Oleg Andreev

The problem with “voting by coins” is that most coins do not vote. This leaves a small fraction of UTXO to actually vote which is not representative and highly volatile since anyone risking to use idle keys to a large stash of coins can dramatically affect the voting outcome.

Most coins are locked up well “under matress” with multisig, time locks and possibly even with HSM-controlled keys. Also, pubkeys to long-term stashes do not want to be exposed from under their hashes in order to be better protected against a QC development in the long term.

In other words, most coins that matter, cannot and will not vote.

This leaves only the least important coins to perform voting. Obviously, the result of such voting will be worthless.

UPDATE: it is possible that people annotate output scripts with a dummy “voting hash” that commits to a separate pubkey, intended only for voting and stored elsewhere. But then security of the voting keys is not equivalent to the security of bitcoin keys which is what we want to begin with: that voters perfectly map to actual bitcoin holders.

First, it is very easy to prove if you are Satoshi:

1. Take the key from genesis block or from transaction paying to Hal Finney.
2. Sign a message that includes your meatspace name, your relation to Bitcoin and the recent timestamp in a form of a recent block hash (that’s how you prove that the message could not be fabricated long time ago and/or with careful choice of contents).
3. Publish the message and the signature anywhere.

No one has done that yet.

Second, it’s quite easy to prove that all claims by Mr. Wright regarding his link to Satoshi are either irrelevant (such as general knowledge of how Bitcoin works) or outright fabricated (such as backdated PGP key demonstrated last year, or a signature copy-pasted from a Satoshi’s transaction).

Third, it’s easy to see how mass media and some prominent voices in the Bitcoin space are turning “burden of proof” upside down. Some express doubts, but still prefer to trust (!) and believe (!!) even after being educated about the invalidity of the presented “evidence”. They still wait for a “better proof” coming from Mr. Wright.

In this story Mr. Wright brilliantly demonstrated who should not be trusted anymore on any matters in finance, cryptography or Bitcoin. Oh, what the heck, who is not to be trusted, period.

PS. This video is just perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2euMNmsb_s