A Feature or A Bug?

Market Meditations | January 23, 2023

Craig Wright has long claimed to be the original Satoshi. Whether that is true or not is debatable, and since he could not provide the private keys for coins in a wallet known to be Satoshi’s, it seems the courts didn’t side with him either. His claim that someone stole the keys from him in a pineapple attack, led him to create a software tool capable of recovering digital assets, at least on the BSV chain. 

  • This new tool is called a blacklist manager and provides an avenue for freezing or confiscating BSV coins if you can provide legal documents proving ownership.
  • To use the tool you must get a court order stating that the funds belong to you. Then you commission a notary who can operate a ‘notary tool.’ The notary converts the court order into a machine-readable format and transmits it to the mining network.
  • Marcin Zarakowski, the legal counsel and chief of staff for the Bitcoin Association for BSV says that before we can garner global adoption, digital assets must get the same treatment as any other property. He also points out that more than $3 billion in digital assets have been stolen over the last two years alone.

Critics claim this is far from Satoshi’s original vision but proponents of BSV claim this feature is very similar to something Satoshi called bitcoin escrow. There was also an alert system in bitcoin that would have allowed power users to disable transactions that was completely removed from the bitcoin chain by 2017. Whether this is a feature or a bug on BSV will depend on how much you value decentralization when you are the one trying to recover stolen assets.