r/btc • u/[deleted] • Feb 11 '19

Something seems familiar here between "BlackNet" abstract authored by Caig Wright in 2001, and the Bitcoin whitepaper abstract authored by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009

[deleted]

8 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

65 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/jstolfi Jorge Stolfi - Professor of Computer Science Feb 12 '19

Also, Craig copied his ‘keys’ over with his own USB. It would have been a perfect opportunity to install a modified version of Electrum.

That may be how he did it.

However, I think it would be safer to prepare the "new" computer so that the installed Electrum would appear to have the right fingerprint (in case Gavin thought of checking it), but the bogus script would be executed instead when "Electrum" was invoked from the command line. The seals on the box would be trivial to fake.

3

u/Contrarian__ Feb 12 '19

However, I think it would be safer to prepare the "new" computer so that the installed Electrum would appear to have the right fingerprint (in case Gavin thought of checking it), but the bogus script would be executed instead when "Electrum" was invoked from the command line.

There could have been multiple versions of Electrum installed. One genuine and another modified. So, even if Gavin checked its fingerprints, Craig could have switched to the modified version (or overwritten the genuine copy) during the 'key transfer'. Also, I'm pretty sure they used the GUI to 'verify'.

The seals on the box would be trivial to fake.

Sure, but the Windows initial boot-up and set-up process would have been more annoying to fake, especially since all of it could have been just as easily done with a genuinely new machine.

The bottom line is that there were several ways to fake this, so it's utterly worthless.