A defamation trial that involves two popular personalities on opposite sides of the Bitcoin world, is underway in Oslo, Norway. And the third day of trial has given people a look at two sides of the same coin with both the plaintiff and defendant taking the stand.
The plaintiff in this trial is Magnus Granath. He became known within the BTC (Bitcoin Core) circle as the anonymous “Hodlonaut” with a profile photo of a cat in an astronaut suit, who rose to popularity for his Lightning Network Trust Chain campaign.
The LN Trust Chain was a kind of tipping game using an increasing amount of BTC (CRYPTO: BTC) passed on to create a chain that was joined by powerful people in the space, such as former Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) CEO Jack Dorsey and Lightning Labs CEO Elizabeth Stark.
On the other side, the defendant is nChain Chief Scientist Dr. Craig S. Wright, who has always maintained that he is the man behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym, the author of the revolutionary Bitcoin whitepaper. Wright was outed by Gizmodo and Wired Magazine in 2015, and according to him, he has since lived in the spotlight against his will.
Since his doxing, the Bitcoin community has been split into two: those who believe he is Satoshi Nakamoto and those who believe him to be a fraud. It has resulted in many lawsuits for Wright. This includes a libel suit against blogger and podcaster Peter McCormack and a civil suit worth at least $126 billion against Ira Kleiman, the brother of David Kleiman, Wright’s friend and alleged partner in creating Bitcoin and writing the whitepaper. Victory in both cases were claimed by Wright.
This time, the plaintiff hopes to prove that a series of tweets made by Hodlonaut in May 2019 that accused Wright of being “a fraud,” “a very sad and pathetic scammer” and “mentally ill” are not defamatory and fall under the protection of Norway’s freedom of speech and expression laws.
Small Blockers vs. Big Blockers There are almost literally two opposing sides of the same coin going on here. For the BTC circle, it is the original Bitcoin, while within the BSV space, theirs is the original Bitcoin. The former is called “small blockers,” while the latter are “big blockers.”
This is because BTC has maintained the original “settings” of Bitcoin at 1MB block size cap and a throughput of seven transactions per second (tps). Wright has been very vocal in his disagreement about BTC’s refusal to scale, stating that the block size cap and throughput that BTC is maintaining up to this day were mere starting points and that when he created Bitcoin, it was meant to scale.
BSV is the product of the second fork in Bitcoin. it has restored the original protocol according to the Bitcoin whitepaper and has unlocked limitless scaling. It is a known fact that the BSV community believes that Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. It is also the Bitcoin implementation that Wright fully supports. At present, BSV is mining 4GB blocks at a throughput of 50,000 to 100,000 tps.
According to BSV, it is aiming to become the technological plumbing that will allow global enterprises to improve their digital infrastructures as they build platforms on the BSV Blockchain. BTC, on the other hand, is promoting the use of second-layer solutions to show that scaling the base layer (the blockchain) is not necessary.
Hence, those in support of BTC are called small-blockers, while those within the BSV space are called “big-blockers.” Granath is a “small-blocker,” while it can be said that Wright is the figure head of “big-blockers.”
Granath v Wright Day 3 Coverage Representatives from the two opposing sides are on-site in Oslo covering the trial. And as Granath and Wright both take the stand on Day 3, it is expected for the coverage to present two completely different angles. Bitcoin Magazine is reporting for BTC, while CoinGeek is doing the coverage for BSV.
Reporting for Bitcoin Magazine is @SpecificMills, who according to her Twitter account is a “God-fearing local community maximalist” and “Head of @BitcoinMagazine Studios.” It must also be noted that her handle is “Millsonaut” and that she has changed her profile photo to the cat astronaut in support of Hodlonaut.
Covering the trial for CoinGeek is Bitcoin Chief Historian and founder of GorillaPool.com Kurt Wuckert Jr. He is live-tweeting while in court and doing a livestream after each day of the trial. Bitcoin Magazine is doing the same, but is also posting videos of the trial itself.
Bitcoin Magazine had a special guest who flew in just for the day for its Granath v Wright Day 3 broadcast. Ben Price, founder of The Bitcoin Company and OpenSats, sat in to present his opinion about Granath and Wright’s testimonies.
“With Hodlonaut, when he started out in the morning, I think he kept his composure. I think he owned what he said. He didn’t deny anything; he stayed grounded in reality, which is realistically what happened,” Price said.
“After Craig Wright’s lawyer was done, the Judge pointed out that it seems as though there are a lot of defamation towards Hodlonaut, as well. She asked, ‘How is this any different,’” Mills added.
Wuckert also had the same comment that Granath seemed to be “in his element,” but likened it to a student in the principal’s office confidently explaining what he was doing outside during class hours. It was in Granath explaining what toxic maximalism is that Wuckert looked visibly frustrated to the point that it seemed he was imitating how Granath was speaking during his testimony.
“[Hodlonaut] really went into explaining how important he thinks that toxic maximalism is for the culture and explaining that ultimately, everything is a shitcoin if it isn’t Bitcoin BTC—that his complete lack of compromise, the fact that he absolutely cannot compromise anything about his world view in order to bring people in to be part of the BTC revolution,” Wuckert shared.
“He makes the point to reference, ‘Well, I mean the most toxic of Bitcoin maximalists have agreed, like he’s so clearly a fraud.’ And so, he’s making this appeal to authority, can’t get over the social consensus, which he did not just bring up once, he brought it up five or six times,” Wuckert added.
Wuckert used up over 20 minutes of his hour talking about Granath’s testimony, then went on to discuss Wright’s time at the stand. On the opposite side, Bitcoin Magazine did not really delve too much into Hodlonaut’s testimony, but focused more than two-thirds of their airtime discussing Wright’s testimony and the “technical nonsense” he was saying in order to confuse the Judge and the people in court.
“They just didn’t seem super prepped on their side. Craig seemed almost getting caught in lies from his own legal team,” Price commented.
“Craig was trying to it seemed like pull some roundabout technical jargon around Shamir Secret keys, which ultimately split a single private key up. He seemed to be going into these nuances trying to deflect these main points. By the end of it, about an hour and a half in, there was just new stories being concocted on the fly. It didn’t look great,” Price detailed.
From Wuckert’s view, on the other hand, it was “the best performance” he has ever seen Wright give during court examination. However, Wuckert had the same view—although not as harsh—as Price that “the weakest part” of Wright’s testimony was about explaining the private keys and why Wright just would not sign using the Satoshi keys to avoid litigation and further questions about his identity.
“The whole point is that you don’t need the private keys. That’s what I’m trying to tell people… Once you’ve proven your identity, then you register the key. You don’t do it the other way around. You can’t come in later and go, ‘I promise this is my key,’” Wright said during a clip of his testimony shown by Bitcoin Magazine.
“I want to make sure that judges and courts understand that Bitcoin is not encrypted and it can be seized, frozen and accessed under a court order,” Wright added.
What both parties reporting at the scene seemed to agree on fully is that the trial can go either way as it progresses. There are still four more days in court before the Judge will deliberate on the verdict. However, whether one is rooting for Granath or Wright, it is best to heed Wuckert’s reminder before making any kind of negative comment on social media.
“I would just like to remind everybody to remember that these are human beings on both sides here…. There’s family on both sides of this who both are also being hurt by this, and I think that there are normal people that are just collateral damage here and that our Bitcoin politics also have human consequences,” Wuckert said.
Image sourced from Unsplash
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