Craig Wright warns crypto criminals their time is almost up

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Dr. Craig Wright is done playing nice, and fed up with those in the digital currency industry who help facilitate crime. On November 8, he took the stage at the AI & Blockchain (AIBC) Summit in Malta to discuss “Satoshi’s Vision: How Bitcoin’s Original Design Creates Honest Commerce,” and why every criminal backing the bucket shop industry will soon be in trouble,

He began with a short history of digital currencies before the invention of Bitcoin, and specifically, how they were all eventually shut down by governments and regulators, with theories of the internet providing freedom for criminal commerce completely being debunked along the way. This history proves, he noted, that “Every single thing that you’re saying about tokens not being covered is utter bullshit.”

He then turned to his creation of Bitcoin and his first detractor, James A Donald, who suggested changes to the original whitepaper to protect the currency against government intervention. Over time, Wright discovered why Donald was pushing for these changes. “This guy didn’t want Bitcoin. He wanted child porn coin. He wanted, like all the others want, this system that works outside government.”

He then discussed how existing laws are already spelling doom for the so-called cryptocurrency exchanges that help people like Donald buy and sell their illegal wares. Chinese law makes miners and exchanges equally liable for the crimes of drug dealers or illegal pornography. As criminals increasingly get caught, these groups will have the choice to stop mining, work with the law, or suffer the penalty of the law.

What most people don’t understand about Bitcoin, he noted, was that it was created to help trace money, rather than make it anonymous. “The one thing that was always missing from every crappy token thing, every crappy e-money, every Chaumian system that failed to understand the real world, was tracing,” he said. “Money requires tracing.”

But what all these criminals are hoping to find in Bitcoin is an anonymous, untraceable version of money. “Bitcoin isn’t that system, and blockchains are not that system,” he explained. “There is no way possible to make a blockchain that cannot be traced. No way to make a blockchain that cannot be seized. There is no, absolutely, zero way that you can have a system that cannot be taken. And that’s good.”

He then noted that the distributed ledger of Bitcoin also will be no help to criminals. Liberty Reserve, he noted, was far more distributed than Bitcoin or current cryptocurrencies are, but the governments of the world still took it down swiftly and arrested its criminal users everywhere they could be found.

He ended by warning these criminals to choose their criminal hideouts wisely, as they are likely to spend time in jail wherever they were caught, specifically citing Roger Thomas Clark’s time in a Thai prison for his role in the Silk Road.