Bitcoin.org Ordered to Take Down Bitcoin Whitepaper
Bitcoin.org Ordered to Take Down Bitcoin Whitepaper
CRYPTODAY 013
Let’s kick off today’s letter with something absolutely insane. Bitcoin.org has been barred from displaying the Bitcoin whitepaper by a UK-based court. The order is a result of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre, the chief proponents of BSV.
Wright has been claiming that he’s Satoshi for the last 5 years or so, and his partnership with Bodog billionaire Ayre has added a lot of litigious energy to an otherwise unfounded claim. Bitcoin.org is a not-for-profit informational website maintained by one of the true legends in the space, the anonymous developer CobraBitcoin, and while his peers have all caved to Wright and Ayre’s legal threats, he has remained defiant. Unfortunately, his anonymity made it impossible for him to appear before the court, and on June 29th the judge awarded the case by default to the plaintiff. Cobra has additionally been ordered to pay 35,000 GBP in legal fees as well as add a takedown notice on the Bitcoin.org website for 6 months. As of this writing, the site appears to still be hosting the whitepaper in a couple dozen different languages, although it’ll only be a matter of time before the webhost itself is compelled to take it down if Cobra doesn’t comply.
Cobra remained defiant following the court order I can’t stress enough how insane this news is. Wright’s copyright victory over Cobra goes against everything that Bitcoin (and presumably, the real Satoshi Nakamoto) stands for. I don’t know how many pro-Wright readers I have, but if any of you were on the fence before, I implore you to reconsider your position. Craig Wright is NOT Satoshi Nakamoto, and BSV is NOT Satoshi’s vision.
This morning I discovered a really wonderful tool over at CoinMetrics.io, which allows you to compare the performance over various cryptos across many, many different parameters. This chart I created compares the number of daily on-chain transactions of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, and Cardano. As you can see, Ethereum is the runaway winner here: it has been pumping out over a million transactions daily for over a year now. Bitcoin hasn’t changed much because it’s basically maxed out now in the 250k/day range. (There aren’t any Lightning network figures for this period, although it wouldn’t be a fair comparison anyway since we’re only evaluating the base layer of each of these chains. In any case, the Lightning Network’s total capacity is still less than $60M a full three years after it launched so it’s unlikely it would have affected this comparison much.)
But perhaps what is most interesting here is that Cardano, the 5th largest coin by marketcap, does FEWER transactions per day than even Dogecoin. Now, unlike with Craig Wright, I’m 100% sure that I have a lot of readers who are Charles Hoskinson fans, so I wanted to just share this metric to put things into perspective when it comes to $ADA and its many promises. They’ve been at this for 5 years now, and their network usage has not managed to exceed that of a joke coin fueled by the Reddit community.
I’ve also included a chart that compares daily transaction VOLUME in USD terms. Here, the picture favors Bitcoin, which is in the lead at $19B, with Ethereum following at $15.5B. Cardano does better at $6B. The reason why I didn’t lead with this chart is because USD comparisons become very fuzzy because the coins’ respective dollar values were all changing in these day-to-day comparisons. In other words, although the same number of coins may have been changing hands between January’s figures and April’s figures, the USD value would be very different since all of these coins were at a very different price point back then. It’s not a great measure of true adoption, in that sense.
Speaking of other coins, here’s an interesting interview with Erik Voorhees, CEO of Shapeshift, over at Reason where he talks about why decentralization IMPLIES a world with multiple coins. This reflects my current view on crypto a little more closely: I’ve stopped believing that Bitcoin is the only coin that matters, because it can’t solve everything and there are so many problems out there that are actively being addressed by other crypto projects.
Have a great Wednesday cryptofam! See you all tomorrow!