Computer scientist Dr. Craig S. Wright is reminding crypto trolls that their online comments, much like Bitcoin transactions, aren’t 100% anonymous.
On March 29, attorneys for Wright, the individual behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym, served legal papers on the individual behind the Twitter account @Hodlonaut. The papers warned that Wright had had enough of Hodlonaut’s “targeted campaign” to harass and libel Wright with “highly defamatory and abusive tweets.”
The @Hodlonaut account has since deleted the offending tweets, which included calling Wright “a very sad and pathetic scammer. Clearly mentally ill.” The account was also one of the originators of the hashtag #CraigWrightIsAFraud and accused Wright of attempting “to fraudulently ‘prove’ he is Satoshi.”
As Wright’s attorneys makes clear, Wright “has not fraudulently claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. He is Satoshi Nakamoto. He produced the report Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System in October 2008, sent the first Bitcoin to Hal Finney in January 2009 and played an integral part in the development of Bitcoin. He has explained his role in detail on previous occasions.”
Wright is demanding that the individual behind the @Hodlonaut account tweet an apology to him, make a statement in open court apologizing to Wright and acknowledge the falsity of the allegations made against Wright. Instead, Hodlonaut seems to have hidden under his mother’s skirt and is nowhere to be found.
The @Hodlonaut account claims to be based in Norway and the majority of its tweets were sent from the Oslo area, including a photo posted from a local bar named Kasbah. The account has also posted several photos in which the individual’s face is obscured but identifying tattoos on both arms are clearly visible (pictured above).
If anyone recognizes these tattoos, Wright is offering US$5,000 in Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) for information regarding @Hodlonaut’s true identity. (For the record, that’s a far better deal than Wright got when two technology magazines involuntarily outed him as Satoshi in 2015.)
Also, @Hodlonaut has indicated his intention to attend the Baltic Honeybadger 2019 conference in Riga, Latvia on September 14-15, so anyone looking to collect the reward should keep an eye out for individuals who seem unnaturally focused on keeping their sleeves rolled down.
Like the ‘Norwegian Blue’ in Monty Python’s infamous Dead Parrot sketch, @Hodlonaut may have ceased its anti-Wright squawking but there are plenty of other social media sock puppets who were only too happy to join in on the Wright-bashing from the (presumed) safety of their anonymous Twitter handles. But these internet tough guys will have their own day in court soon enough.
As for what may have motivated the attacks on Wright, @Hodlonaut’s very public support for the Lightning Network – the inelegant off-chain bolt-on to the discredited Segwit Coin – suggests that @Hodlonaut’ hoped to discredit Wright’s support for BSV and its capacity for massive on-chain scaling.
Similar attacks have been made against Calvin Ayre, another noted BSV supporter, who over the past few weeks has endured a shameful litany of smears and allegations regarding underage females. The @Hodlonaut account was part of this disinformation echo chamber, publicly referring to Ayre as ‘PedoCalvin’, so @Hodlonaut’s legal woes may only be beginning.
Rest assured, @Hodlonaut and the other trolls are about to discover why ‘he who laughs last, laughs best.’ They’re in for an even greater shock when they realize that the bastardized Bitcoin variants they’ve championed can’t scale to meet the needs of a truly global financial platform, and thus they’ve expended all this vitriol for nothing.
BSV is the only real Bitcoin because it follows Satoshi Vision and as such is the only one that can scale to meet whatever the future can throw at it. Evidence of this capacity will be amply available at the upcoming CoinGeek Conference in Toronto on May 29-30.
The antics of @Hodlonaut and its similarly-minded ilk are further evidence that it’s past time the Bitcoin industry grew up. CoinGeek invites all Bitcoin adults to come to Toronto and play a role in the future and leave the trolls to play in their social media sandboxes.
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