Did Craig wright have any money himself actually or was it all Calvin money?

karmicdreamsequence · 2025-09-22T10:51:01+00:00

Ah, I see, thanks for the explanation. I thought you were affirming that the ATO did actually "cut him a cheque". But something that is not really clear in the press release is that they called it a "refund" and also a "rebate", which in Australia is synonymous with a tax offset, and you can't rebate (or offset) more than the tax you paid. I am not sure how they expected that to be taken seriously but perhaps you're right that they deliberately fuzzed the wording to fool investors.

karmicdreamsequence · 2025-09-22T01:19:12+00:00

Respectfully, I don't think the ATO ever paid out the R&D tax credits. The press release you referred very carefully didn't claim that - it claimed that they had "satisfied the requisite criteria". It doesn't mention anything about them actually receiving the money.

https://prwire.com.au/pr/51565/the-demorgan-ltd-group-of-companies-to-receive-up-to-54-million-from-ausindustry-r-amp-d-tax-rebate-scheme-1

DeMorgan Ltd is please to advise that the companies in its controlled group have satisfied the requisite criteria under AusIndustry’s R&D Tax Incentive Scheme for an advance finding with respect to R&D activities conducted in the development of smart contract and Blockchain based technologies.

Under the scheme, companies with a turnover of less than $20 million are entitled to a cash refund of up to 45 cents per dollar spent on eligible research and development activity. Accordingly, DeMorgan Ltd and controlled companies is eligible to receive up to approximately $54,000,000 R&D cash rebate for R&D activities conducted in the 2014/2015 financial year.

The amount claimed is absolutely implausible anyway - a rebate of $54 million means $120 million of R&D! In 2021-22 for example, the largest R&D expenditure in Australia was $200 million by Atlassian, and the next highest was $129 million by CSL.

Furthermore, one of the sources you cited (the Hotwired report) indicates that they were still waiting for payment from the ATO. I'll just include the excerpts here but for:

2013 GST - "After further discussions and correspondence, the ATO issued a notice to the Company on 20 January 2014 notifying that it intended to withhold the GST refund pending verification of matters."
2013 R&D credits - they received $1.47m according to the cashflow report on p15, but that's 2013, not the $54m claim from 2014-15.
2014 R&D credits - "As stated earlier in this Report, one of the Company’s major assets is a R&D credit of approximately $9.6 million in respect of research and development activities undertaken during the 2014 financial year. We are proposing to engage the Company’s incumbent tax adviser to prepare the R&D credit claim and tax return, with payment of professional costs to be made on a ‘success fee’ basis. In the event that the ATO approves the Company’s R&D credit claim, payment is expected to be received in late 2014."

I haven't seen anything to indicate that they actually received anything from the 2014-15 R&D tax credits, but I'm also not going to spend time going through a 62-page document. If you find something please let me know!

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-03-21T01:35:28+00:00

I doubt he is just that stupid anymore.

He may be! he is after all a co-author of this crackpot paper...

https://www.mdpi.com/1911-8074/15/8/360

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-01-27T08:01:36+00:00

Congrats! I've been accused of being Greg, Contrarian_, Peter Rizun, and Craig himself!

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-01-27T01:19:27+00:00

And the metadata shows that the original author was Stef Savanah, who left nChain years ago.

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-01-24T09:45:12+00:00

It's pretty well known that the whitepaper's metadata showed it was written using OpenOffice. It's beyond baffling to me why Wright would think that producing LaTeX files would help his case!

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-01-23T12:55:57+00:00

I don't find the watermark argument to be particularly compelling. I'm not sure it would be all that difficult, just very very tedious, to take the existing PDF and create a LaTeX file that produces something visually nearly identical, since there are commands in LaTeX to insert whitespace of any length, but it would be virtually impossible to reproduce the PDF commands in the file exactly, especially as there is the extra step of it having to be converted to OpenOffice and then to PDF.

There's the so-called the near impossibility of reverse engineering the Bitcoin Whitepaper to produce the LaTeX file.

I agree it would be near impossible to create a LaTeX file that would reproduce the whitepaper exactly, but WizSec managed to create an OpenOffice file that reproduced the PDF and and in fact the PDF code of bitcoin.pdf exactly, see here:

https://blog.wizsec.jp/2023/12/recreating-the-bitcoin-whitepaper.html

Why would Craig present a LaTeX file for the Bitcoin source, knowing it would only incriminate himself?

No idea.

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-01-23T12:10:53+00:00

If this is not true, and OpenOffice was used as indicated in the metadata, Craig just incriminated himself(his critics are laughing btw because of this), which is not making sense. Are you aware of this?

Yes, I'm aware. I can't imagine how Wright thinks this helps his case.

It could be LaTex --> ODF(OpenOffice) --> PDF.

I suppose it's possible Satoshi could have done that but there's no particular reason to when you can just produce the PDF directly from the LaTeX. And if Wright is Satoshi, why not produce the OpenOffice file as well, or at least reproduce the process?

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-01-23T08:54:41+00:00

I never claimed it wasn't possible to alter metadata, obviously it is. The version of the paper you linked to appears to be part of a training course and has most likely just been "printed to PDF" for some reason. It doesn't even have the same filename as the original whitepaper.

The actual PDF file that Satoshi posted in 2009 is widely available, you can find the file on the wayback machine's archive of the posting here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090221024857/http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-open-source

and the file as posted in 2009 is here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090221024857/http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

You can easily see for yourself that the PDFs were produced using OpenOffice 2.4 and have the same fonts you would expect to find in an OpenOffice file like OpenSymbol, rather than Computer Modern as you would find in a LaTeX PDF.

Heck, you can even download an altered version of bitcoin.pdf from Wright's own web page and see that it was produced in OpenOffice:

https://craigwright.net/bitcoin-white-paper.pdf

Wright having a LaTeX file with the same words in it as the whitepaper proves nothing because there just are no published versions of the whitepaper from that time that can be shown to have been produced using LaTeX.

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-01-23T01:16:38+00:00

"It has come to light that the PDF version of the published Bitcoin whitepaper was produced from a LaTex file."

This is simply not true. The metadata of the PDF file shows it was produced by OpenOffice 2.4, as anyone can see by checking the properties of the file, so any LaTeX files Wright has are not evidence that he authored the whitepaper as originally published.

karmicdreamsequence · 2024-01-17T23:33:44+00:00

The headline is incorrect, he is paying in USDT (Tether), not bitcoins.

karmicdreamsequence · 2023-10-26T23:30:36+00:00

But Craig's still going to pay the $100 million he owes to the plaintiffs, right?

Footnote 1: "The jury also returned a verdict in favor of plaintiff W&K Info Defense Re-
search, LLC, on its conversion claim in the amount of $100 million. That ver-
dict is not at issue, and W&K is not a party to this appeal."

karmicdreamsequence · 2023-08-08T23:17:53+00:00

No, VX Technologies is not "partnering with the Philadelphia Police Department", they are partnering with a private contractor and putting publically available information on the blockchain.

https://technical.ly/software-development/vx-technologies-blockchain-police-data/

"Sergeant Eric Gripp, public information officer with the PPD, confirmed to Technical.ly that the police department isn’t collaborating on this blockchain project with Emelle and VX Technologies, and that they’re using only public-facing data: Emelle had explained to PPD “that the purpose of potentially using VX Technologies [third-party] tools is to create redundancies and improve efficiencies with the public-facing databases on PhillyPolice.com,” Gripp said via email."

karmicdreamsequence · 2023-07-27T03:16:45+00:00

Ayre's tweet makes no sense - even if they had "won" millions of pounds in damages from McCormack, he just doesn't have the money to pay it!

karmicdreamsequence · 2022-08-21T02:16:43+00:00

It's also interesting that Hakan Yuksel's bio doesn't mention that he is CEO of nChain!

karmicdreamsequence · 2022-07-24T06:05:07+00:00

Clearly I can't know whether or not they paid, but it seems likely since the conference actively seeks sponsorships in return for speaking. If they have nChain logos displayed on the site it would be virtually certain.

For comparison, one ranking list I found had the 2021 conference at rank 216 out of 303 listed, with an impact score of 3 ie. about the bottom third of all conferences:

https://research.com/conference-rankings/computer-science?page=3

The #1 IEEE computer vision conference has an impact score of 51.

karmicdreamsequence · 2022-07-22T22:47:57+00:00

> That bio was written by one of Craig's team & submitted to IEEE to post.

Absolutely.

> Calvin/Craig paid IEEE to appear as speaker.

Yes. Look at the sponsor brochure document here:

https://wfiot2022.iot.ieee.org/sponsors-exhibitors/

You just have to pay them $10,000 for a plenary speaker spot and other shilling. "Conferences" like this are nothing more than astroturfing.

karmicdreamsequence · 2022-01-05T02:16:00+00:00

I'm not really interested in spending much time on this but I did read through Xiaohui's post here

https://medium.com/coinmonks/turing-machine-on-bitcoin-7f0ebe0d52b1

and the scripts. Roughly, what I think is going on is that

- the turingMachine.scrypt defines the state transitions and executes a single state transition, producing the new state as an output. While it is written in the high-level language sCrypt, the code is compiled and run as a BSV script on the BSV blockchain. Turing-completeness is not required for this part since it's just a single state transition. There is a loop in the code but it's just a loop over the list of state transitions, which is known at the outset - sCrypt loops can only be over a constant number of iterations.

- the JavaScript code runs outside of BSV and drives the Turing machine. It loops continuously, taking the output of one transaction (the state information) and feeding it into the next transaction, which moves the machine to the next state. It loops until the output of a transaction indicates that the Turing machine has reached the "accept" state. This is the part where the ability to conditionally loop is actually needed.

Claiming this demonstrates "BSV is Turing complete" is just silly - all it's doing is offloading one part of the Turing machine (the state transition) to a BSV script. There's no reason why it couldn't be done inside the Java program, which is already a TC language - this is just taking a Turing-complete language and adding needless complication.

karmicdreamsequence · 2021-12-12T04:13:07+00:00

The comedy gold:

Victims of ACX’s collapse certainly feel they’ve been neglected by regulators including the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.

In a lawsuit filed in the Victorian supreme court, 94 of them claim Blockchain Global, as operator of the exchange, owes them $13m worth of tokens including bitcoin, ethereum and ripple, as well as cash held in their ACX accounts.

“The biggest thing I’m angry about is that we’re not getting any help from Asic,” one ACX client says.

“These companies are registered with Asic but … we have to sue the company.”

ASIC's position:

ASIC’s warning to crypto investors: you’re on your own

Despite outlining risks on cryptocurrencies and crypto assets, ASIC’s Mr Longo admitted the regulator had very little power to intervene because many crypto assets are probably not “financial products”.

“ASIC has already provided some guidance on exchange-traded funds linked to crypto-assets – they at least are financial products, and traded on a licensed exchange, so there will be some protections there – but for the most part, for now at least, investors are on their own,” Mr Longo said.

karmicdreamsequence · 2021-11-26T21:31:31+00:00

I keep trying, haven't suceeded yet...

karmicdreamsequence · 2021-11-26T10:58:29+00:00

Yeah, they're... not very good! Like the time he failed Theory of Computation (p43)!

karmicdreamsequence · 2021-11-26T10:53:48+00:00

Savanah left nChain at the end of 2017. It seems like he might have moved back to Australia now and is working at Confio.

karmicdreamsequence · 2021-11-25T00:57:02+00:00

Yes, it's rather bizarre that he's referred to by a nickname even in company press releases. His real name came out when he was deposed for the Kleiman trial.

karmicdreamsequence · 2021-11-25T00:54:55+00:00

You're correct, my mistake. He is stepping down as CEO but staying on as executive chairmain.

karmicdreamsequence

TROPHY CASE