Speaking to Ran NeuNer on an (impressively substantive) episode of CNBC’s CryptoTrader, Dr. Craig Wright revealed that in addition to being the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin known as “Satoshi Nakamoto,” he is also the immortal swordsman known in the distant past as Connor MacLeod, a so-called “Highlander.”
Wright’s exchange with Ran got off to a testy start after NeuNer brought up Wright’s claim to be Satoshi. That claim was most recently enshrined in an advisory letter about blockchain to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a U.S. regulatory body. Wright didn’t want to talk about his claim, though, and threatened to “end it now” if NeuNer brought up the topic again. This was the first sign that he was preparing to admit that he has lived many lives of ceaseless battle: A Highlander is nearly invulnerable except to suicide.
Later in their discussion, the man we know as Craig Wright revealed that his longtime rivalry against the deathless assassin The Kurgan continues, though on new terrain. “New coins, new ICOs, are pure scams,” Wright said. “Not one of them has ever created anything. They are purely a way to get around the controls that stop people from scamming others . . . they have to end.”
Related: Is Craig Wright Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto? “You Have No Right to Know,” He Insists
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When asked about smart contract platforms like Ethereum, Wright affirmed that his vendetta extends to all challengers.
“There is no such thing as a token for a supercomputing mechanism. That is a scam and a lie. There is not one token that gives you a single compute cycle for anything less than a million times the cost [of a conventional computer]. You would actually be more efficient to buy a Raspberry Pi than you would be to buy a thousand dollar’s worth of compute cycle on Ethereum.”
Wright also questioned the logic of the very decentralization that he claims to have championed a decade ago in the bitcoin whitepaper. While bitcoin operates as a “clearinghouse,” he told NeuNer, “It doesn’t replace banks, it doesn’t do any of this decentralized crap. Because quite frankly, decentralized . . . it’s thrown out there as this nebulous word . . . That is idiocracy squared.”
"There can only be one blockchain . . . You either have one or nothing."
Wright, as a true warrior, is not content to battle his foes with logic—he is also an eager narc. “One of the things that I’ve been working on that I’m going to be releasing later this year,” Wright said, “first to people like law enforcement and then to others, will be: How to kill Zcash, how to kill Monero, etcetera. If you have a privacy coin, I will show you, it’s basically as private as running through Times Square with your pants around your ankles.”
Wright explained to NeuNer his basic stance that all blockchains except bitcoin (by which he of course means Bitcoin Cash SV or whatever his fork is called now) are superfluous scams. “There can only be one blockchain. This is the whole nature of it . . . the power is competing for the same thing. Either one survive or all collapse. There is no middle ground here, it’s a protocol. You either have one or nothing.”
[Joking aside—this is a real stance known as Bitcoin Maximalism. The basic idea is that efficiency demands all transactions will eventually converge on a single currency. Wright shares this belief with some very rational, non-immortal people.]
After Wright has chopped all competing blockchains in half with his ancient Damascene Steel broadsword, he will presumably take possession of The Prize—a vast store of secret knowledge that will grant him authority over all living human beings.