Craig Wright on Kitco News: The only thing that wins is scale, and Bitcoin is the answer

In the digital economy, the only thing that matters is scale. Bitcoin’s ability to scale will improve lives worldwide, providing cheap and fast payments and digital ownership records to those who’ve never had them before. Bitcoin creator Dr. Craig S. Wright elaborated on his vision for the future in a half-hour interview with financial video channel Kitco News this week, while correcting some misconceptions about Bitcoin’s past and its purpose.

Kitco’s show is titled “Craig Wright, self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor, reveals plan for his BTCs.” Host David Lim was particularly interested in what Dr. Wright intends to do with his presumably large BTC stash, pressing him on the issue multiple times.

Dr. Wright, however, wasn’t giving away any specifics other than to say, “eventually I will sell it because it has no utility.” He noted that the only place he talks frankly is on Slack’s MetaNetICU group and hinted his comments there shouldn’t always be taken as firm promises. He doesn’t use social media, his Twitter account is run by staff, and all his BTC is corporate holdings managed by trusts.

On the point of utility, Dr. Wright said the only things that should drive the prices of Bitcoin (and other assets) is fundamentals, such as their use in a commodity system, the number of transactions, and what they’re actually doing. All else is just speculation; well-known “crypto exchanges” are essentially bucket shops and likely illegal, trading assets that cannot scale and thus will never have any real value to the world.

Only Bitcoin can scale and do what the world needs

Cheap, fast transactions are the only things that matter and are the only things that will create a global digital economy that real people can benefit from. Only Bitcoin can scale, and its ability to do so has been built into the protocol since its launch in 2009.

“The only thing that wins is scale, by the end of the next 12 months, what I want to do—just as a little side exercise, we’re going to run every other blockchain protocol on earth on BSV… we’re going to run them all for free, just to show how stupidly asinine these other things are,” Dr. Wright noted.

nChain, where Dr. Wright serves as Chief Scientist, will continue to build its patent library and plans to expand into things like (transport) ticketing, secure money transfers, and digital cash aimed at the developing economies of Africa and Asia.

Bitcoin can easily compete with existing e-cash networks like Africa’s M-Pesa, as well as corporate data leviathans like Amazon. He wants to take Bitcoin to billions of transactions per second, each costing around a thousandth of a cent.

“In Bitcoin, I’m talking about a protocol that will go 10, 100 billion transactions a second, at a rate that will undercut Amazon for transactions by a hundred times—literally. By the end of this decade, I will have a protocol running that will be cheaper than Amazon, 99% of Amazon’s costs cheaper, that has value. (One) that is more secure, faster, able to handle everything Amazon does, and better. That’s my aim,” he explained.

Bitcoin’s creation and who did what

Lim also asked Dr. Wright about his earlier days and inspiration for creating Bitcoin and the controversy surrounding various claims over who actually created it, and why Dr. Wright doesn’t “prove” his status as creator by moving some of Satoshi Nakamoto‘s BTC.

Dr. Wright paid tribute to the help he’d received from friends like Dave Kleiman and Hal Finney but stressed that neither of those men took part in Bitcoin’s actual creation. He also reiterated that, although he’s often referred to as Bitcoin’s “self-proclaimed” inventor, his identity was only revealed after pieces appeared in WIRED and Gizmodo in 2015. It had not been his intention to reveal himself as Satoshi when those claims were made.

Lin also touched on the Kleiman vs. Wright case, which Dr. Wright described as a “case about a greedy person who wanted a lot of money.”

“I guess greedy people get what they deserve,” he said, referring to Dave’s brother Ira Kleiman. To clarify issues surrounding the W&K intellectual property award and moving Satoshi’s coins, he noted that his former and current wives are the majority owners of W&K, not Ira Kleiman and that moving Satoshi’s bitcoins wouldn’t actually prove anything.

“They’d just say I stole them,” he said.

Dr. Wright also dropped a few more interesting details about his grandfather’s classified communications work under Douglas MacArthur in Asia in WWII. His family’s experience with code-breaking and cryptography, along with his own career in the early days of the internet and various financial-related systems, were the inspiration for creating Bitcoin. How to properly monetize the internet was a “holy grail” that most corporations never found, he said. The world will come to understand the importance and value of scaling and that Bitcoin has always been the grail they were looking for.

Check out all of the CoinGeek special reports on the Kleiman v Wright YouTube playlist.

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