In a surprising move at the Deconomy conference that took place recently, the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin openly calls Craig Wright a fraud. This is not the first time that these two people have a conflict between them. Deconomy is a global forum that develops the concept of distributed economy.
6 April, AtoZForex - Craig Wright is most commonly known for claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto. However, he has never managed to show any proof of him being Satoshi. Not just this, but upon searching a bit more into Craig Wright, he has a history riddled with false claims and allegations against him. To say the least, he is a very controversial figure in the crypto world.
Vitalik Buterin openly calls Craig Wright a fraud
At the same time that the panel discussion was taking place at the conference, Vitalik was also posting on his Twitter account a series of commentary tweets. While his tweets were quite neutral, it seemed that he was not liking Craig Wright. Below are some of the tweets from Buterin about Wright:
25. Re selfish-mining: "you actually have a negative gamma" ... "you actually help the honest miners by attacking the network"
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 3, 2018
My bulls*** meter appears to be showing a negative value.... oh wait that was an integer overflow.
27. The Bitcoin network is highly connected, and therefore a transaction gets broadcasted across the network very quickly. Therefore double spending is not worth worrying about. True in some cases (many consumer-merchant payments), false in others; the distinction matters.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 3, 2018
This story did not end here. Craig was quick to post some responses about Vitalik on his own Twitter.
https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/981133497791205376
https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/981152244195254273
Vitalik's Commentary
The topic that the panel was discussing at the time was mainly about the scalability of bitcoin, and whether bitcoin cash is better or not. Bitcoin cash aims to solve the scalability issue by raising the block sizes. Here are some other tweets that were interesting by Vitalik:
I'm going to live tweet comments on the "Bitcoin, Controversy over Principle" section of Deconomy for fun.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 3, 2018
10. "Bitcoin is a really big shift on par with the internet and the internal combustion engine"; even if you replace "bitcoin" with "cryptoeconomics in general", I don't think it's fair to go quite that far. The tech is important, but imo better not to oversell it.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 3, 2018
23. Shows a slide containing 6 diagrams of network topologies, and just claims that Bitcoin is less decentralized because "it has more centrality", and does not elaborate further.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) April 3, 2018
In the meantime, Vitalik's supporters were recording the whole interaction and uploaded the videos as soon as they could. Some of them were also applauding Vitalik for his response to Craig. You can see one of the recordings below.
What Vitalik is saying is: “Given that makes so many non-sequiturs at this stage, why is this fraud allowed to speak at this conference?”
Summing up...
It seems that Vitalik feels like the crypto community needs to rid itself of people like Craig Wright. Craig Wright's arguments at Deconomy did not make much sense in many cases, nor were accurately describing the mathematics behind bitcoin. He has yet to prove to the world that he is Satoshi Nakamoto as he has claimed to be in the past.
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