The Insanity of Cults

Opens March 12th 2024 with a live demo, signing a message with a fake Satoshi key he backdated, to show how trivial cryptographic signing actually is.

Every Bitcoin block, transaction, and the white paper is tied to a keypair, so anyone who truly built Bitcoin could trivially sign with the real Satoshi key that only Satoshi holds.

Craig Wright has for years babbled nonsense wrapped in layers of lies and plagiarism, and that COPA is finally suing to bury the claim.

Recalls seeing Craig Wright three times, including in Rwanda bragging he has more money than the country, yet he cannot do the one simple signature that would settle everything.

Cites the book Cults: Inside the World's Most Notorious Groups, framing BSV and Craig Wright as a true cult built on a hero-and-victim persecution narrative.

Cults ensnare smart people too, and every bull run brings cult leaders out of the woodwork, listing Do Kwon, the BitConnect and OneCoin people, and Mark Karpeles.

As newcomers flood the bull market the rule is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, so make a list of what a real Satoshi should be able to do and know.

Lists the artifacts a real Satoshi would hold: the PGP keys tied to blocks, unpublished early source code datable before launch, and deep C++ and cryptography knowledge.

The unorthodox choices only Satoshi would know: the secp256k1 curve that turned out uncompromised by the NSA, the stack-based Forth scripting, and base58 encoding chosen to avoid typos.

A real Satoshi should possess all the emails and private Bitcoin Talk messages, a threshold no lawsuit has ever met.

Applies the same burden-of-proof lens to projects claiming to have solved the blockchain trilemma, scalability, or governance: ask what evidence is needed and demand it.

Uses Cardano as an example, noting its papers go through the same conference peer-review rigor as any university cryptographer's, verifiable by the conferences that accepted them.

Acceptance means independent academic standard-bearers found the work novel, citing GKL15 with 1,800 publicly verifiable citations as Cardano's security foundation.

Code correctness can be raised with high-assurance languages like Spark and Ada, dependently typed Idris and Agda, Haskell with formal methods, or OCaml as Tezos uses, plus provable formal specifications.

Doing all this signals legitimate goodwill but never guarantees commercial success, and that in a cult or scam none of this objective validation exists at all.

A scam tells you nothing will fail, it is guaranteed to moon, and any criticism is illegitimate, with the Craig Wright affair the greatest case study, even risking litigation just for making this video.

The broader crypto community, Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, and Bitcoin, must look out for each other despite commercial fights, since all teach decentralization and being your own bank.

Recalls exchanges listing BitConnect while admitting it was a scam because the trading fees were great, and his own warning of Luna's cascading algorithmic-stablecoin failure from his BitShares experience.

Predicts 2025 could be the biggest year ever with a nonzero chance of 200,000 dollar Bitcoin, flooding in tens of millions of newcomers who will also be victimized by scams and cults.

Recalls calling ICO Mania a ticking time bomb on Bloomberg in 2017, a prediction that burst as expected, and fears the industry is set to repeat the same mistakes.

The Edinburgh Decentralization Index was built to keep the industry from repeating its mistakes, and Sean Ford is working on a macroeconomic survey of crypto value, plus objective throughput metrics as unifying North Stars.

Offers a simple axiom: if you do not understand something, do not get involved, and there is never a genuine rush to act now.

Recalls missing the dot-com boom as a kid while Elon Musk built Zip2 and x.com into PayPal, then catching the crypto boom, mining in 2011 and going full-time in 2013.

A new generation is doing GameFi and metaverses, and new waves keep coming: OpenAI and LLMs, and decentralized social networks like Farcaster versus older Mastodon and Gab.

Every era had its revolution, cell phones and apps like Instagram, the web, the internet, and Steve Jobs's hardware, so a missed train is followed by another; scammers lie that this is the only window.

No government, attorney general, or priest will protect you in this last frontier of unrestricted capitalism, likening it to the self-reliance of the 19th-century Oregon Trail he is writing about for his Wyoming ranch book.

Restates the axioms: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, builders should show evidence and honest tradeoffs, and anyone weaponizing a missed window is a vampire or its spawn.

Warns that within 12 to 24 months multimodal AI could fake a video of him with his real voice and face, saying he is giving away money, has resigned, or has cancer, to short and manipulate markets.

Impersonators will target every public figure, Vitalik and Brad Garlinghouse included, and the fix is a DID via Atala Prism to sign and authenticate a video stream so it shows green.

The web still does not honor digital-signature non-repudiation enough to defeat generative AI, so in that gap you must protect yourself, carrying wisdom and common sense above all.

Closes with 89-year-old sea captain Art Wright, who joined his Papua New Guinea spherule expedition and still works every morning because the sea is his home.

Like Art he loves the research, coding, and decentralization but hates the dishonesty and cycles, and that the next 24 months of headlines will be scandals overshadowing real innovation in zero-knowledge, consensus, and quantum.