Bitcoin SV head honcho Craig Wright has launched a scathing attack at Binance CEO Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao, branding him a “money laundering piece of scum”.

The comments from Wright, who claims to have written the Bitcoin whitepaper under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, came during an exclusive interview with Coin Rivet at London’s CC Forum.

Wright’s attendance at the conference caused a stir on social media, with numerous cryptocurrency supporters urging people to boycott to event.

When asked for his thoughts on negative comments from the likes of Adam Back, Samson Mow and CZ himself, Wright replied: “You have to understand that even if I don’t like tax, I pay it. CZ is just a lowlife, money laundering piece of scum, who will go to jail eventually. He keeps moving country thinking he can keep getting away with not having money laundering laws, too bad.”

Despite repeated attempts from Coin Rivet to reach Changpeng ‘CZ’ Zhao, no response has been made to the comments from Craig Wright.

Craig Wright or Satoshi Nakamoto?

In spite of intense scrutiny, Craig Wright maintains his claims he is the mastermind behind the Bitcoin whitepaper and, therefore, Satoshi Nakamoto.

When asked whether he was attending the conference as Wright or Nakamoto, he retorted: “No, I’m talking as Craig Wright. I don’t make people acknowledge me at all. Yes I did create it [Bitcoin] and yes and when I go to court I will show what I have as evidence.”

His wild claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto have landed him in hot water in recent weeks, with an ongoing court case in the US ordering him to pay up to $5 billion in Bitcoin to the estate of programer David Kleiman, who is said to have worked with Wright in the early days of Bitcoin development.

“The Kleimann case is ongoing. I don’t have anything to discuss,” Wright snapped. “There’s a lot of Twitter media out there who don’t even realise that the case hasn’t even started yet.”

Roger Ver and the ‘hardfork’

Last November the Bitcoin Cash network hard-forked, with Wright going off to develop Bitcoin SV while Roger Ver and co remained on Bitcoin Cash.

The fork signalled an end to a budding relationship between Craig Wright and Roger Ver, who incidentally were both in attendance at the CC Forum.

When asked if there’s any bad blood between the pair, Wright explained: “I stayed on Bitcoin and he forked off. I’ve already said ‘hi’, I wished him well. He’s doing his thing and I’m doing mine. If he wants to come back to Bitcoin then fine, but he has different views on government and all the rest.”

Wright did, however, have a very strong opinion about the hard-fork itself, denying that any fork took place.

“No, no. We didn’t hard fork,” he added forcefully. “Bitcoin is a set, stable protocol, so when I created it I said Bitcoin are set in stone. If you read the last sentence of the white paper, ‘miners don’t create rules, they enforce them’, so all this crap about miners can vote on any rule they want or developers can change things. No you can’t. Actually, you cannot.

“When you alter things, when you do things like CLTV, when you create things like Segwit, you have airdropped a completely new coin and just issued income to those people who had it before. So, Bitcoin is stable, it keeps going. That’s it, it’s plumbing – it doesn’t change.”

Wright went on to claim that “hash rate is irrelevant” before asking everyone to “read section five” of the Bitcoin whitepaper.

“Read section five,” he continued. “Miners validate transactions. If you don’t have miners then you are just hashing for the hell of it. What the hell are they doing? They are getting a subsidy that is about to disappear. They’re making false arguments to try and confuse regulators saying that you can’t seize Bitcoin. You can.

“Hash rate doesn’t secure the network. Miners validate transactions. They signal that they want to invest in the network using hash rate. It’s not the same thing.

“Bitcoin SV has more nodes than you guys have on the BTC chain. There are twenty nodes on Bitcoin. A node is defined by someone who creates a block. It’s in the whitepaper, you don’t get to change it. I’m sorry, Satoshi not relevant is crap. I dictated, number five, set of things and if you do those you’re a node. If you don’t do those you’re not a node. Full stop.”

Nouriel Roubini

Another speaker and attendee of the conference was global economist Nouriel Roubini. The 60-year-old New Yorker regularly receives hate and heckling from the cryptocurrency community over his stubbornly negative views on digital assets, but he has a lot in common with Craig Wright.

“My PHD is in economics and computer science, so I’m tainted with the same brush as Roubini.” Wright told Coin Rivet.

Roubini often labels the cryptocurrency industry as a “scam” that is tainted with thousands of “sh*tcoins”, but Wright believes he is simply misinformed.

“Roubini is a sceptic of what people tell him is the fake idea of Bitcoin,” he added. “This whole ‘Bitcoin isn’t a seizable asset argument’, in fact, Bitcoin is very seizable, it’s incredibly seizable. It’s not distributed to every person, you can’t make it run that way. I’m sorry. The system was designed because of commercial efficiencies that it always ends in a data centre. I’m the one who said it ends in a data centre, I said it at the beginning, I said it to James Donald and in Bitcointalk forums.”

For more news from the conference and comments from Craig Wright, click here.