Eli Afram’s Research and Reporting Should be Taken With a Grain of Salt
In a recent article published on Coingeek titled “Dr. Craig Wright “backdating” claims should be taken with a grain of salt” the author, Eli Afram, made some wild and unsubstantiated claims in light of research that seems to reveal that Dr Craig S. Wright backdated blog posts in relation to the creation of Bitcoin on his Blogger.com blog.
In particular, Mr. Afram makes the case that the Archive.org site respects robots.txt meta tags placed in a sites directory. These text files indicate to a search engine and archiving robots to, not index a site, or certain pages from a site that the author does not want to be indexed publicly. This means that although the published blog post would appear as normal to the readers of the blog, and show in the blogs categories and chronological links, a search engine or archival website would skip it. This is all true.
What Mr. Afram fails to mention, or is simply unaware of in his post, is that Dr Wrights blog in question, gse-compliance.blogspot.com, was a Blogspot site, a free blogging platform owned and operated by Google. Blogspot sites were under the Blogger.com platform. As Mr. Afram rightly claims, website owners are generally able to include a robots.txt file in a sites directory to limit search and archival robots from crawling certain parts of the sites, however blogger only offered this ‘custom’ SEO friendly functionality called “search preferences ” to its users in an update to their user interface sometime in March 2012 — see post here. This means that only after this date could Dr Wright have used this functionality to limit Archive.org from displaying his page in its archive. So if Dr. Wright had added a blog post in 2009 on his Blogger blog, Archive.org would have recorded it. If he didn’t want Archive.org to display this page, he would only have had that functionality after March 2012 and not before that date.
The blog post in question has Dr. Wright claiming to be privy to the launch of Bitcoin (http://web.archive.org/web/20140602022810/http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.au/2009_01_04_archive.html). This capture was made in 2014. Revealingly, however, in a 2013 capture of all the blog posts Dr. Wright made that entire month does not show this post. (http://web.archive.org/web/20131017085515/http://gse-compliance.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/). Many other curiosities were also revealed in the researcher’s Pastebin entry. For those that have time to examine that page, and it can take some time to follow all the links, the insights are quite revealing and contrary to the public narrative.
What is also revealing is Dr. Wright’s cryptic reply to a direct question from a twitter user when asked if he wrote that post that month:
to which Dr Wright replied with Timezones differences:
The twitter user followed up with:
To which Dr Wright cryptically answered:
Curiously, that was the same day Mr Afram’s article was published on the Coingeek blog, a An Ayre Group Property asset.
Whether you believe Mr Afram purposely left out valuable information in his article, or he simply did not conduct thorough research, it does leave his authoring skills exposed to criticism and one should definitely take Mr Afram’s articles with ‘a grain of salt’. As for why Dr Wright would backdate blogposts to create the impression that he was privy to Bitcoin’s launch, the reader can decide for themselves while they are being asked to respect Dr Wright’s privacy.
