain money which is what it is about, trying to get money from another person using deception.
Peter McCormack: I think the use of --
Craig Wright: I have not taken money from anyone; when I get it, I give it away.
Peter McCormack: I think when people use it, they use it more broadly to mean maybe disingenuous.
Craig Wright: Then that's not the same as saying fraud.
Peter McCormack: No, but I think that's what people mean.
Craig Wright: I don't believe they're actually saying that.
Peter McCormack: You don't?
Craig Wright: No. They're using it as a form of attack to basically stop anyone looking further. In December 2015, I didn't say anything, so of course all my degrees were fake. The simple answer there is some things I've not graduated from, which I don't claim that I've done. Some things I have graduated from, but I did late.
I've got a number of degrees where I effectively became a graduand and two years later, I actually finally did the graduation; some of those because I just hate paperwork and administration; some of those because I wanted to try and get the chance to actually go to a graduation ceremony and didn't, and then went, "Bugger it, just send me the damn paper out". Interestingly enough, that doesn't mean you can't use the title; it just means you haven't passed from being a graduand to a graduate.
Others, because people like to not see that a professional doctorate has an equal standing to a PhD. I'm doing a professional doctorate in law at the moment, a Doctor of Law, that the university publishes; that is equivalent to a PhD, it is considered part of the PhD programme, but it's not a PhD. Then other things just because I couldn't have done that. At one stage, I did four postgraduate degrees simultaneously, which nearly killed me, just because I wanted to see what my limits were. That was beyond my limits, that was breaking point type level.
Peter McCormack: But with all these attacks, are you never tempted just to shy away and disappear?
Craig Wright: No.
Peter McCormack: Or does it drive you on further?
Craig Wright: It doesn't do anything.
Peter McCormack: Doesn't do anything? It must affect you sometimes. There must have been times when you thought, "Give me a break"?
Craig Wright: It did in the past, yes; it affects my family more.
Peter McCormack: That's an important point.
Craig Wright: My wife would love all this to go away, and my wife would love if I settled certain things. The reality is it isn't going to happen; I'm not going to make everything easy for those who want to attack me, whether it answers their questions or not. I came out and I did the wheelbarrow full of degrees bit and people then say, "Oh well, they're online unis". Well no, actually the University of Newcastle, for instance, is one of the top universities in Australia. Northumbria is one of the top law courses here in the UK, especially in the field that I did it. One of my studies in mathematics, I chose because my supervisor was a field prize winner.
Peter McCormack: I think yes, that's an area people challenge you. I think we know what this really relates to when people put out the main accusation.
Craig Wright: You mean they want answers that they don't deserve, or they say that I said things because they haven't read what I actually said?
Peter McCormack: I think people want an answer to one specific question, which I'm not going to ask you today; I've told you that. I think people want an answer, I think they want an answer because they were told they were going to get one and then they didn't.
Craig Wright: They didn't get told that by me. Other people say, "We couldn't get him to answer". Too bad.
Peter McCormack: It seems to have had a negative effect on some people; Gavin.
Craig Wright: Unfortunately yes, Gavin got very highly attacked out of all this and I'm sorry for that.
Peter McCormack: I read your note on that and I could sense genuine sorrow for that. I've reached out to him; he's not interested. It feels like he feels like he's been let down by the community.
Craig Wright: He has been. Gavin took on a project that he never asked to take on. Basically, the way that Gavin got involved with this was one day, someone who was the head of that project basically said, "Here's access and start managing this". Gavin thought that meant he would be like a 2ic effectively and have help. The next thing he realises is, "Bugger, I'm the only person doing this anymore and the person who was in charge of this has scarpered off and done other things and left me holding the bag". That would not be something that I would recommend doing to anyone again. It's where Gavin ended up the first time.
Peter McCormack: Are you still in touch with him?
Craig Wright: From time to time.
Peter McCormack: Okay relationship?
Craig Wright: He's in America, I'm in Britain, but I like Gavin; Gavin's a great guy. Gavin's smart enough to be a family man who hides away from most of the Bitcoin drama.
Peter McCormack: We've hit our time limit.
Craig Wright: Yes.
Peter McCormack: I'm going to ask to follow this up another time. Thank you for doing this; I really appreciate it. I've never done an interview where I've looked so little at my questions. Yet, I've never brought so many questions to an interview, so it was quite interesting. Do you have any final thoughts, anything you want to add, anything you want to tell anyone what's coming up for you?
Craig Wright: Bitcoin is peer-to-peer electronic cash; that's important and everyone seems to forget that. There is no moving away from that central vision. Bitcoin only works, only scales, only succeeds when it is cash.
Peter McCormack: All right. We did it, thank you.
Craig Wright: Thank you.
