BSV Is A Dying Religious Movement
A Deep Dive into BSV’s Current State of Affairs: The Church of Messiah Wright and BSV’s Total Abandonment of Bitcoin’s Original Purpose
Written by Arthur van Pelt
ABOUT EDITS AND UPDATES to this article: as more material may become available after the publication of this article, it could have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, to become a reference piece for years to come.
Disclaimer
Any resemblance to, or rebuttal of, a certain article called “BTC as a Religion” by con artist Craig “I am not Satoshi Nakamoto” Wright is very much not purely coincidental. Wright’s article simply screamed “debunk me, as I’m full of lies and rewriting of history again” that I felt the urge to set the record straight. And the AI generated images from his article were happily reused here, without Wright’s written or oral permission.
Intro
In November 2018, inspired by Craig Wright in the year previous, Bitcoin Cash — by itself a minority fork of Bitcoin — spawned a minority knock off, a fork called BSV. How come BSV, which already briefly dropped from the top 100 market cap lists several weeks ago, is still against all odds somewhat relevant today?
Simply said, that is because a little personality cult — some consider it even a doomsday cult — around Craig Wright is still keeping BSV alive. Let’s explore the (at times very cringe) religious faith that this little community still has in BSV, and the role of their spiritual leader and messiah who, after having been judged a few months ago by Justice Mellor in the UK not to be Satoshi Nakamoto, is still presenting himself as a Bitcoin expert with obvious and awkward hints to being Satoshi after all, with the usual incompetence that comes with this role, an incompetence that dedicated followers of the Faketoshi saga know so well.
BSV: a ‘not-so-good-idea’ executed poorly
BSV has since November 2018 transitioned itself from a peer-to-peer cash system (as the original Bitcoin system still is), into a technical trainwreck, unable to scale nor able to attract any long term viable use cases. Furthermore, BSV has been plagued by several successful 51% attacks (costing the Bitmart Exchange over $6 million in double spend damages), and it is now only supported by a little group of fans who entertain a belief system that mirrors many characteristics of a centrally organised religion.
Central to this transformation is the total abandonment by Craig Wright of the core principles outlined in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 whitepaper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, which is showcased on several levels in Wright’s totally failed BSV project. BSV has shifted from Bitcoin’s original focus on peer-to-peer cash to become a highly centralised, hardly used data pump monstrosity with closed source development and the introduction of trusted third parties. The only narrative that is left in recent days in the BSV realm is “micropayments”, something that BSV is not even capable of. We’ll dive into that subject a bit later.
The Bitcoin whitepaper states meanwhile:
“What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”
The whitepaper is clear. No data. Not micropayments only. But with incompetent oracle-like mumblings by Craig Wright elevated to a quasi-religious ideal, rather than investing in BSV as a functional tool that has scaled for the world and adheres to the Bitcoin whitepaper, we are starting to understand why BSV is more like a religion. A dying one for that matter.
The shift of BSV, away from the original Bitcoin ideology, is since November 2018 being driven by theological, sociological, and psychological factors, in particular by the emergence of the Church of Craig “I’m not Satoshi Nakamoto” Wright since 2015, which has reinforced BSV’s centralisation on all levels as a means to an end in itself.
This article will explore how BSV’s transformation from a Bitcoin Cash knockoff to a data pump monstrosity drowning in Craig Wright fraud undermines its original goals, how it has introduced several features that have nothing to do with Bitcoin let alone with Satoshi’s original vision, and it will examine the role of Wright’s dark triad — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — in shaping BSV’s evolution.
And meanwhile, make no mistake, dear reader. We can be absolutely certain that the real Satoshi Nakamoto was totally against so-called “forked second versions”, as he explained in June 2010.
“If someone was getting ready to fork a second version, I would have to air a lot of disclaimers about the risks of using a minority version. This is a design where the majority version wins if there’s any disagreement, and that can be pretty ugly for the minority version. I don’t believe a second, compatible implementation of Bitcoin will ever be a good idea.” — Satoshi Nakamoto, June 17, 2010
So why on earth would Satoshi Nakamoto create a knockoff of a fork like BSV against his own Bitcoin design, and against his deepest beliefs, instead of returning to the heart of the Bitcoin project on GitHub and express his worries to try influence the direction of the original Bitcoin, if he ever felt the need to do so?
Oh, we know the answer already, actually. Satoshi said it in April 2011 when he was asked by Mike Hearn “Are you planning on rejoining the community at some point (eg for code reviews), or is your plan to permanently step back from the limelight?”. Satoshi his answer was clear: “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
In other words, from this moment in 2011 onward till today, we are all Satoshi Nakamoto.
Except for Craig Wright, of course.
And no doubt the real Satoshi Nakamoto is totally fine with how the real Bitcoin project has been developing over time, meanwhile.
BSV, or The Total Abandonment of Bitcoin’s Original Purpose: From Peer-to-Peer Cash System to Non-Scaling, Fully Centralized Data Pump Monstrosity Sporting Trusted Third Parties and ‘Proof-of-Court-Order’ Reversible Transactions
Bitcoin was designed by Satoshi Nakamoto as an electronic cash system, with the explicit aim of enabling peer-to-peer cash transactions without the need for trusted third parties and other intermediaries (Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper, 2008).
The Bitcoin system’s two key innovations that contribute to this aim are:
First and foremost, Bitcoin is a fully decentralized, and developed as an open sourced, programmable money. As Satoshi Nakamoto stated on the P2P Foundation Forum on February 11, 2009:
“I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties. […] A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.”
Bitcoin being open source needs no further explanation: it has always been available for all developers on the open source platforms SourceForge (2008–2011) and with Satoshi’s knowledge and approval on GitHub in later years (2011 — today). To add, Bitcoin being envisioned as programmable money is explained by Satoshi Nakamoto in the Bitcoin whitepaper:
“Any needed rules and incentives can be enforced with this [1 CPU is 1 vote] consensus mechanism.”
The reader will no doubt immediately understand that “ANY NEEDED RULES” does not imply a Bitcoin protocol that is set in stone for its full lifetime. And indeed, as on a later occassion, on February 13, 2009 on the P2PReasearch forum, Satoshi expanded on this crucial theme as follows in front of his audience:
“[Bitcoin] can be programmed to follow any set of rules. I see Bitcoin as a foundation and first step if you want to implement programmable P2P social currencies like Marc’s ideas and others discussed here. First you need normal, basic P2P currency working. Once that is established and proven out, dynamic smart money is an easy next step. I love the idea of virtual, non-geographic communities experimenting with new economic paradigms.”
Furthermore, Satoshi coded up a Bitcoin node (or client, as it was called sometimes too back in the days) that was automatically downloading and hosting the full blockchain by default, while mining was an optional state of this node that could be switched on and off. All these Bitcoin nodes, mining and not-mining, also participate in proof of work validation of incoming new blocks and on top of that, they participate in signaling for protocol rules’ code updates. Because of this pretty clever design by Satoshi Nakamoto, and actual technical setup of Bitcoin that he coded up, none of the three individual major parties in Bitcoin are in full control of the Bitcoin system.
Those three parties are:
1. almost 1,000,000 individual Bitcoin miners owning all the Bitcoin mining rigs worldwide, now largely connected to and behind one of the few dozen Bitcoin mining pool nodes,
2. the Bitcoin open source developers and
3. Bitcoin end users like exchanges, payment processors, merchants, data services, professional home users, etc. represented by Bitcoin full nodes.
And because all these Bitcoin nodes, mining and not-mining, host a full blockchain, we can also conclude that Bitcoin is more than sufficiently decentralized.
How these three parties aforementioned reach decentralized consensus is brilliantly explained by Andreas Antonopoulos in his book “Mastering Bitcoin” in chapter 8 “Mining and consensus”:
“Bitcoin’s decentralized consensus emerges from the interplay of four processes that occur independently on nodes across the network:
(1) Independent verification of each transaction, by every full node, based on a comprehensive list of criteria
(2) Independent aggregation of those transactions into new blocks by mining nodes, coupled with demonstrated computation through a proof-of-work algorithm
(3) Independent verification of the new blocks by every node and assembly into a chain
(4) Independent selection, by every node, of the chain with the most cumulative computation demonstrated through proof of work”
Secondly, the other key innovation within Bitcoin is its ability to solve the double-spending problem with a Byzantine Generals Problem compatible solution by means of cryptographic proof (called Proof-of-Work, or PoW), allowing immutable and irreversible peer-to-peer transactions to happen in the process. As River Learn describes it succinctly:
“Bitcoin was the first realized solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem with respect to money. Many proposals and projects preceding Bitcoin had attempted to create money separate from the government, but all had failed in one way or another. Bitcoin managed to solve the Byzantine Generals Problem by using a Proof-of-Work mechanism in order to establish a clear, objective ruleset for the blockchain. In order to add information, called blocks, to the blockchain, a [mining] member of the network must publish proof that they invested considerable work into creating the block. This work imposes large costs on the creator, and thus incentivizes them to publish honest information. Because the rules are objective, there can be no disagreement or meddling with the information on the Bitcoin network. The ruleset governing which transactions are valid and which are invalid is also objective, as is the system for determining who can mint new bitcoin. Additionally, once a block has been added to the blockchain [after approval by all mining and non-mining nodes], it is extremely difficult to remove, making Bitcoin’s past immutable. Thus, at all times, members of the Bitcoin network can agree on the state of the blockchain and all transactions therein. Each node verifies for itself whether blocks are valid based on the Proof-of-Work requirement and whether transactions are valid based on other requirements.”
This was all intended by Satoshi Nakamoto to facilitate a globally used fully decentralized financial system, where individuals could transfer value quickly and efficiently, with no third parties, trusted or not trusted, being able to corrupt, confiscate, censor or otherwise interrupt with user’s transactions.
Bitcoin (BTC) was born.
After a rather humble start in the years 2009–2011, years in which Bitcoin was initially only a highly wanted collectible between members of a little Bitcoin fan club of computer nerds and rebels interested in cryptography called cypherpunks, Bitcoin was then traded first on New Liberty Standard when Satoshi Nakamoto’s sidekick Marti Malmi’s, who not only developed on Bitcoin, also kicked off Bitcoin price discovery with this exchange with a 5,050 BTC trade for $5,02 on October 12, 2009. A screenshot of this notable event will follow later.
Other exchanges like BitcoinFX and Bitcoin Exchange followed suit late 2009 and early 2010, and Bitcoin was then used as means of exchange for the first time on May 22, 2010 when a Bitcoin developer named Laszlo Hanyecz made history by spending 10,000 Bitcoins to have two large Papa John’s pizzas delivered to his door. This transaction, where the real world met Bitcoin for the first time, has since become a legendary tale in the Bitcoin community, commemorated annually as Bitcoin Pizza Day.
And finally, the first merchant goods started being priced in Bitcoin in February 2011. Who doesn’t remember the now infamous Grass Hill Farm alpaca socks that could be paid with Bitcoin?
And from then onward, Bitcoin quickly gained popularity. As a result, Bitcoin its scalability issues slowly became more apparent too. The network’s capacity to handle transactions was not only limited by its block size but also by its lack of payment channels and other layer 2 solutions who only existed yet as blueprints on virtual paper (see Bitcoin Wiki, Payment Channels page).
As Bitcoin usage and demand increased, so did at times its transaction fees and confirmation times. A process of trying to address these issues, for example by increasing the block size or developing alternative scalability solutions like Lightning Network, started. For a long while, and the reader has to think several years here, the group of so called “big blockers” (a group who wanted to scale Bitcoin onchain only) tried to stall Bitcoin’s progress into the only logical technical direction as indicated and supported by Satoshi Nakamoto: a delicate mix of raising blocksize combined with scaling on second layers.
How do we know that Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned exactly this: a delicate mix of scaling onchain and offchain? We only have to look at his communication with Mike Hearn.
About Bitcoin’s blocksize:
“A higher limit can be phased in once we have actual use closer to the limit and make sure it’s working OK. Eventually when we have client-only implementations, the block chain size won’t matter much. Until then, while all users still have to download the entire block chain to start, it’s nice if we can keep it down to a reasonable size.”
About Bitcoin’s second layers for high frequency trades, which are regular buys and sales of goods and services on a large, global scale:
“One use of nLockTime is high frequency trades between a set of parties. They can keep updating a tx by unanimous agreement. The party giving money would be the first to sign the next version. If one party stops agreeing to changes, then the last state will be recorded at nLockTime. If desired, a default transaction can be prepared after each version so n-1 parties can push an unresponsive party out. Intermediate transactions do not need to be broadcast. Only the final outcome gets recorded by the network. Just before nLockTime, the parties and a few witness nodes broadcast the highest sequence tx they saw.”
To cut a long story short, it ended that it played out exactly as envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto, and in August 2017 Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 149 (BIP149) by Bitcoin developer Shaolinfry found majority consensus with the Bitcoin nodes.
For who’s interested, please read Shaolinfry’s “Understanding BIP149, redeployment of Segwit with BIP8” for some background to this event.
So in August 2017 the Bitcoin blocksize was raised from 1 MB to 4 MB, and Segwit was implemented to support (among more) further development of Lightning Network, a second layer that scales Bitcoin to a completely new level. Lightning Network’s current capacity is, after lab tests indicated that Lightning channels each contribute 500 to 1,000 transactions per second capacity, estimated at 40,000,000 Bitcoin transactions per second, for example.
Interestingly, Bitcoin has during its 15 years’ history not only been described as a currency for daily transactions, Bitcoin has been referred to as “digital gold” (or likewise) too. Take for example the Bitcoin whitepaper, where Satoshi himself is making a reference to gold:
“The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.”
Later, in August 2010, Satoshi expanded on this view on the Bitcoin Forum in a topic called “Bitcoin minting is thermodynamically perverse”.
“It’s the same situation as gold and gold mining. The marginal cost of gold mining tends to stay near the price of gold. Gold mining is a waste, but that waste is far less than the utility of having gold available as a medium of exchange. I think the case will be the same for Bitcoin. The utility of the exchanges made possible by Bitcoin will far exceed the cost of electricity used. Therefore, not having Bitcoin would be the net waste.”
And make no mistake here also, dear reader. This is literally Satoshi drawing a parallel between Bitcoin and gold in terms of both their creation processes. These quotes from the Bitcoin whitepaper and the Bitcoin Forum are in my opinion akin to saying Bitcoin is like digital gold, as both Bitcoin and gold involve a resource-intensive extraction process.
Now some see gold (and Bitcoin) as a speculative asset that is only hoarded rather than spent, and in a limited sense that is correct. But it is not, and never was, the complete story. In reality, an asset that is hoarded is hoarded for a very good reason: it has been acting for a good while as a store of value, and the people hoarding it trust the asset to keep its value in the foreseeable future. And that’s exactly what has been happening with gold for thousands of years.
And it’s the same story for Bitcoin since October 2009 when its price discovery on New Liberty Standard started. We can today say with confidence that Bitcoin has hold its value in US dollar terms on every 4 year timeframe. And for exactly this reason we see Bitcoin being considered as long term saving instrument by enterprises, countries and even central banks alike. Bitcoin can now be found in many treasuries and ETFs.
And suddenly the “HODL” meme starts to make a lot of sense, right?
Now some people like Craig Wright see this hoarding as a shift in the Bitcoin narrative from utility to speculation which can be likened to the transformation of early religious movements. Wright argues that “many religious communities start with a set of practical or moral principles, only to evolve over time into systems focused on symbolic rituals or abstract ideals (Stark & Bainbridge, 1985). In the case of BTC, the shift from micropayments to speculation reflects a similar process, where the original purpose of Bitcoin was abandoned in favour of a new narrative that benefits early adopters and speculators.”
This is, of course, utter nonsense. Nothing could be farther away from the truth. There never was any shift, and there is nor was a religious movement in Bitcoin (or BTC, the ticker by which Wright rightfully refers to Bitcoin).
(Fact checking the fact checker: Bitcoin Genesis block wasn’t mined though, but created hard coded with a pre-determined hash put in the header code. Proper Bitcoin mining only started at block 1, and Satoshi even had the decency to wait with mining until another mining node had joined the network. See code in screenshot below. Otherwise a completely correct assessment!)
Back to con artist Craig “I am not Satoshi Nakamoto” Wright. What Wright doesn’t seem to grasp is that money, or cash as Satoshi called it, always grows along the lines of a few well defined phases in a specific order. This order of phases is as follows:
- highly wanted collectible
- store of value
- means of exchange
- unit of account
- reserve currency
Gold went through all these phases over several thousands of years. Bitcoin is currently also going through these phases, but on steroids. Let’s have a more detailed look at Bitcoin.
- highly wanted collectible since January 2009
- store of value since October 2009
- means of exchange since May 2010
- unit of account since February 2011
- reserve currency (TBD)
Because Bitcoin has been used for all the aforementioned utilities and purposes except reserve currency, it is understandable that many people, and that includes the undersigned, consider Bitcoin to be money. At the same time this means that instead of a shift in the Bitcoin narrative from utility to speculation, as Wright wrongly argues, there are several narratives existing alongside each other, narratives that are related to all the phases that Bitcoin already went through in a rather short timeframe.
And they are not mutually exclusive either, of course. At all times, this all has to do with organic decentralized adoption of a new money, and nothing with, as Wright also wrongly argues, with a religious movement.
What we see happen here in Wright’s description of Bitcoin (BTC) is a classic case of projection. The religious movement is, of course, only with him and his fraudulent pet project BSV.
Just before the aforementioned BIP149 locked in in August 2017, a minority consensus group that had limited itself to a big block-only upgrade to tackle Bitcoin’s scalability question, forked away to end ‘ugly’ as Satoshi himself indicated in June 2010 (see his exact quote a bit earlier in this article).
This group, known for their failed Bitcoin hijack — and hostile Bitcoin takeover attempt with the New York Agreement (NYA) in May 2017, called their Bitcoin fork “Bitcoin Cash”, which turned out to be a project that, unsurprisingly, failed to get any traction whatsoever in the years after. Currently it is hovering around the 20th position on the market cap lists, while it’s spiritual leader and ex-Bitcoiner Roger Ver is in jail for tax fraud.
In November 2018 this same Bitcoin Cash fork spawned, inspired by Craig Wright, a spin off called BSV, short for Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Not that the BSV project has anything to do with Satoshi Nakamoto let alone his Vision, of course. Let’s summarize five major points by which we can determine that BSV is anything but Bitcoin.
- Satoshi explicitly excluded the data pumping that BSV is executing: “Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn’t scale. […] The networks need to have separate fates. BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it’s easy for lots of users and small devices.” — Satoshi Nakamoto on Bitcoin Forum, December 10, 2010
- Satoshi also excluded the usage of trusted third parties (where as BSV needs the BSV Association to handle Digital Asset Recovery requests): “I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties.” — Satoshi Nakamoto on P2P Foundation Forum, February 11, 2009
- Satoshi did not even envision coin confiscation, called Digital Asset Recovery by BSV: “Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly more. Think of it as a donation to everyone.” — Satoshi Nakamoto on Bitcoin Forum, June 21, 2010
- Satoshi proposed Nakamoto consensus about the longest chain with most accumulated Proof-of-Work with a 1 CPU is 1 vote concept for all nodes, and not limited to only mining nodes, as Wright wrongly argues. This becomes pretty clear looking at the Bitcoin code, in which non mining aka full nodes validate incoming blocks and signal for code updates, just like mining nodes. If Satoshi had wanted to exclude full nodes from this specific functionality, it would have taken only a few lines of code to switch on downloading blocks, validating these blocks when they arrive and signal for code updates *only* when the menu “Generate Coins” was clicked in the Bitcoin client. But Satoshi didn’t code it up like that, for reasons that we can make educated guesses about: the moment a Bitcoin client is switched on and starts running, it will automatically start downloading the full blockchain. It means that every running Bitcoin client, mining or not, will host the full blockchain. Ergo, the Bitcoin blockchain is decentralized to the max possible.
- Satoshi was a fan of open source development on a programmable money. See Bitcoin’s key innovations section #1 a bit earlier. Meanwhile, BSV is fully closed source and even worse, which will make Satoshi Nakamoto roll over twice in his grave presuming he is not among us anymore, they consider themselves a ‘protocol set in stone’: “Central to [BSV]’s structure is its “set in stone” base protocol — meaning the fundamental rules governing its functionality cannot be changed. [BSV]’s protocol was formalized in such a way with the release of Bitcoin v1.0.0, or “Genesis” in February 2020.” — CoinGeek, March 18, 2020
Wright’s gospel as the Religious Ideal for BSV
We only need to have a look at some of Wright’s most prolific outings why it is totally fair to argue that BSV is a religion. Read it and weep, dear reader.
After Wright lost the COPA v Wright Identity Issue case, only a few dozen hardcore fans remain faithful to the Wright gospel. One of them is ‘cryptorebel_SV’ also known under the (utterly misleading) pseudonym ‘Truth Machine’.
And another quote from one of his articles called “The Spiritual Battle for Truth, Bitcoin and Satoshi’s Vision”.
Then there’s Wright’s long time fan and Faketoshi apologist Zem Gao. When he read Wright’s article , he couldn’t help projecting, sorry, responding:
“Calling BTC a religion gives a bit too much credit to it. Not that religion is good, but BTC is worse. Religion is counterfeit faith. True faith is based on the revelation of the higher realm (the invisible spiritual realm). In contrast, religion, even in its honest form, is based on dogmatism extracted from killed (dead) revelation of the higher realm. That is, religion kills living revelation of the spiritual realm to suit man’s mind and flesh. But honest religion is at least typically moral, because it aims to mimic the higher realm of the real truth. Then there is cult. Cult is fake religion. It is not based on honest morality but on the personal interests and benefits of the cult leaders. Cults rely upon people’s ignorance. Then there are scams, which are similar to cults because scams also exploit people’s ignorance, except that cults are more personal while scams are more utilitarian. But the worst scams, such as Ponzi schemes, exploit not only victims’ ignorance but also their greed, making these scams more popular than a cult in its purer form. BTC is a case study. It is a combination of a cult and a scam. Cult because it is based on dogmatized and ideologically elevated narratives that are deliberately separated from reality to avoid reality check; Scam because it is just that, a scam. For this reason, calling BTC a religion seems to give it a bit more credit than it deserves. So it is a combination of a cult and a scam. A quite amazing one for that. It has had some marvelous effects characteristic of a kind of illusion that reaches the biblical end-time level.”
To which Wright responded, as usual these days by using ChatGTP (scribbr indicates that the following text is very likely for 55% AI generated):
“Zem,
I DO see what you’re saying. You’re drawing the line between true faith and counterfeit religion, and I get that. BTC’s not in the same league as something with real spiritual depth, real moral grounding. But here’s why I called it a religion: it’s the belief people have in it, the blind, unquestioning devotion, the way they cling to it like it’s their salvation.
So, I get it, calling BTC a religion does give it too much credit. It’s like calling a grifter a saint because they know how to put on a good show. This isn’t faith, it’s manipulation.
You know how throughout history, some religions, not all of course, have led people down dark roads — bloody sacrifices, wars in the name of something higher, all driven by zealots who twisted the original message? That’s how I see BTC. It’s not true faith, it’s the counterfeit. But to the people caught up in it, it feels like faith. It’s their dogma, their creed. They believe in BTC like it’s the answer to everything, like it’ll save them from the failures of the world.
So yeah, I get your point — calling it a religion maybe elevates it too much. Real faith is about something bigger, something eternal. BTC’s just a cheap imitation of that, a cult mixed with a scam, praying [sic] on people’s greed. But man, the way people worship it, defend it — it’s got all the signs of a modern religion, just without the soul.
— Craig”
One only needs to change the text a little to read:
“Real faith is about something bigger, something eternal. For example, genuinely believing that Bitcoin (BTC) will become Reserve Currency of the world. BSV’s just a cheap imitation of that, a Faketoshi personality cult mixed with an affinity scam, preying on people’s innocence, fear, insecurity and greed. But man, the way people worship BSV, defend BSV and its spiritual leader Wright — it’s got all the signs of a modern religion, just without the choirs singing hallelujah gospels and praise the lord psalms 24 hours a day. Oh wait, there are choir members Calvin Ayre and Kurt Wuckert Jr, of course.”
and to understand how projection works.
The Dark Triad — Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy in BSV’s Spiritual Leadership
BSV’s transformation into a religion has been driven, in large part, by the dark triad of Wright’s personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. These traits are often found in cult leaders and have been instrumental in shaping BSV’s evolution.
Narcissism is evident in the way how Wright falsely presented himself as Satoshi Nakamoto for a decade, and when that ultimately failed in court, he now presents himself as a Bitcoin expert and — visionary, promising his little group of dedicated followers a financial revolution with BSV based upon… micropayments.
Yes, you read that correctly. Micropayments. Wright now projects an image of intellectual and moral superiority, framing his support for BSV micropayments as evidence of his enlightened understanding of Bitcoin. This mirrors the behaviour of religious leaders who claim special access to divine knowledge, using their perceived authority to justify their position.
I’m sure it needs no further explanation that Satoshi Nakamoto hardly mentioned micropayments, let alone it being the ultimate and most important goal of Bitcoin. Of course, in the Bitcoin whitepaper ‘small casual transactions’ is mentioned:
“The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services.”
But it is pretty obvious that these ‘small casual transactions’ are only part of the full scope of financial transactions that Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned:
“What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party.”.
Machiavellianism, characterised by Wright’s camp deceit(*): manipulation of historical events and creating digital forgeries, is prevalent in the way BSV leaders like Craig Wright, Calvin Ayre and Stefan Matthews — together I often call them ‘the fraud squad’, these are the three people where BSV has centralized around over the years: Craig the spiritual leader, Calvin the financial sponsor of the whole shebang, while Stefan is mostly the marketing guy— have corrupted the narratives around Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin to suit their illicit financial interests.
(*) Deceit is the full time modus operandi of Wright and his friends. Deceit is the act or practice of deceiving — lying, misleading, or otherwise hiding or distorting the truth. Deceit doesn’t just involve lying though. Deceit can also consist of misrepresenting or omitting the truth, or more complicated cover-ups.
By falsely promoting Wright as Nakamoto and at the same time falsely promoting BSV as the real Bitcoin, as “enterprise data blockchain”, as “scaled for the world”, as “secure record of truth for everyone” rather as a crippled, centralized monster of Frankenstein not even remotely resembling anything Bitcoin, these leaders of BSV have ensured that all short term or long term adopters of BSV continue to get rekt.
BSV is meanwhile also, as said before, plagued by successful 51% attacks and BSV is at the same time hardly used by anyone else: I checked on September 14, 2024 and again on October 4, 2024 and guess what: BSV is executing around 45,000–50,000 transactions in 24 hours, which is less than 10% of the real Bitcoin (BTC)!
This narrative manipulation and — corruption is a classic Machiavellian strategy, where the leaders of the BSV community have somewhat successfully convinced their little cult of followers and believers to accept a new reality that primarily only benefits those who operate at the the top of the fraudulent scheme.
Psychopathy, defined as a lack of empathy and a willingness to severely harm others for personal gain without any excuse let alone recourse, is also very evident in BSV’s leadership. Those on the top of BSV who promote BSV as Bitcoin, and as a micropayment system, show little to no concern for the fact that the real Bitcoin, which is BTC of course, is following Satoshi’s guidelines as described in the Bitcoin whitepaper since January 2009, while BSV has taken a path in the opposite direction since November 2018.
No need to repeat now what has been described before.
To distract from this inconvenient truth, the BSV promoters are trying to get the reader’s focus on, and this is a psychopathic lie of course, how
“BTC its current design excludes large parts of the global population, particularly those in developing countries who cannot afford the high transaction fees. This lack of concern for the original goals of Bitcoin as a tool for financial inclusion is symptomatic of psychopathic tendencies, where the well-being of others is disregarded in favour of personal profit.”
Quote above taken from Craig Wright’s article “BTC as a Religion”.
Nothing could be farther from the truth though, and no doubt Wright is fully aware of this, which makes his lying even more psychopathic. With the Lightning Network protocol, Bitcoin has not only scaled for the global masses, it has also provided a solution for the sometimes high transaction fees onchain. Wright can only awkwardly avoid and ignore this subject to not fall in the trap that he thinks he had incompetently set up for the Bitcoin (which is BTC) fans.
And we all remember that moment in 2018 when he promised to reveal a fatal Segwit flaw in 2019… Well, we’re still waiting for that highly anticipated reveal in 2024!
The Psychological Impact of the Church of con artist Craig “I am not Satoshi Nakamoto” Wright
Cognitive Dissonance and Confirmation Bias
The psychological dynamics within the BSV community are well characterised by cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, both of which play a critical role in sustaining the cult-like BSV belief system.
Cognitive dissonance occurs when individuals are confronted with information that contradicts their beliefs, leading to discomfort. Rather than adjusting their views, BSV adherents often rationalise the inconsistencies in the system by shifting the narrative or ignoring facts. For instance, when confronted with the fact that BSV no longer functions as a fully decentralized open source project, proponents simply shift the focus to BSV’s presumed scaling qualities, avoiding the need to confront the failure of the original vision of Bitcoin.
Confirmation bias also plays a significant role in maintaining the faith of BSV adherents. Rather than seeking out information that challenges their beliefs, BSV proponents only selectively engage with data that reinforces their views. This creates an echo chamber where only positive narratives about BSV are accepted, and criticisms are dismissed as the product of ignorance or malice. This behaviour is not dissimilar to the way religious communities reject evidence that contradicts their sacred texts, relying instead on dogma to sustain their beliefs.
The Shift in Narrative
From Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash to Enterprise Data Blockchain to Micropayments
The shift in BSV’s narrative from Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash to Enterprise Data Blockchain (which is probably the most major narrative shift that BSV underwent since November 2018) to Micropayments represents the clearest example of how the BSV project has evolved into a religious belief.
Initially, BSV forked off from BCH to facilitate massive blocks, used to store arbitrary data against Satoshi’s clear advice (see Satoshi’s “doesn’t scale” remark earlier in this article). And as the BSV system’s scalability issues became apparent when BSV was losing nodes on a weekly, sometimes almost daily basis (BSV went from 400+ nodes early 2019 to around 10 nodes currently), the BSV community quickly began to pivot away from Bitcoin’s original purpose of being a peer-to-peer cash system, focusing instead on BSV’s data storage capacities, specifically for enterprises as Calvin Ayre would often narrate to his listeners.
This transition, fully supported by people on the helm of BSV, allowed BSV proponents to maintain a misplaced faith in the BSV system, even though BSV no longer served as a practical, sufficiently scaled peer-to-peer payment solution with a store of value feature looking for enterprise treasury — and merchant payment means adoption. This type of adoption, intended by Satoshi Nakamoto, solely remained with Bitcoin.
The focus on BSV as enterprise data solution is driven largely by the massive mistake that camp Craig Wright made: believing that con artist Wright is the inventor of Bitcoin and that his incoherent ramblings are the only gospel to follow. Here is where we lay the connection again between Craig Wright, religion and BSV.
Meanwhile Bitcoin stayed on the existing path of being open source, decentralized and peer-to-peer ‘digital gold’, used as saving instrument and payment means, based on its fixed supply of 21 million coins, which had been implemented by Satoshi Nakamoto as a feature that basically guarantees its future — rising — value.
The first person to make an educated guess about Bitcoin’s potential future value was the legendary Hal Finney. While Bitcoin was only live for an odd week since January 3, 2009, Hal in an answer to Satoshi estimated on the Metzdowd platform on January 11, 2009 that Bitcoin could reach an unit price of no less than $10,000,000.
In my imagination, Satoshi just smiled reading Hal’s considerations, meanwhile happily agreeing with him. And a few days later, on the same Metzdowd platform, Satoshi would drop the now famous and often quoted two sentences:
“It might make sense just to get some in case it catches on. If enough people think the same way, that becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.” — Satoshi Nakamoto on Metzdowd, January 16, 2009
Mind you, from here it still took 10 months for Bitcoin to obtain a real world value of $0.001 per unit (you read that correctly, only 0.1 dollar cents), when Martti Malmi performed the first Bitcoin trade ever, when he sold 5,050 BTC to the New Liberty Standard exchange for $5,02!
In the meantime, by unjustifiably reframing BSV’s limitations as strengths, BSV proponents have managed to sustain some sort of belief in the BSV system, even as it has been thoroughly crippled, has been centralized around sugar daddy Calvin Ayre and has completely moved away from Bitcoin’s original purpose as designed and coded up by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Sociological and Psychological Mechanisms
Reinforcing Belief through Groupthink and Charismatic Leadership
The sociological and psychological mechanisms that sustain BSV’s transformation into a religion are deeply intertwined with the concepts of groupthink, charismatic leadership, and cult dynamics. Groupthink, a psychological phenomenon where the desire for conformity within a group overrides critical thinking, plays a central role in the little BSV community.
The emphasis on enterprise data, followed by the latest narrative ‘micropayments’ combined with the cult-like veneration of messiah Craig Wright, it has created an environment where dissent in the BSV community is not only discouraged but is actively suppressed. Those who question the direction BSV has taken, particularly those criticizing the loss of open source development and the introduction of trusted third parties related to the Digital Asset Recovery feature of BSV, are often ostracised from the community or labelled as enemies of the faith.
The BSV community’s emphasis on enterprise data and micropayments has also led to the creation of what could be described as an “in-group” and “out-group” dynamic. BSV proponents and Craig Wright apologists see themselves as part of an exclusive group of enlightened individuals who understand the true value of Bitcoin as embodied in BSV, while critics and outsiders are viewed as either ignorant or, in many cases, straightforward malicious.
This dynamic, supported by conspiracy theories (*) about a still ongoing Blocksize War (BSV lost that war many years ago) and reinforces group cohesion and strengthens the belief system, much like how religious communities often define themselves in opposition to non-believers or heretics. The result is a closed, insular community where any challenge to the dominant narrative is met with hostility, rather than rational debate.
(*) Wat follows next is just a random recent example I came across, where a BSV fan who calls himself ‘369bsv’ summarizes several conspiracy theories around the “Craig is not Satoshi” ruling of Justice Mellor in the COPA v Wright case in UK, May 2024.
Note how ‘369bsv’ after being made aware of Mellor’s reasons to not believe in a “very large number of unfortunate coincidences and/or a number of conspiracies against Wright”, immediately changes the discussion to BTC’s utility and price trajectory compared to BSV’s scalability (subjects which are utterly irrelevant to the discussion at hand) instead of addressing Mellor’s fact heavy content.
But this is how the BSV cult avoids being confronted with the cold hard truth: they just completely ignore it.
Charismatic leadership has also played a significant role in shaping the religious nature of BSV. The most influential figure within the BSV community, often referred to as “messiah” or “second coming of Jesus Christ” wield significant power over the narrative and direction of the BSV system.
This BSV leader, who, you guessed it already, goes by the name of Craig Wright, and who wasn’t even a very early adopter of Bitcoin as he only bought his first BTC in April 2013, has unsuccessfully positioned himself as the true Satoshi Nakamoto.
Because by now it’s no secret anymore that Wright his interpretations diverge enormously from the original Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. Wright his ‘success’ is only with a little group of very gullible, very delusional and very dedicated followers. This mirrors the role of religious leaders who claim special access to divine knowledge or insight, using their authority to justify their positions and rally their cult followers.
Those who’ve followed the COPA v Wright case until its ruling in May 2024 know way better, meanwhile. Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.
The dark triad of personality traits — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — further reinforces the cult-like dynamics within BSV. Narcissistic leaders in the BSV community like Craig Wright often present themselves as visionaries who are leading a financial revolution, framing their support for BSV as evidence of their superior understanding. Machiavellian figures manipulate the narrative around BSV (often deceitfully called “the real Bitcoin”) to maintain power and influence, promoting ideas like “enterprise data” and “micropayments” to ensure continued investment and, hopefully, BSV price appreciation.
These religious efforts of Wright’s camp have turned out to be extremely unsuccessful, though. Let’s take the company nChain as an example. nChain was set up in 2015 as the business vehicle where Craig Wright, one of the founding shareholders, would drop his Intellectual Property. After a successful Satoshi reveal, planned for 2016, the founders of nChain would, they hoped, walk away with billions.
Fate, karma, reality, however you want to call it, turned things into a completely different direction. The next quote is a little piece I wrote a few days ago for my Twitter followers.
“Why is nChain currently in serious financial trouble, to the level of having to postpone releasing their 2023 accounts while rapidly selling and discontinuing substantial parts of their business? And why are our (patent attorney David Pearce and undersigned) Patent Oppositions not to be underestimated in the process?
Because the valuation of intangible business assets such as patented IP, particularly when a company is pre-revenue, is often based on income models supported by contracts and license deals. Since nChain has no patent contracts nor any license deals, that means there is no bookkeeping evidence from which to extrapolate the numbers. Although this is an educated guess at the moment, we do know for sure that nChain partner IPwe went bankrupt recently, and we can safely presume that they never closed a patent deal for nChain. nChain would have shouted from the rooftops that they had closed any patent deals, but as we all know, that never happened since 2016 when they started to file patents.
To add, there are even strong negative indicators of valuation such as the successful Patent Oppositions Faketoshi01, Faketoshi02 and soon Faketoshi03, showing that nChain’s patented inventions are in fact not very novel in nature, and they are very likely not holding up when challenged in court in patent trolling cases. Look at it from this angle: in a valuable patented IP portfolio like IBM or Philips, 80% of the portfolio is normally valued at nothing in the industry. 10–15% may be okay-ish, while only 5% are gold nuggets. For nChain, now that we have proven, mind you, that their patents can even be kicked from the registry quite easily, it means that their patent portfolio will very likely be valued at close to 100% nothing.
In the absence of income models, another valuation method could be used, which is cost replacement. That would lead to a valuation of simply number of patents multiplied by say $70,000 to $80,000 a patent. More than likely under Swiss GAPP, who run with a prudence principal for audits, in the absence of a measurement reliability of > 55%, they — the auditors — will have impaired the asset in line with IAS36 (see https://www.ifrs.org/issued-standards/list-of-standards/ias-36-impairment-of-assets/).
Another point — much like for example Mergers & Acquisitions in valuation of a portfolio of intangible assets — is that they (the auditors) will put significant weight on the nChain team creating them and the nChain team selling them. What we see here is that nChain has seen a UK court ruling that an identity fraud has been involved in creating the patents, and nChain has recently also fired the majority of their sales people. And at the same time having no board since September 2023 to manage the strategy and no CEO with a reputation for IP commercialisation since Stefan Matthews was retired in recent days, it would take several miracles for the company to enter into a meaningful deal with an interested buying party to value above cost replacement.
And no doubt that nChain’s auditors are fully aware of all these painful facts.”
Also, an ex-employee of nChain lashed out on Reddit in recent days.
Oh boy, oh boy.
The Psychological Foundations of Faith in BSV
Understanding the psychological mechanisms that sustain the completely unjustified belief in BSV, particularly cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, are critical to understanding BSV and its religious transformation. Cognitive dissonance occurs when individuals experience discomfort as a result of holding conflicting beliefs or when reality contradicts their expectations. In the context of BSV, cognitive dissonance arises when the community is confronted with evidence that BSV, after miserably failing to function as a scalable peer-to-peer cash system, is not an highly wanted enterprise data system either, let alone a heavily adopted micropayments platform. Mind you, BSV cannot even perform transactions of 1 satoshi let alone 0.001 satoshi, while Bitcoin (BTC) can actually perform these nano type transactions!
Yesterday, December 19, 2018, an auction was held by cryptocurrency and blockchain artist @cryptograffiti for a piece titled “black swan” which the artist made using “fiat and counterfeit detector pen ink”. The artist, who became involved with bitcoin in 2013, held the auction on a website where users could only bid via Lightning Network micropayments, with the first person to bid the smallest amount being the winner.
Cryptograffiti and Bitcoin Magazine would like to take this opportunity to announce the winner of the auction. Congratulations Twitter user @BTC_Spot!
The winning price was the first of several 1 millisatoshi bids (one hundred billionth of one bitcoin). At the time of writing, the US-dollar denominated value of the bid is approximately $0.000000037.
The auction marks a significant event for Lightning’s use among the Bitcoin community. It even served as a learning lesson for those who participated.
“Many others were unaware that sub-satoshi payments were possible via LN,” the artist told Bitcoin Magazine.
Rather than adjusting their beliefs to align with reality, BSV adherents often rationalise the BSV system’s shortcomings by shifting the narrative to focus on BSV’s next almost mythical update called ‘Teranode’, which has been announced for several years now.
This rationalisation process allows BSV proponents to maintain a completely unjustified faith in the BSV system, even when its current reality diverges significantly from its original purpose. By reframing BSV’s limitations as strengths, such as claiming that Teranode lab test results of 1 million transactions per second are a sign of success, BSV adherents resolve the cognitive dissonance between their belief in BSV’s future and the practical challenges it faces in the present.
This nicely mirrors how religious adherents often reinterpret challenges to their faith as tests of devotion or signs of divine intervention, rather than confronting the contradictions between their beliefs and reality.
Confirmation bias further entrenches this belief system by causing individuals to seek out information that reinforces their existing views while ignoring or dismissing evidence to the contrary. In the tiny BSV community, confirmation bias is particularly evident in the way proponents selectively engage with data that supports the narrative of BSV as data and micropayments platform, while disregarding evidence that highlights the system’s scalability issues, the total lack of decentralization and adoption after operating for almost six years in the industry, or the abysmal state of security the BSV system operates under. This selective engagement with information creates an echo chamber where only positive narratives about BSV are accepted, and dissenting voices are marginalised or silenced.
This combination of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias creates a feedback loop that reinforces the religious nature of BSV. As BSV fans rationalise the system’s shortcomings and seek out information that confirms their beliefs, the faith-based aspects of the BSV community become more entrenched. This feedback loop is common in religious movements, where adherents often engage in similar processes to sustain their faith in the face of contradictory evidence.
Conclusion — BSV’s Religious Evolution and the Loss of its Original Vision
BSV’s evolution from a peer-to-peer cash system to a data pump monstrosity that hasn’t scaled and is, despite the promotional narrative, not capable of micropayments of any kind, but still defended furiously by a little group of brainwashed believers, this trajectory can be compared with a (quasi-)religion. BSV is a case study in how technological systems can take on religious characteristics when a messiah like personality is involved.
The emergence of the “Church of Messiah Wright” and the total abandonment of Bitcoin’s original purpose, the elevation of enterprise data and micropayments to a quasi-sacred principle, have all contributed to this transformation from a technology platform to a religious gathering of gullible cult members parroting an incompetent cosplayer. Sociological mechanisms such as groupthink and charismatic leadership, along with psychological factors like cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias, have further entrenched BSV’s faith-based belief system.
And because the disintegration of the whole BSV infra is currently accelerating after Justice Mellor May 2024 ruling “Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto”, it is fair to presume that we can soon start preparing a ‘Craig Wright & BSV, In Memoriam’.
That’s all folks, thanks for reading again!
