The work of nChain, and in particular its chief scientist, Dr. Craig Wright, was the subject of a Forbes cover story this week that looked at Wright’s decades-long career and, most notably, the large portfolio of digital asset patents it has built with nChain.
The premise of the article is this: It doesn’t matter if you or anyone else thinks that Dr. Wright is Satoshi, because the blockchain-related intellectual property Wright and nChain are developing will dominate the industry regardless.
Maybe it doesn’t matter if Craig Wright created Bitcoin. The real question is whether the nearly 4,000 patents it controls or has pending will force computer programmers around the world to stop using open source software as they do now, or will they pay for the privilege. https://t.co/H0kMYBYPyD
— Forbes (@Forbes) July 12, 2023
That’s right: Forbes reports that nChain has 800 patents already granted and 3,000 pending in 46 jurisdictions. Patents are mainly concerned blockchain applicationsand according to Forbes “it would affect everything from the trillion-dollar cryptocurrency market to corporate implementations built by some of the world’s largest companies.”
The article provides much of the detail that has been missing from the general coverage of Dr. Wright. Most of these reports have focused on lawsuits involving Dr. Wright and which, if any, will likely reveal something new about his invention of Bitcoin or, more superficially, the background to the early bitcoins that most assume. Satoshi Nakamoto would be in possession of.
That interest is understandable, but it ignores the much bigger story collected by Forbes: that the patents developed and granted by Dr. Wright or companies he is affiliated with already cover much of the digital asset industry as it exists today. If there is a storage of Satoshi, it is this pool of intellectual property, and it is unequivocally the product of Dr. Wright.
This context (criminally underreported compared to the salacious details gleaned from Dr. Wright’s various legal battles) is critical to understanding the digital asset industry as it exists today.
It is also essential to understand why the critics of Dr. Wright, usually anonymous, spend so much oxygen trying to convince the world that Dr. Wright is either irrelevant or very dangerous to the industry or a paradoxical mixture of both. This cyberbullying campaign has been so successful that those who haven’t been paying attention to nChain’s work may be surprised to read Forbes’ reports. This is not an accident, but a deliberate attempt to ignore or discredit the power that nChain now has over the future of the Silicon Valley based Web2 Big Tech industry.
Follow the trolls
In fact, the Forbes article itself contains the perfect demonstration of this phenomenon.
He quotes an English lawyer named David Pearce who says of nChain’s patent empire that “many of these patents are, for better or worse, valid” and that many were “validly granted by the European Patent Office Patents, which is generally considered one of the toughest in the world.”
Pearce should know, because as the Forbes story reveals, he’s being paid by a career troll Arthur Van Pelt to try to remove as many patents from nChain as possible. Van Pelt is a longtime stalker of Dr. Wright; based in the Netherlands, spends an improbable amount of time following Dr. Wright and making inflammatory comments via social media. His first account was banned by Twitter in early 2022 and he’s been posting from an alternate since then.
Pearce knows that nChain’s patents are valid because, despite this campaign, they have only managed to oppose three of the 800 patents that have already been granted to nChain. Presumably, Van Pelt’s relentless social media troll picks up the slack.
Herein lies a bigger story revealed by Forbes research that even its own writer has missed. Why does Van Pelt, who claims to be an independent crypto “journalist”, spend over 40 hours a week following Dr. Wright and trying to discredit his and nChain’s work?
If his activity were limited to posting on social media, one might be tempted to see Van Pelt as one of the many faceless, deranged Twitter accounts that litter the infosphere. But the Forbes piece confirms that for Van Pelt, it’s much more than that. It is paying lawyers to sift through hundreds of already granted nChain patents to see what they can challenge. That they only managed to challenge three makes this project a failure, but it still begs the question: Why is Van Pelt doing this? In whose name? As deranged as he may seem, Van Pelt won’t be out of pocket for lawyers to challenge patents with a 0.4% success rate for his own entertainment.
Considering what Forbes said about the nChain Patent Portfolio—which will affect virtually the entire industry—it’s pretty easy to speculate who might be directing these attacks. Anyone with an interest in legacy industry players would be a good place to start, because sooner or later they will be forced to choose between paying licensing fees to nChain to use their patents or closing up shop. Their only hope of avoiding this outcome is to completely remove nChain and its chief scientist from the picture, something they have seriously tried to do.
The attacks on Dr. Wright have already proven to be commercially motivated
That at least some of the attacks on Dr. Wright have a commercial motivation has already been proven beyond doubt.
Take for example the Kleiman v. Wright case, which saw a Florida man sue Dr. Wright for billions of dollars in hopes of convincing the court that Dr. Wright invented Bitcoin with Kleiman’s late brother. That failed, but most interestingly, Kleiman’s lawyers were caught on camera boast about using mock lawsuits to attack the “crypto” competitors of one of its other big clients, Ava Labs and Emin Gun Sirer. Dr. Wright was named as the main competitor.
Or consider Magnus ‘Hodlonaut’ Granath, the pseudonymous Twitter user who relentlessly attacked Dr. Wright on Twitter and called him a scammer and fraud, among other things. When Dr. Wright wrote to Granath warning of possible legal action if he did not remove the tweets, Granath sued him in Norway for a declaration that his tweets were not defamatory.
At the trial, the full extent of Granath’s campaign was revealed: it turns out that Granath is part of a private Telegram group formed solely to harass the “leaders” of those perceived as BTC competitors, with the head of Dr. Wright among them. Granath himself has been a key figure in the coordinated trolling of anyone publicly identified with the BSV blockchain or anything related to Dr. Wright.
And how else would you explain the fact that Jack Dorsey and his mobile payments company Block (NASDAQ: SQ) founded the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), which despite presenting itself publicly as a “non-profit community of like-minded individuals and companies formed to encourage the adoption and advancement of cryptocurrency technologies and remove patents as a barrier to growth and innovation” has done precisely nothing in years. since its foundation except suing Dr. Wright in the UK, asking for a statement that he did not invent the white paper.
You might think that Dorsey and the companies that have joined COPA since its founding, including Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (NASDAQ: TARGET), faced hard-line Coinbase and BTC Blockstream—would have more than enough to focus on without attacking Dr. Wright. But to senior members of COPA, Dr. Wright represents the precise threat that caused Emin Gun Sirer to let his legal dogs loose on Dr. Wright and the BSV. It all depends on the continuous flow of money into Bitcoin imitations at the expense of the original (as represented by the BSV blockchain), and Dr. Wright is the original.
This campaign is so pervasive that even the Forbes story is tainted by it: the article talks as if Dr. Wright’s legal battles are somehow directed at open source software, but none of his cases have target the development of open source software.
It is easy to see where the writer got this idea from: the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fundwhose lawyer Jessica Jonas is quoted by Forbes as saying that one of the cases involving Dr. Wright…Tulip Trading Limited v Van der Laan and others—is somehow an attack on open source software. The Legal Defense Fund is another organization established by Jack Dorsey, which like COPA presents itself as a general purpose resource for the digital assets industry, but also like COPA has actually dedicated all of its resources (funded by anonymous donations ) to benefit. anyone in a legal fight with Dr. Wright, including the defendants Trade in tulips.
The case is not, however, open source software. Tulip Trading, a company owned by Dr. Wright, argues that many blockchain projects (in this case BTC, BCH, and BCHABC, but actually many more) are controlled by an identifiable group of developers with centralized power to change their blockchains. This centralized power means that developers have legal duties to those who use their blockchains, and that those duties obligate developers to, for example, restore access to lost or stolen digital assets.
It’s an idea with considerable legal and academic support, and it’s challenging the decentralization myth just as lawmakers and regulators are taking notice. This poses an existential risk to the industry’s largest digital asset projects and explains why the Legal Defense Fund has taken up the case and is working so hard to convince the world that it is an attack on open source software development . Is not.
The war is already won
That’s not the point all of people and events are cynically attacking Dr. Wright in order to mitigate the upcoming fallout from nChain’s massive patent portfolio. But there is a lot of smoke, and according to the cases that have been confirmed as anti-competitive attacks on Dr. Wright, it is clear that there is some force determined to discredit the work of Dr. Wright. To which of the many enemies of Dr. Whether Wright applies this remains to be seen, but they all typically have one thing in common: they all rely heavily on the industry status quo and especially the fallacy of decentralization. nChain’s accumulated intellectual property threatens this status quo, as does Dr. Wright.
In this context, whether Dr. Wright has “proved” his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto in court is irrelevant – he already has control over huge swathes of the industry, whether the industry still knows it or not.
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