This week on the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream, SLictionary founder John “Jack” Pitts joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. to talk about Bitcoin SV (BSV), the Granath vs. Wright trial, and the blockchain industry in general.
Some announcements about SLictionary
Pitts starts by saying that the word “negligent” will hold special importance in the Norwegian trial of Granath vs. Wright. He says he’ll put a $10 BSV word bounty on SLictionary for those who want to define it. It was upped to $50 by CoinGeek.
Magnus Granath Norwegian trial dialogue, Miami Sound Machine as greatest band ever, the definition of NEGLIGENT and other very important topics… https://t.co/auF0rMzXAJ
— John Pitts (@EquityDiamonds) September 6, 2022
He also announces that SLictionary will be integrating with HandCash. This will lead to a 100x speed improvement over MoneyButton, which SLictionary is depreciating.
A new transaction record for BSV
Wuckert recaps some of the recent news in BSV. First, he mentions that the blockchain recently experienced 35 million daily on-chain transactions. This was a Relysia stress test, but it’s still a new record, and the blockchain handles it without any problems.
The stress test was a success for us – we identified and located a handful of issues in our infrastructure that were hard to reproduce any other way. Now we take 2 days to fix it and go higher.
— Rob (@Rob_GCC) September 7, 2022
Magnus Granath vs. Dr. Craig Wright
Wuckert notes that most listeners are excited to hear about the upcoming trial. He invites Pitts to give a brief summary of what’s happening.
Pitts begins by saying he has learned a lot from Dr. Wright, and not all of them are related to Bitcoin or money. One of those things is his statement that “there should be more litigation in the world.” He’d never heard anyone say that, and while it took a while to understand, he now interprets it as meaning that court is a superior way to reach resolutions when compared to alternatives like war. He also now understands that litigation acts as a deterrent to future attacks.
Recapping the events that led to the case, Wuckert recalls that Granath, under the alias HODLonaut, started the “Lightning Torch” (passing satoshis on the Lightning Network), which became a huge deal and made him Twitter famous. He then used this online fame to attack Dr. Wright and label him a fraud. Continuous cyberbullying by Granath led to Dr. Wright asking him to retract the statement, which he did not.
Looking at the bigger picture, Wuckert recalls how, initially, Granath’s supporters ran with the idea that Dr. Wright could not issue a court order to an anonymous Twitter account. Dr. Wright then put a bounty on Granath’s identity, which led to him being able to serve him.
Wuckert also points out that this lawsuit is Granath suing Dr. Wright. The defamation suit Dr. Wright launched will take place in the United Kingdom, but this one is about Granath alleging his tweets are truthful because Dr. Wright is not Satoshi. He rightly says that this trial will bring the Satoshi question into sharp focus, whereas in many others, it was either implicitly assumed or wasn’t the issue. He then asks Pitts for his thoughts on the matter.
What Jack Pitts thinks will happen
Pitts recalls that he initially thought Dr. Wright would win the Kleiman case hands down, and he came pretty close to being correct about that. He predicts that Dr. Wright will win this upcoming trial “rather easily” because the truth is easy enough to prove. Pitts also believes we’ll see more evidence that Dr. Wright is Satoshi at this trial, given that it’s integral to how it will turn out. He also thinks the world will learn an important lesson about the limits of anonymity.
Wuckert asks Pitts for his worst-case scenario. He replies by saying that Granath could quit the case as McCormack did. He recalls how Tether’s Chief Counsel Stuart Hogner bailed on the McCormack case as soon as Dr. Wright’s evidence was presented. He sees this as a dirty trick to avoid facing the inevitable truth.
Giving a poker analogy, he asks Wuckert to imagine they’re playing with an ace, queen, and king of spades on the table. However, when he goes all in, Pitts flashes his cards to let him know he’s got the nuts, meaning defeat is inevitable, so Wuckert folds and walks away.
“McCormack and Hogner saw the cards and folded,” Pitts says, pointing out how little work and research most “investors” in this industry do.
“The experts are all fake,” Wuckert agrees, noting how he’s had numerous conversations with so-called experts who don’t know the basics of blockchain technology. Compared to Dr. Wright, they don’t even have an elementary understanding of what’s going on.
Circling back to this case, Pitts says that, whereas in some other cases, expectations were extremely high and the cases sometimes under-delivered, he believes this one will be the exact opposite.
“This case is only about whether he is Satoshi. It’s almost the perfect case,” Pitts says.
What could happen to Bitcoin SV
Looking at the numbers, Pitts says that if only one person in 100 is convinced that Dr. Wright is Satoshi as a result of this case, and they decide to take a position in BSV, the price could quadruple.
“I think this is kind of a turning point,” he says. Wuckert notes that Latif Ladid waited for the result of the Kleiman trial before reaching out, so it makes sense that other important people might come out and support BSV after this trial.
Focusing on why there’s so much pushback against Dr. Wright and BSV, Wuckert says he finds the fact that people like Gregory Maxwell spend so much time trying to suppress the truth online bullish. Pitts says there’s some professional envy involved, noting how Emin Gün Sirer was “completely wrong on all counts” regarding his selfish mining paper, which Dr. Wright systematically demolished.
Zooming in on the fact that Gün Sirer tried to use Cornell credentials to establish credibility, Pitts points out that there are many appeals to authority in the industry. He points to the Algorand community as an example of this. It’s also common in BTC when people appeal to Adam Back’s authority on the basis he once wrote a paper on HashCash, Wuckert reminds us.
Looking at the early behavior of Satoshi Nakamoto and how he coded Bitcoin first, then wrote the whitepaper, and then looked for citations and stuffed them in, Wuckert calls this “classic Craig.” Pitts follows up by saying he believes that Dr. Wright using Liberty Reserve and seeing it go down may have been the lightbulb moment that helped him understand “if you go anonymous, it is 100% certain you will fail.”
Wrapping up, Wuckert brings up how Dr. Wright warned the industry that goading powerful governments is like kicking a gorilla in the nuts, and that’s a bad idea. Pitts wraps up by saying he wouldn’t be surprised to see some shenanigans on the part of Magnus Granath to keep this evidence from coming to light.
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