Storm Asia recently sat down with Dr. Craig Wright, the creator of the Bitcoin Cash hard fork BSV.... and the man who claims to be Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator of BTC Bitcoin. Dr. Wright discussed his vision for BSV and why he believes it to be the superior version of the Bitcoin network. While many in the crypto community doubt his admission, from his doctorate in computer science Craig has a deep understanding of the way cryptocurrencies work, he offers deep insight into some crypto topics and speculates on the future of BTC.

Key points from the interview:

His goals and vision for BSV:

• Dr. Wright aims for BSV to be massively scalable. He wants it to be able to support billions of transactions per second, each costing fractions of a cent. He believes this will facilitate its use as digital cash.
• He sees that peer-to-peer digital cash will liberate people in undeveloped nations from the high transaction fees of current financial systems.
• In many ways his sentiments and ambitions are genuine, he believes people need to be better educated in the use and function of this digital cash system. He sees this as an essential pathway on the route to adoption.

Achieving scalability:

• When pressed for details on how he will achieve this, he admitted he is still working on this goal, he seemed to mention sharding in passing...
• Many believe he will or has attempted to achieve this by increasing the block sizes, but he vehemently denies this, citing the complexity of the problem.
• As mentioned above, he does not seem to be focused on the idea of decentralization and believes any current claims to decentralization from the perspective of nodes to be a myth. He sees 11,000 to 12,000 nodes controlling the BTC network but believes around 7,000 are owned by 3 entities or individuals that work for some of the major centralized exchanges.

His views on other projects:

• Ultimately he believes crypto needs to be useful and cannot thrive on speculation. He anticipates BTC will collapse after people lose interest in speculating on it, comparing it to a fad such as Beenie Babies.
• He does not think ETH is scalable. He does not approve of other crypto projects. Craig did (indirectly) complement the functionality of Smart Contracts, but he does not like the name itself.

Satoshi sentiment?:

• Craig likes to say that Bitcoin was not supposed to be part of any Cypherpunk movement. He thinks the genesis block article headline does not have anti-bank sentiment. The headline from the British Times 2009 reads, 'Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks.' Craig believes the Chancellor is "threatening to nationalize Britain's banks" in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Craig believes this was in fact an "anti-socialist, anti-communist statement with a sort of Rayndian/Thatcherian idea of not wanting banks to be owned by the government."
• These ideas align with his own beliefs but oppose those of the majority of the Bitcoin community.
• Whether you believe him or not, interacting with Craig Wright forces you to delve deeper into the technical detail and history of Bitcoin.

When asked what would happen when all the Bitcoin had been mined:

• Craig believes that if the network is scaled up massively, the miners could survive on transaction fees alone. If billions of people were using the network simultaneously, even at fractions of a cent per transaction this would generate millions of dollars per second (go do the maths yourself).
• Ultimately whoever ran large amounts of nodes on this network would generate massive wealth.

He was asked about BRICS countries and their plans to create a new currency backed partially by gold and other rare metals:

• Craig pointed out that it is difficult to prove the existence of such reserves. Physical auditing would be needed to verify this, there are many ways to get around physical audits, gold has traditionally been mixed with other metals to distort its true value.

And if Bitcoin could be a reserve currency or digital gold:

• He thinks it needs to be proven to be useful as a form of digital cash before this can be seriously considered.
• In his own words, "It would have to become something that would be valuable as a reserve. It's not there yet. Until it could achieve 10 billion transactions per second, I wouldn't even consider it to be digital silver."

Dr. Wright does have a backstory for the moniker Satoshi Nakomoto, he has answered this question several times: 

• In his interview on Kitco News.
• More briefly, the name comes from Tominaga Nakomoto, who he calls the Japanese version of Adam Smith, the man who introduced the world to modern finance. 
• Satoshi means intelligent learning, the name being the perfect combination of old financial ideas with modern technology that learns from past mistakes.
• However, he does not have a good answer for why he chose to claim the moniker.

According to the interwebs, one miner has controlled 80% of the BSV hash rate:

• Read about it in this link from October 2021.
• No doubt this person is a massive BSV whale.

He also faces several legal disputes:

• He recently lost a case against Hodlnaught.
• He won a case against the relatives of a deceased colleague, where he was able to retain custody of $50 billion in BTC.
• He has not yet managed to convince anyone that he is Satoshi Nakomoto. Except for Gavin Andresen for a brief time in 2016.

While much could be learned from his clearly broad knowledge base, his attitude towards the hard work and successes of the rest of the community leaves much to be desired. BSV could be a dark horse that takes the whole community by surprise if Craig Wright manages to achieve his goals of mass scalability and negligible transaction fees. Until then he will continue to be an outlier and outcast in the community, shunning the others despite being existentially, digitally and cryptographically bound. And perhaps the real Satoshi is somewhere writhing and cringing in disbelief or even enjoying the chaotic display he set into motion.

The Bitcoin rolls on. In many senses.

You can watch the video here, or directly on the video below.

I've added a few more links below from Trader University (a Bitcoin Maxi) on Youtube if you want to learn more about this topic.