Craig Wright — The Tankening Is Near
Written by Arthur van Pelt
This short article will put a brief spotlight on the handfuls of companies that Satoshi Nakamoto cosplayer Craig Wright bankrupted since 2013 when he started his Bitcoin fraud show, and why the Calvin Ayre subsidized, and controlled — but all set up to support Craig’s wild Bitcoin dreams — , companies Taal Blockchain, nChain, CoinGeek Media and of course the Bitcoin Association for BSV are extremely likely next in line. Also Craig’s brainchild, the Bitcoin affinity fraud project BSV (sometimes called “Bankrupt Soon Vehicle” already), will very likely not escape the hand of doom that follows Craig closely since he bought his first few Bitcoin on Mt Gox in April 2013.
“On Tuesday, two different technology publications, Wired and Gizmodo, ran big stories pointing to an Australian businessman, Craig Steven Wright, as the possible creator of the digital currency bitcoin. And on Tuesday night (Wednesday afternoon in Australia), Australian federal police raided Wright’s house and office. It was a wild ending to a wild day in bitcoin news.
The Australian authorities said the raids in the Sydney suburbs of Gordon and Ryde were part of a tax investigation and not related to the day’s bitcoin reports. The Australian Taxation Office ordered the police raid, and, according to the New York Times, it has declined to comment. The Australian Federal Police did release a statement in which it said, “The AFP can confirm it has conducted search warrants to assist the Australian Taxation Office at a residence in Gordon and a business premises in Ryde, Sydney. This matter is unrelated to recent media reporting regarding the digital currency bitcoin.”” — Fortune (Daniel Roberts)
Many of my readers will remember this moment in December 2015 all too well I’m sure; here is where Craig Wright’s claim to Bitcoin creator fame started in the Wired and Gizmodo magazines, a claim that failed from the get-go, and kept on failing ever since. Within hours of the publications aforementioned, almost as if it was coordinated (but it wasn’t, as we know now), Craig’s home and offices were raided by the Australian police, on behalf of the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), to collect all bookkeeping files and other records of the companies that he was running at the time:
What we are looking at above is the final installment of Craig’s Bitcoin-related Potemkin Village in Australia, just before he fled to London to become nChain’s Chief Scientist. Despite the fancy looking logos, all these companies do not exist anymore. It’s even fair to say, some of them never really ‘existed’ in the first place, except for their Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) registration and some made up paper-only figures to try defraud the ATO for millions in fake, baseless tax returns.
For example, when the ATO was inquiring Coin-Exch (middle row, logo on the right) and requested one of Craig’s tax refunds of AU$3,787,429.00 back (and fined Craig AU$1,893,714.50 on top of it), they explained to his tax lawyer Andrew Sommer:
Let’s do a quick rundown of these, and a several other — not mentioned in the screenshot — companies that went bankrupt or were otherwise forced to close shop during the Australian tax fraud era where Craig Wright started using Bitcoin as a scam tool in 2013, and ignited a Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay in the process in later years.
All companies are located in Australia, except where mentioned otherwise. Note that this list is likely still incomplete, and took quite the research effort to create, as Craig Wright went to great lengths in his attempts to obfuscate his (non-existing) Bitcoin dealings, and to deceive the ATO in the process. For a more detailed run down of Craig his fraudulent Bitcoin and tax dealings up till 2015, I happily refer to the, as yet unfinished, “Faketoshi, The Early Years” series of articles.
- Information Defense (raised 2009, dismantled 2017)
- Integyrs (raised 2009, dismantled 2015)
- Not to be confused with Integyrz - Greyfog (raised 2009, dismantled 2014)
- Cloudcroft (raised 2011, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Panopticrypt (raised 2011, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Strasan (raised 2011, renamed to C01n in 2014, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Coin-Exch (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence (raised 2013, bankrupt 2014, dismantled 2017)
- Integyrz (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Interconnected Research (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Pholus (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Denariuz (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Zuhl (raised 2013, raided & put under ATO’s External Administration 2015, dismantled 2020)
- Hotwire PE Employee Share Plan (raised 2013, dismantled 2018)
- Chaos And Nonlinear Forecastability In Economics And Finance (raised 2014, dismantled 2018)
- Daso (raised 2014, dismantled 2017)
- DeMorgan Holdings (raised 2014, dismantled 2017)
- DeMorgan Ltd (raised 2014, dismantled 2017)
- Misfits Games (raised 2014, dismantled 2018)
- Ezas (raised 2014, dismantled 2019)
- Denariuz Ltd (UK) (raised as empty shelf company in 2012 by CFS, obtained as such by Craig under the name “Permanent Success” who immediately renamed to Denariuz Ltd in 2014, dismantled 2017)
- C01n Ltd (UK) (raised as empty shelf company in 2012 by CFS, obtained as such by Craig under the name “Moving Forward In Business” who immediately renamed to C01n Ltd in 2014, dismantled 2017)
On purpose, the two most ‘famous’ Seychelles companies (Tulip Trading Ltd & Wright International Investments Ltd) that Craig Wright still owns are not in this list. As far as we know, these two companies still exist, have not been dissolved from the Seychelles company registries, and — by means of backdated forgeries, fraudulent bookkeeping and non-existing encrypted files between its assets(*)— form the current installment of the infamous Tulip Trust.
Note that to this very day, the Tulip Trust fraud is still used heavily by Craig Wright and his UK lawyer firm Ontier to further scam and harass inside and outside the Bitcoin industry with several elements of the long-debunked Craig is Satoshi lie. Allow me to mention false copyright claims, several senseless libel cases, the Pineapple Hack that never happened, multi-million Nigerian prince advance fee scammery… as examples where the Tulip Trust fraud is making an appearance. Time to put an end to it, if you ask me, but that’s another story for another day.
(*) as determined by the ATO in 2016 during their very thorough tax fraud inquiry, and as determined by Court Florida in 2019 during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.
Now how is all this related to the BSV project, to Taal Blockchain, nChain, CoinGeek Media and the Bitcoin Association for BSV?
Simple.
Just as (almost) all of the 22 bankrupt, raided & discontinued Australian and UK companies have been based upon, and wrapped around, Craig Wright’s Bitcoin fraud that he ignited in 2013, so are nChain et al. When Craig’s Bitcoin Potemkin Village, together with his Satoshi cosplay, collapsed in 2015 in Australia, he just rewrapped the whole — empty, paper only — thing, created a new set of lies and forgeries, found a gullible, and wealthy, Calvin Ayre on his path, and he was allowed to continue the whole scam under a set of new business monikers in the years after 2015!
Since this is just old wine in new bottles, this will, of course, not end well again for everyone involved. Thoroughly rooted in fraud, deception and false promises (of which we’ve seen handfuls fail already), the current Craig Wright entourage of ‘Bitcoin’ related endeavors are set up for one thing only again: bankruptcy.
And it is about time to not ignore the signals anymore. Take Taal Blockchain, the longest standing dedicated BSV mining pool, for example. It was a total shock, but not a surprise (to me at least), to learn that in 2.5 years, Taal managed to build up no less than $40 million in losses. Not at any time in their mining history have they been able to:
- attract successful managers, directors and Board members that remained in position longer as 1–2 years
- make any substantial revenues on mining or otherwise to cover their massive cost structure
- walk on their own legs, as they recently needed a $7 million loan and a $40 million bailout to stay afloat
Let’s have a closer look at the figures of Taal.
Just make a count of the ‘Net loss’ line and you will get to a number north of $40 million. This, and for several reasons more, is why it is to be expected that Taal will go bankrupt in the upcoming years.
- Economical: as mining BSV is not to be expected to become profitable anytime soon for a — dedicated — miner, Taal will, as a result, not be able to make any profits. Unless Calvin Ayre, the monetary mind behind some 80% to 90% of all BSV infra, keeps bailing out Taal, they will go belly up within two years, is my expectation.
- Social: as BSV and its few 100 dedicated community members have a reputation that, if possible, would be measured below zero by industry experts, as a result no widespread adoption of BSV is ever to be expected. Recently, Australia already hinted to that trend when refusing to sponsor BSV related projects with tax money, citing reputational and legal issues with BSV.
- Legal: as there is currently immutable illicit material like child abuse pictures and copyrighted images and — artwork in the BSV blockchain, it is to be expected that at some point regulatory forces are going to clamp down on the easy-to-bring-down centralized BSV blockchain. Another ticking legal timebomb under the long term existence of the BSV blockchain is the rightful accusation that BSV shows all signs of being a security: centrally controlled issuance of a digital token with a promise of future returns(1) based on enforcement of patents(2) and the Craig is Satoshi-bonus, combined with his price calls based on his future actions, like dumping all the BTC from his ‘Tulip Trust’(3).
(1) With the Howey Test one can determine if a self-proclaimed crypto currency is in fact a security: “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others”. Meanwhile, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has recently announced to start cracking down on possibly up to 6,000 security offerings in the crypto space. There is no doubt in my mind that BSV will be on the SEC’s radar sooner or later.
(2) Calvin Ayre has no shame in admitting this fact. Only note the typo: he forgot the SV after Bitcoin. Bitcoin, unlike its affinity fraud derivative BSV, has no controlling entity, of course.
(3)Twitter user @m__btc nailed it in a tweet dated December 23, 2020 (with screenshots provided): “BSV is owned by Calvin Ayre (according to the official BSV website) and his fraudulent buddy is promising profits. BSV meets all of the Howey requirements but it will likely implode before drawing SEC’s attention.”
And @m__btc further detailed his stance on March 5, 2021:
Now let’s have a look at another BSV ‘behemoth’: nChain. They appear to be doing fine; steady turnover growth, no losses over the last two years, nice little profit each year… A solid business to happily invest in, unlike Taal, one would think. No?
No. Maybe not.
Let’s have a look at what the turnover actually is: “provision of commercial blockchain and IT products and services”. Okay. That’s not patent licensing revenues, since nChain never sold one of the hundreds of Craig Wright’s patents since 2015. That’s not the Tuvalu project (announced late December 2020) nor EHR Data (indefinitely postponed in April 2021). So what are these revenues, coming from the “rest of the world”? Could it be that nChain just sends a $1 million invoice for “provision of commercial blockchain and IT products and services” to Antigua each month to be able to pay the salaries of 76 employees, as Calvin Ayre is literally sponsoring ‘everything’ in the BSV circle jerk environment, up to literally tens of millions in a hilarious Nigerian prince style advance fee scam(*) for Craig Wright’s legal struggles? One can try to make an educated guess here. But fact is, nChain, always quick to make big announcements like EHR Data and Tuvalu, never announced any other enterprises and governments coming in in droves.
(*) Nigerian prince advance fee scam, as we learned from one of Craig’s lawsuits:
What remains are a few words about the single most risky central point of failure for BSV: Craig Wright, the Satoshi Nakamoto cosplayer. In the past few years, we’ve seen that the BSV price needle only moves when, always based on fake news, Craig is presumed to have proven his Satoshi-ness. The most recent, and most prolific at the same time, example was the Tulip Trust pump in January 2020.
In January 2020, during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, Craig Wright appeared to have handed over the so-called Tulip Trust list of his Bitcoin ‘holdings’ from his self-declared mining in the early years of Bitcoin, to be precise from January 2009 till August 2010. This mining, of course, never happened, and as a result this Tulip Trust list turned out to be the umpteenth forgery that Craig had created during the lawsuit. In May 2020, 145 Bitcoin addresses on this list were signed “Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud”, in the months after followed by numerous coins moving from handfuls of Bitcoin addresses on the, obviously fake, Tulip Trust list.
To cut a long story short, Craig Wright will not win any of the lawsuits that he’s currently involved in as they all are, no exception, loaded with his lies and forgeries.
- Craig will not win the Kleiman fraud case
- Craig will not win the COPA copyright case
- Craig will not win the Peter McCormack libel case
- Craig will not win both the hodlonaut libel cases
- Craig will not win the Pineapple Hack case against the Bitcoin devs
Admittedly, this might take a few years more to play out properly. But knowing that only Craig Wright is able to make the BSV price move, the coming years we will see an avalanche of bad news hit the BSV community, and they will not hesitate to put further pressure on the BSV price. Not compensated by good news (as there will be none; BSV doesn’t scale, is technically crippled as the recent reorg attacks (leading to over $6 million double spend damages for Bitmart Exchange, as their lawsuit to chase the Russian hackers evidenced) showed, and is not being adopted due to its ugly reputation), BSV is heading for the abyss. And with the demise of BSV, all companies like Taal and nChain and Bitcoin Association for BSV making up their infrastructure, will end up in the cryptocurrency gutter too.
My strong advice, as always: get out, and stay out of the massively toxic Craig Wright and BSV environment. The tankening is near.
The end. Thanks for reading.
