This article is based on a Suspension By Greg Maxwell on Reddit. If you are looking to support Hodlonaut directly, you can Visit the donation pageOver 50 BTC raised in support of Hodlonaut.
It would be hard to overstate how important this is to Bitcoin, yet it is often underestimated because the situation is so bizarre that if it were a novel, it would be criticized for being too unreasonable.
A scammer who can’t even program and obfuscate even the basics of Bitcoin technology has started claiming that he created Bitcoin to try to get out of trouble after he got involved in a long-running multi-million dollar tax fraud, which has so far ended in a police raid on his home and office where he successfully evaded the police and escaped from country.
He claimed on several occasions that he would provide “proof” of his claims, but only the evidence he provided was proven to be fraudulent. At one point, he was ordered to bring a specific list of bitcoins he owns to court, and when public parties controlling thousands of bitcoins from his list were made public, he immediately appeared to sign letters calling him a fraud. Even his mother told his pathological lie.
You’d think that would be the end of it – but no, tax fraud triggered an unlikely series of coercive moves as he then needed to pay the IRS money to get them off course, in order to get millions of dollars in allegedly holding 1.1 million bitcoins in a fund. A credit controlled by a “bonded courier” who would release him on a certain date (think of that scene at the end of “Back to the Future 2”). Unfortunately, there are plenty of technically inexperienced but wealthy people who can be tricked into ignoring even the most crucial technical evidence of fraud.
When the enslaved postman didn’t show up (surprise surprise), Mr. Wright needed a new excuse and began claiming that his coins had been stolen in a high-tech “Ocean’s 11”-style break-in to plant a “wireless pineapple” to hack his computers. He claims, aptly, that he erased the computers afterwards so that he had no evidence that they had been stolen.
Now you might be thinking – this all seems tragic to its victims and their families but why should that worry me? Indeed, it did not happen for a long time and so anyone from almost any jurisdiction ignored it. Unfortunately, this gave him significant control over the media narrative through ongoing events, press releases, and purchased and paid outlets. To really lock it up, he began filing lawsuits against journalists and community members who countered his seemingly false allegations with chilling criticism. The world was divided into two groups: one who did not know anything better and would repeat his claims with the least amount of suspicion, and people who knew they did not want to get close to him. As a result, the first group defines the general narrative.
With plenty of coverage taking him seriously (he often says, at most, that his claims are “disputed by some” rather than being completely ludicrous and substantiated) and tens of millions of dollars in funding from his victims—essentially allowing him to monopolize an entire law firm—the courts have taken him Seriously too. So, although his lawsuits are laughable and doomed to fail, he is able to spend millions of dollars in legal fees on his victims even when they eventually win, in some cases financially damaging them so completely that they are unable to resist effectively. He has been directing these lawsuits to members of the Bitcoin community, advocates, journalists, and more recently former Bitcoin developers, developers and exchanges.
His malicious lawsuits made the Bitcoin worksheet unavailable to people in the UK from the original download site; In fact, when you search for him in the UK, you get a recent forgery of Mr. Wright bearing his name. I once had a confused conversation with a journalist who couldn’t understand why anyone He believed that Wright did not invent Bitcoin, and they finally said his name was on the white paper and I understood what happened. It also caused Bitcoin Core from bitcoin.org to not be available to anyone in the UK
To substantiate his pineapple hack allegations, he has sued dozens of (active and former, but increasingly ex-) developers demanding their help in producing and distributing a copy of Bitcoin with an encrypted backdoor allowing him to confiscate those coins he claims to be losing (but apparently He never owned it) or paid him billions of dollars in damages. It is clear to anyone with experience with Bitcoin why the request did not work: users would not simply choose to run such a version and would run alternatives or continue with older versions. But the courts are not experts in Bitcoin and seem happy to take Wright’s word on hold because it will work and won’t immediately dismiss the case on the grounds of its apparent impossibility.
He also supposedly filed a second lawsuit against an overlapping and somewhat larger group of developers for apparently failing to implement his offerings in general. This doesn’t even go into a great deal of harassment and threats (including posting a statement that he would shoot us in the back of the head if he could get away with it) outside the legal system. His actions have contributed to at least four of some of the most prolific and older developers stopping or drastically reducing their involvement in Bitcoin (and I am a target for both).
And, of course, Wright and his co-conspirators actively pressure governments, slandering heads of state.
When people talk about Bitcoin being strong and safe from attack, this isn’t a magical property that exists out of thin air – part of what makes it strong is its community. He is protected because his community follows his self-interest and works to protect him. This protection sometimes comes in the form of developers hiding excellent security technology, but sometimes political help, public relations or legal help is required. All the amazing technologies in the world can’t help if people don’t have access to them, or don’t use them because they’ve been cheated on them, or have had to take unreasonable risks to work to maintain them.
The group is massively stacked against Hodlonaut and Wright’s other targets: Wright’s ludicrous claims in several countries could have been thrown into a brief verdict, limiting legal costs to just hundreds of thousands instead of millions – but since he had nothing to lose, he’d tell no lies They are required to keep litigation going for as long as possible. With Wright burying his opponents under hundreds of thousands of documents (a large proportion of which are fraudulent), he could easily push the costs of the trial into the millions or even tens of millions of dollars. It creates a situation where the most reasonable course of action in court is to let him win as quickly as possible to reduce the cost, since you’ll come out better that way then see and win. At best, Wright’s targets can hope to minimize the damage to them, while Wright and his co-conspirators expect to benefit greatly from their scheme, justifying extensive lobbying spending and manipulation of the press while the opposition has reacted almost exclusively with the exception of the few members of society who They posted angry tweets.
The Wright scam is an attack on Bitcoin. Not a speculative or hypothetical attack but a real attack that actually caused massive damage. I am confident that this is an attack Bitcoin will survive because I am confident that when people stand up to fight for it and don’t wait forever for it to be solved by the invisible hand without realizing that each of us is the invisible hand. Waiting for him to go away and only allowing the situation to fester has been experienced.
We are all very fortunate that Hodlonaut was able to hold out up to this point and continue to confront Wright’s fraud allegations head-on rather than following one of the many alternative paths that are highly understandable that would lower his cost but leave the fraud largely unchallenged. It is an effort that deserves our support.
But helping Hodlonaut continue his fight is only necessary, and that is not enough: Wright is unlikely to be stopped even by Hodlonaut’s complete victory, but it will only slow him down. At this point, it seems likely that the only thing that will bring it to an end is the start of a criminal prosecution. It’s not too far-fetched either: We’ve finally heard that the Australian criminal case for his tax fraud is still ongoing, but prosecutors tend to act slowly; Only when they are absolutely certain of winning and especially in the absence of political pressure or the possibility of a refund. But despite the vastness of the Bitcoin network, our society does not seem to be well connected to politics. But “not well” is not at all the same: there are some of us who know people who have the ability to do something here or have it themselves. It’s time to start some of those conversations.
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