Bitcoin : I was neutral on Craig Wright but *patent trolling* Bitcoin is where I draw the line, this is completely unacceptable!
I’ve given the benefit of the doubt to CSW for a very long time, I did not and still do not care about whether he “is Satoshi”, fake proofs or not, his degrees or whatever, all that is actually pretty irrelevant. I even defended him from attacks on this basis. I liked his stance, ideas on blocksize and Bitcoin in general but ultimately only actions and delivery of features/code matters so I waited, and waited …
I was watching with interest his grand claims of “what’s coming” from him and nChain for BCH soon^^TM and every time nothing would come out of it I would give him more time, developement/coding takes time.
But every benefit of doubt has its limits and I reached mine, he delivered *nothing* of substance in all that time (except *proprietary* SDK that isn’t used anywhere and patents to apparently troll and exercise power over Bitcoin developement) and continues to be an arrogant ass to everyone, causing drama, baseless division and chaos everywhere he is involved.
All of that is bad in itself but where it gets really serious and where I draw the line of tolerating his eccentric behavior is when I learned he implicitly **threatened to use his patents to control the developement of Bitcoin**:
[Dr Craig S Wright @ProfFaustus](https://web.archive.org/web/20180827005110/https:/twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1033653060004978689)
> If you hate patents, here is the best reason to block OP_DataSigVerify. DSV allows you to call a TX from a TX statelessly, this means it is able to loop IN the script. **We have patents on this and related techniques pending – so, you add DSV and you hand the base protocol to us**
This kind of patent trolling is the exact reason we “hate patents” you dolt!
This is exactly the scenario many were concerned and warning about regarding patents by nChain and around Bitcoin in general.
**We need to realize how serious this is, CSW threatening to use his patents against Bitcoin if he doesn’t get his way – restricting free development of the base protocol. This kind of aggressive threat should earn him an instant boot from the BCH community (ostracize, not censor/ban him), not even Blockstream was/is that aggressive!**
This is extremely dangerous, should be regarded as such by the community and appropriate measures should be taken to limit the damage he can do – namely, diminish his influence as much as possible, he crossed the line.
The patent itself may well be unenforceable as it’s pretty general and there may be prior art but that’s the point of patent trolling, the threat of litigation and financial ruin *is the weapon*, not the patent itself necessarily.
If he was honest and had good intentions to let BCH develop freely he would say that if it’s decided by the Nakamoto consensus that DSV should be included in the base protocol, he would free the patent as he doesn’t want to be the king of anything – **he has done the exact opposite, used it to implicitly threaten BCH if a feature he doesn’t like is implemented from the position of power**.
**He could’ve chosen to be the good guy, he chose to be the bully – this is his intentional voluntary choice, he had another option, chose the most totalitarian one and he should be made accountable for that.**
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Author: mushner
Score: 181
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