Vitalik Buterin Calls Craig Wright a Fraud

“Why is this fraud allowed to speak at this conference?” – So thundered Vitalik Buterin while pointing at Craig Wright following Buterin’s rebuttal of two points.

In regards to the Lightning Network (LN), Wright had apparently stated that making LN work is as hard as breaking a discrete log, which is “absolutely false,” Buterin said.

“For NP hard problems, it’s a widely known fact that we can make heuristic solutions that are very optimal, almost as good in practice,” Buterin said.

Craig Wright had also apparently said in the context of selfish mining that gamma can be less than zero.

“An absolu… absolutely nonsensical claim,” Buterin said while waving his hand around as if dismissing someone claiming 0+0=2.

Now this is a bit technical, but gamma in the context of selfish-mining is just an abstract number of sorts from 0 to 1 or 0% to 100%. That’s just measuring the % of nodes that collude with the selfish miner. Something which naturally can’t be a negative percentage.

Wright says the negative percentage comes from instead of paying or helping the selfish miner, you pay other people. “Instead of the selfish miner earning a benefit, the honest miner does,” he says.

Yet who is paying here is unclear since we have the selfish-miner and honest miners. Those “honest miners” can either collude knowingly or unknowingly. The % of those that do is either 0, as in none, or 1, as in everyone.

“I wrote the Lightning Network whitepaper, I still don’t understand your presentation,” Joseph Poon retorted.

Bringing us back to Buterin’s concluding question which attracted wide applause: “Why is this fraud allowed to speak at this conference?”

He spoke at the Satoshi Vision conference too and we must say one felt completely uncomfortable listening to the utterly vulgar language he used throughout that presentation.

A language that we have to repeat here, because Buterin’s question needs an answer. Asked by someone how does a miner decide which transaction is valid, “I don’t give a shit,” Wright said.

Similar statements that makes one feel they might not be in decent company were made throughout that presentation.

One can therefore imagine Buterin thinking his presence in the same venue as Wright might paint him with the same “clown” brush in the eyes of uninitiated audience members.

More poignantly, court documents have recently revealed that some one million bitcoins allegedly claimed by Wright to belong to him and be in a trust fund of sorts are actually none other than the proof of solvency MT Gox address.

This is not the first time Wright has been called out by prominent members of the crypto community across crypto-political spectrums.

But somehow he remains of relevance and is even given a stage despite widespread evidence of his dubious, if not absolutely fraudulent, claims.