“London Calling.” Will Bitcoin Arbitrage Global Litigation?
Recent events in the space we loosely call crypto, Bitcoin, or blockchain, have centred around the real life identity of Satoshi Nakamoto —pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
In a nutshell, Craig Steven Wright came out a few years ago to make the claim he is Satoshi, subsequently then making a retraction of sorts, only to recently double down on his conviction that he is indeed the man behind the mask.
And things haven’t stopped there — threats of legal action and libel have been made to those who have doubted Wright’s word, with accusations of fraud and faketoshi taunts.
A Town Named Sue
Craig Wright blogs in respect of his work, here — and generally speaking, rails against the cypherpunk view of Bitcoin being an alternative to government, law and Central Bank inspired modern money.
However, one of the reoccurring requests to Wright in proving conclusively he is who he claims, can be seen:
The London libel courts work on a different principle however which may prove “friendlier” to Wright’s claim: defamation law in the UK has been fashioned in a plaintiff-friendly way by judges over the centuries:
“The most important reason for that bias is a judicial fiction called “the presumption of falsity”, by which every defamatory statement is presumed to be false, however likely it is to be true. This means that the media defendant must, in court, bear the burden of proving it true — a difficult task at the best of times…” London is still a town named Sue, New Statesman Magazine.
In the UK — and in all other civil actions except libel— claimants bear the burden of proof, since they are the ones who are using the legal process to drag others into court in an effort to win damages.
In the Nature of Arbitrage
It has been said London is the world centre of libel tourism, possibly because the British take words more seriously than sticks and stones.
Possibly also because the British constitution has evolved informally, with no defined separation of powers — however, one wonders what Craig Wright has to gain from this action and what kind of damages he will be seeking?
Bitcoin as a Litigation Standard
In a previous blog, it is noted [from] Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals that justice doesn’t exist in itself, only laws and institutions which make justice possible — that something can only have utility or purpose, if there is a “will to power” acting on it.
Similarly, inflation only exists because we target it — and to target it we measure it. Without the measure, we can’t target and without a target the measure serves no purpose.
It is trust in this system, by which money holds value.
The complexion of money is relevant in the award of money as punitive damages, restoration and compensation which is common place in courts— and to such end what rationale or benchmark would the court use in such a case, or is being pressed for?
The Honesty Abstract
The Bitcoin problem is it appears anomalous and disruptive to contemporary thinking around economics and jurisprudence — by and large, Bitcoin still hasn’t been made sense of yet in the co-opted sense, or yet to find a Nietzschean “will”, which is really what’s meant by ‘scaling’.
Bitcoin was titled peer to peer electronic cash but Satoshi never explicitly defined who were peers and introduced a cash system that isn’t cash as we currently understand.
It should be noted, too, if Wright is indeed Satoshi, why has he orphaned his original creation by forking away from it? And why doesn’t he move one of his coins, rather than experience life from the inside of a court room?
It has been noted too Bitcoin computationally “makes work” for no reason than to prove itself through the most proof (honesty) as an evolutionary potent game machine.
In the game theoretical sense, if Craig Wright’s motive is to prove honesty at the behest of a court— through the award of damages — and signal Bitcoin SV to be the real Bitcoin, then this may spark a general hedge at large by which the need for justice atrophies on a cooperative basis.
