Craig Wright, Satoshi, and Turing Completeness

I am only passingly familiar with Bitcoin technology, but I have been intrigued by recent claims that Craig Wright is the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto.  I was also intrigued last December, when the first claims came out.  At that time, I knew even less about Bitcoin  then I do now, and I knew nothing about the people who were involved in its creation.  But I watched this video,




and at around 17 minutes, I thought it was funny that "some guy" (who I now know is Nick Szabo, another Satoshi candidate - who denied it.) was arguing with "Satoshi".  Here is an approximate transcription at 16:34:

@BitcoinBelle: So, um, how is it that you feel about... obviously it's a peer to peer currency, and protocol that you don't want government involvement in...

Wright: I'm not... I mean... That's looking at it too small.   Umm... Unfortunately, not many people seem to have knowledge of assembly code or Forth or anything like that any more and I listened to one of Nick's earlier talks and he was talking about limitations in machine code there's none of these limitations and in fact, we have a rather rich instruction set.  It's just not well-defined yet.  And then the next part is, we have Ethereum going out there saying we've got to build a new stack because we can't loop.  But no one seems to realize that Forth actually does loop.  You have to use a separate control stack.  It's not like a lot of code forms where you actually have a single stack.  Forth and Forth-like languages use a dual-stack architecture.  So everything that we're talking about in derived contracts can actually be done directly in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin protocol.  It's just going to take time for people to understand it. 

@BitcoinBelle: Since you mentioned Nick, then I'm going to allow him to respond to that... 

Szabo: No... I have not heard that opinion before.  I've never heard anybody call the bitcoin script Turing complete.  And I don't believe that's accurate. 

@BitcoinBelle: He just said you're wrong. 

Wright: The difference is the script itself isn't.  What you can do is you have in Forth, a control loop, so the looping function is separate to the actual script itself. 

Szabo: Yeah, that's an esoteric thing.  If it's not Turing complete, then it's not a general purpose language like Ethereum....

There was some more back and forth between the two of them until Joseph VaughnPerling - apparently a diplomat - joined in on the topic, saying,  "...It doesn't exist today.  It is a possible future.  Who knows if it will occur?  But... both of these gentleman are correct."

I remembered this discussion because I thought it was funny to see someone debating Bitcoin's capabilities with Satoshi - it was only later that I read the skepticism about whether Wright really is Satoshi or not, and later still when I learned that Nick Szabo isn't just "some guy" in the cryptocurrency field.  I soon read that the Wright = Satoshi claim was widely believed to be a hoax, so I put it out of mind until the Satoshi spark was lit again this month.

As I understand it, many people have again concluded that Wright's latest claims were false, but there are four prominent bitcoiners who are still backing Wright's claim: Gavin Andresen, Jon Matonis, Joseph VaughnPerling, and Ian Grigg.  I know very little about any of them, but one of the first articles I read on the topic came from Matonis.  In light of the video above, here's what I found especially interesting:

Directly or indirectly, the work of Satoshi has already provided employment opportunities for tens of thousands of people around the globe and created over $7 billion of new blockchain wealth. The forthcoming research work from Dr Craig Wright can only be described as voluminous and highly technical.

At its essence, Bitcoin displaces the intermediary, or trusted third party, and there will be no sacred cows along the way. It will be methodical, scientific, and unforgiving in its ascent.

Going forward from here, Bitcoin-company board rooms and others throughout the financial ecosystem will be recalibrating business models as these applied developments realign the prevailing orthodoxy. Expect radically-new solutions that address specialized nodes and on-chain scalability, smart contracts that exploit a Turing complete Bitcoin, the impotence of tokenless blockchains, and a systematic decline in the quantity and value of alt-coins.

So it seems that not only did Wright convince Matonis that he is Satoshi, but - and perhaps more importantly - Wright also convinced Matonis of the viability of a Turing complete Bitcoin, which Szabo had disbelieved.

Is Wright Satoshi?  Or part of a Satoshi team?  Who knows?  My guess is yes.  When 4 different "insiders" all believe him, and two of them claim to have personal knowledge of his identity, it seems a stretch to call them all liars or dupes.

But I know less than Jon Snow, so that guess is basically just wild speculation.  At any rate, it's an interesting question from the perspective of history and current events, but in practical terms, the answer isn't very useful.  At this point, I'm far less interested in Wright's Satoshi-status than in the content of that "voluminous and highly technical" research.

Does Wright's exit from the stage mean that Matonis' expectations will go unfulfilled?  Or is the anticipated technology realignment still on the horizon for Bitcoin?

Update: Wright's reference to publishing again next year during his video introduction is interesting in light of current events and Matonis' description of Wright's forthcoming research.