Craig Wright And The BlackNet Lie
MyLegacyKit (Link to original medium.com post)
Written by Arthur van Pelt
ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material might become available
after publication of this article, it will have edits and updates every now
and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress,
to become a reference piece for years to come.
Intro
As far as we know now, it was on June 30, 2016 in Andrew O’Hagan’s “The
Satoshi Affair” when the larger audience learned that Craig Wright
considered something called “BlackNet” as the roots of ‘his’ Bitcoin.
“‘Sketch it out for me,’ I said to Wright. ‘Those years before bitcoin. What
was happening that would later have an influence? I want to know about all
the precursors, all the previous attempts to solve the problem.’
‘Back in 1997 there was Tim May’s BlackNet …’ May was a crypto-anarchist,
who had been operating and agitating in the cypherpunk community since
the mid-1980s. ‘Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability
for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a
totally anonymous manner,’ he wrote in the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto in
1988. BlackNet operated like a precursor to WikiLeaks, soliciting secret
information with payments made by untraceable, digital money.
‘We all have a narcissistic hubris,’ Wright told me. He wanted to take May’s
BlackNet idea further. He was also enthusiastic, in those early days, about
Hashcash and B-money. The idea behind Hashcash, a ‘proof of work’
algorithm where each of a group of computers performs a small task that
can be instantly verified (thus making life impossible for spammers, who
depend on multiple emails going out with little to no work involved), was
‘totally necessary for the building of bitcoin’. (To simplify: it’s a bit like the
system used when registering on many web services, when you’re asked to
type a specified set of characters into a box. This is ‘proof of work’,
something a robot can’t do, and it authenticates the transaction.) Wright
said that he spoke to Adam Back, who proposed Hashcash in 1997, ‘a few
times in 2008, whilst setting up the first trials of the bitcoin protocol’.”
Craig Wright, a notoriously desperate rewriter of history in which he mingles
his Satoshi cosplay into all kinds of real life events — and creates numerous,
many times backdated, forgeries in the process — , is seen here mentioning
Tim May, who indeed originally came up with something called BlackNet in
the 1990s. Note that Craig Wright is completely wrong here with 1997
though, as Tim May’s BlackNet originated in 1993.
It is also well known that Craig Wright made, and still makes, many of these
timeline mistakes in his Faketoshi career. Now let’s explore all the
inconsistencies in Craig’s false and totally made up BlackNet story. Prepare
for a hefty read, as we’re going to do a deep dive into this subject over three
main angles, all more or less intertwined with the BlackNet lie.
1. Designing Bitcoin
2. Coding Bitcoin
3. Writing Bitcoin whitepaper
Will there be forgeries too? Y’all love forgeries, don’t you? Yes, there will be a
lot of yummy forgeries too. There’s never a Craig Wright story complete