Blog > Bitcoin & Blockchain Tech

Statement of Dec 27, 2019

By Craig Wright | 27 Dec 2019 | Bitcoin & Blockchain Tech

Recently, we have received many questions and seen much public conjecture about what will happen in January 2020 with bitcoin in my family’s trust. What a family does with its finances should be its own private business.

But many of the questions being asked arise from fundamental misunderstandings of bitcoin. In fact, bitcoin is one of the most misunderstood systems ever created. This is in part my fault for not explaining things many people, as well as I, should have explained much earlier in bitcoin’s life. But, today’s misconceptions about bitcoin are also the fault of those involved in anarchist systems who sought to try and change bitcoin and create something that bitcoin was designed never to be.

So what I will say now is the following.

As I’ve explained in court proceedings, I believe I will receive information in January 2020 that will enable us to identify coins I mined into my companies in 2009 and 2010, but cannot be certain that information will in fact arrive. I have not said the private keys to those coins would become available, or if so, actually used, in January 2020.

None of this will be what people expect because people have come to associate bitcoin and the system I developed with something that it is designed not to be. The process we will be engaged in over the next 12 months will be one that radically changes the perceptions of the industry and demonstrates the true power of bitcoin. As part of this, we are working to ensure that the fallout from any interaction in the market involving my family trust’s coins is minimised. We also want to slowly migrate people and node operators (aka miners) into a sustainable model that will take us not only past the next block reward halving in April/May 2020, but far beyond 2020. I do not intend to dump my family’s BTC as some people suspect or want, as this would hurt many people in the industry. Instead, I will work with the family trust to implement plans to slowly move the interests of the trust into a sustainable model that builds the Bitcoin SV environment and ensures that the bitcoin that I originally envisioned more than a decade ago (now known as Bitcoin SV – BSV) continues to grow strongly.

Bitcoin is a protocol and a platform. It’s stable and set in stone in the manner that the Internet was. Beginning in 2020, people will start to better understand the power of bitcoin and just how fragile the position taken by the Bitcoin Core developers – and their creation of a different coin in BTC – really was. Bitcoin was never designed to be anonymous; instead, it is anti-anonymous. Bitcoin was not designed to oppose governments or banks; instead, it is honest in nature and designed to implement a system that fights corruption. Governments are not bad when they are honest and subject to the just will of the people. It is anonymity that allows corruption to flourish. In 2020, people will start to see that truth and the true nature of bitcoin.