Mike Lorrey: I know, who is Satoshi, and I replace Nathan Wosnack on the jury of CoinIdol



Coinidol.com presents you a new member of jury in the public trial of scammers - Mike Lorrey, a legendary person in the field of Bitcoin and Blockchain, who is the co-creator of the cryptocurrency, predecessor of Bitcoin. If you still haven’t met him on your way, you have to know about his ideas.

Here is his opinion without any corrections:

“George Gor has asked me to replace Nathan Wosnack on the jury to decide the disposition of the $1000 that the accused/alleged scam artist, Yacub paid to CoinIdol to promote his coin venture. As I am asked to sit on this jury I cannot and will not express any opinion on the merits of the case against him, although I have made a flippant comment in the thread on the case. Yacub does indeed deserve a trial by his peers who will come to the case with objective minds willing to hear whatever defense he chooses to present, if he chooses to present one.

George asked me to comment about why I was interested in sitting on this jury. I happen to believe that it is important for the blockchain community to develop its own tools of self governance if we want to avoid having state actors oppress the entire industry. It is our responsibility to ourselves, and to the technology, and to future generations, to assume this duty. To understand why I feel this way I need to go back into the dim mists of internet history to the time when I and a loose group of others on a few different mail lists (cypherpunks, >H, and Extropians, primarily) were discussing the problems of the digital currencies of the 90's and other attempts to make independent monetary systems.

Back then, we had seen things like eCash, Digicash, eGold, and a number of other digital currencies pop up. Those that were unbacked quickly fell subject to trust issues because their issuers fell into the classic fractional reserve behaviors of the existing Federal Reserve banking system and their fiat money. They issued more money than they had assets for they spent the other currencies they received in exchange for their own digital money. Those that did back their money with durable commodities like gold and silver found themselves subject to theft, either by criminals, or government agents (but I repeat myself).

The government generally accused all digital currency operators of aiding and abetting drug dealers, money launderers, organized crime, and terrorists (yes, exactly the same things they accuse blockchain people of today, its starting to get old...) Then the government raided NORFED, and it became clear that gold and silver in a vault were a point source security risk, not a strength, of backed 'sound' money. How could we code a system to replicate the monetary behavior of gold and silver as sound money? It would obviously require that it take more work to fake it than to create it but still require an amount of computational work to create in the first place legitimately. So was born the idea of proof of work.

There was still the problem of hacking the digital money: if someone can copy your digital cash file, and spend it, your copy becomes worthless. That was John Clark's argument. I countered that if there was a massive public ledger that documented the chain of custody of every piece of digital money from its point of inception, you could eliminate both the fractional reserve fraud issue as well as the theft issue, because the thief cannot respend the money into the system without identifying himself as the thief, by linking himself with the stolen goods in the public ledger, whereupon, the victim can put a claim upon the stolen currency and regain possession of it. That was the actual intent I had when I originally proposed the public ledger for the first time.

Nick Szabo took that and other ideas we had to compile them into his "Unforgeable Costliness" essay on his blog, "Unenumerated", where our ideas for "bitgold" became a solid algorithm that is remarkably similar to what eventually wound up in the pseudonymously authored Satoshi paper a few years later.

Yes, I know who Satoshi is, and no, its not me, and no, I'm not telling. At the time, Hal Finney cautioned about anonymity, as he had seen his friend Phil Zimmerman arrested over PGP, which Hal had coded for Phil. He knew from personal experience how heavy handed the state would get when you threaten their self perception of power. Everyone had lives, and had no interest in winding up in some secret CIA prison somewhere, nameless and disappeared. So don't ask.

Since that time, many have made much of the anonymity of Satoshi, the numbered wallets, as an ethic of unaccountability, of wild west 'anything goes'. But that isn't what it is about. Pseudonym is part of man's natural right to alias, but the right to alias is about protection against oppression, not as a tool to exploit and oppress others with craven crime and fraud.

It was inevitable that when the state treats a market as a black market, that it winds up being dominated by criminals, and unfortunately, there are far too many criminals in the blockchain space. Crooks, con artists, ponzis, scam artists, thieves, extortionists, hijackers, kidnappers, you name it. This infestation of criminals in our community cannot be tolerated by us as individuals if we want blockchain technology to become the force for good and change in the world that so many of us want for it. We each have to take personal responsibility to deal justly with each other, and to hold others accountable in the community when they take advantage of our ideals to exploit and defraud others.

Since those early days, as we have all learned more about and thought about the power of blockchain to be a transformational force for good in the world, I have sat back and observed and thought a lot about it. As a libertarian, I am ardently of the belief that that state governs best which governs least, and which governs closest to the man on the street. Blockchain is about authenticating transactions in an untrusted society.

We have all lost a lot of trust in our government institutions from the corruption, the fake news, the propaganda, the constitutional violations, the leaks showing massive violations of citizens rights, and that is just here in the US and other "civilized" nations. The rest of the world is crying out for justice just as badly. In the post colonial world that allowed socialist looters to pillage the few institutions of social trust those powers left behind, societies, billions of people, are stuck in development traps because they lack institutions that are trustable, and inspire people to interact with trust in the validity of their transactions, both in private commerce and in interactions with governments that are often corrupt.

These problems our civilization faces can be solved with blockchain technology. Etherium is just one example. Factom is another, and there are more entering the coinspace every day. Blockchain as a Service, or BaaS, stands poised to transform society by enabling us to build institutions of public trust without having to trust central authorities to oversee them.

We can decentralize the state and other institutions of our society into blockchains. Whether it is about drivers licenses, property deed transfers, trademark registrations, building permits, weddings, births, you name it INCLUDING dispute resolution (hint hint), all of these bureaucratic administrative functions can be decentralized to a blockchain. With national, supranational, state, or even local blockchains, possibly even blockchains in competition with each other, these governance services can serve the needs of every person interacting directly with the blockchain.

Not just those needing services, but those needing help too. There are increasing calls for "Universal Basic Income", but none of them show any economic validity or sustainability whatsoever. They are either expanded welfare programs that don't eliminate existing welfare state programs, or they are redistributive looting by taxing capital, automation, or other systems of economic productivity.

I have proposed that these BaaS systems be adopted as national and state currencies, and enable those who seek entitlements: welfare, disability, social security, retirement pensions, etc can earn their benefits by mining these BaaS blockchains, while at the same time learning and practicing useful skills that make them more economically viable in the 21st century economy.

So, this is a big vision, and this case of Yacub, where we need the community to resolve the dispute over whether Yacub is a legit business person, and what CoinIdol should do with Yacub's money, can serve as the impetus for all of us to think about solving these issues of decentralized governance as I have laid them out, to use blockchain to realize its full transformational potential to bring justice to all.

I am therefore accepting George's request to sit on this jury, for the good of the community. If Yacub or Jawad or whatever he is called wants to threaten me with legal action, let him try. He can ask Anon what happened when one of their offshoots proposed to raid my home. I don't intimidate easily. If you want your story to be considered fairly, objectively, present the evidence, and trust in your peers and the process.”



