A primer on Craig Wright's claimed blocks, Tulip Trust(s), and lists of addresses from the Kleiman lawsuit. There's lots of misinformation. I'll clear it up.

While he's contradicted himself at various times, Craig Wright has sworn under oath that the bitcoin he mined have been locked up in a trust since approximately 2010. The keys, including the public keys/addresses, were inaccessible, since he split the "root" private key into several parts using a Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. Those "shares" were apparently distributed to various parties who may or may not be the trustees of the Tulip Trust.

Despite that claim, the magistrate judge in the Kleiman case ordered Wright to produce an accurate list of the addresses of the bitcoin that are locked in the trust. Wright initially said it was impossible, but that he could at least narrow the potential blocks/addresses down.

To that end, Wright gave the CTO of nChain, Steve Shadders, a list of six criteria, so that Shadders could generate a list of blocks that potentially belong to Wright. (Why "Satoshi" couldn't do this himself is a mystery.) The two most important criteria were:

1. The output of the coinbase transaction is unspent

2. The least significant byte (LSB) of the block header nonce is between 0 and 58

Shadders created a list, but screwed it up badly.

1. He included dozens of blocks that were spent between August 1, 2017 and the time he created the list, due to the fact that he used only the BSV blockchain.

2. He included thousands of blocks that didn't meet the nonce criteria. He thought a Java byte was unsigned, so he accidentally included blocks in the range 0 to 58 and 128 to 255.

This list is referred to as the "Shadders List" in Andreas Antonopoulous's report. See page 20. The bug that resulted in the incorrect nonce LSB range is referred to as the "Shadders Bug". Overall, the Shadders List, which is publicly available, has 27,973 blocks.

After this list was delivered, the lawsuit temporarily paused because the litigants were negotiating a settlement agreement. As part of the settlement negotiations, Wright's side produced two new lists: the "CW" list and the "DK" list. These were apparently "independently produced by the trust". (See Anotonpoulos report paragraph 103.)

Both lists are proper subsets of the Shadders List, and there no common entries between the CW and DK lists.

The CW list contains 16,430 blocks and the DK list contains 6,416 blocks.

1. The CW list contains at least 26 blocks that have been spent between August 6, 2017 and June 27, 2019. (See Shadders's first error.)

2. The CW list also contains 1,749 blocks outside of the nonce LSB range of 0-58. All of those 1,749 blocks have nonce LSB range between 128 and 255. (See the "Shadders Bug".)

To make it perfectly clear, it's patently obvious that the CW list is derived from the Shadders list, as it exactly replicates his unique bugs. The Shadders list was created in 2019. The CW list was supposed to have been created around 2010. To make it even more perfectly clear: the CW list is a forgery.

In addition, the CW list has two "gaps" in the list of the coinbase transaction ids (TXIDs). The TXID for each coinbase transaction should be a basically-random number between 0 and 2²⁵⁶ -1. However, there were multiple large "gaps" in that range where no (or very few) TXIDs fell. Imagine if you generated a list of 500,000 numbers randomly in the range of 0 to 1,000,000, and none of them appeared in the range of 300,000 to 700,000.

This would not happen by chance. One way it could happen is if someone started with a list of TXIDs and sorted them using something like Excel, then selecting a couple big ranges and deleting all those entries. As chance has it, the Shadders list explicitly included the TXIDs!

The settlement talks eventually collapsed, and the lawsuit continued.

The judge eventually gave Wright one more chance to deliver an accurate list, since Wright said a "bonded courier" was supposed to arrive with keys to the Trust.

Miraculously, Wright received a list of only the blocks and addresses. He still says he cannot access the private keys. This new list, delivered by his Kenyan "lawyer", is referred to as the "CSW Filed" List in Antonopoulos's report. Wright represents that the CSW Filed List is an accurate list of his mined bitcoin.

The CSW Filed List is identical to the CW list, except the 26 blocks spent between August 6, 2017 and June 27, 2019 have been removed. It contains 16,404 blocks. (16,430 - 26 = 16,404). All other blocks are identical. That is, it still includes the Shadders Bug and TXID "gaps".

To make matters worse, at least three blocks from this new CSW Filed list have already been spent: two on July 8, 2019, and one on September 2, 2019 (UTC). With some simple blockchain sleuthing and comparing the results to the public Shadders List, we can see that those blocks are:

• 57,585
• 63,790
• 67,690

To my knowledge, these are the only blocks we know for sure are on the CSW Filed list.

In addition, none of the four lists (Shadders List, CW list, DK list, CSW Filed list) contain any blocks that are well-known to have been mined and spent by Satoshi, including block 9.

Again, as the CW list is a forgery, and the CSW Filed list is obviously derived from it, the CSW Filed List is also a forgery.

To bring this all back to the early block that was spent yesterday, it was included in the Shadders List. At this point, we don't know whether it was in any of the other three lists. However, it's not particularly important, since the Shadders list, CW list, and CSW Filed list already have recently spent blocks. That block, if it's in the CSW Filed list, would just be one extra.

TL;DR:

There are at least three lists that are supposed to represent Wright's mined bitcoin:

1. The Shadders List - a bug-ridden list made in 2019 meant to simply narrow down the blocks that could potentially belong to Wright.

2. CW List - a list produced by the "Trust" that is an obvious forgery derived from the Shadders List.

3. The CSW Filed List - the list submitted by Wright to the court, which is supposed to be an accurate list of his actual mined bitcoin. This is also an obvious forgery based on the CW List (and Shadders List). It was supposedly made around 2010.

All three lists have recently spent blocks in them, when Wright testified that the keys are inaccessible.

Submitted May 21, 2020 at 08:54PM by CombustibleBitcoiner https://ift.tt/2Xm6LzM