The Cult of Satoshi: Like its creator, BSV faithful are in it purely for the tech

U.K. Judge James Mellor’s written ruling that Craig Wright isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous author of the 2008 Bitcoin white paper, has (predictably) set off a celebratory deluge of dunking from the social media accounts of Wright’s longtime critics.

But the reality is that the tweets and blog posts slamming Wright have never really stopped since Mellor issued his initial ruling in mid-March. And it’s unlikely that Mellor’s written ruling will mark the end of these attacks.

Because the fight against Wright was never about him. It was all about stopping further adoption of the BSV Blockchain technology he supports. That’s because BSV, unless sabotaged by external forces, poses an existential threat to the technologies promoted by the members of the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) that brought the suit against Wright.

Due to Wright’s high profile, COPA appears to have elevated him into being BSV. Stop Wright, their thinking went, and BSV will be forced to follow him offstage. Their reasoning here was way off base, but that shouldn’t be all that surprising given how badly they also misinterpreted Satoshi’s plan for Bitcoin.

COPA’s members are in lockstep agreement that Bitcoin—despite the white paper defining it as peer-to-peer electronic cash—was never intended to serve as a global currency. Instead, Bitcoin was meant to be ‘digital gold’ that doesn’t do anything beyond (allegedly) perpetually increase in value. That’s the mindset that led the developers at BTC Core to strip the Bitcoin protocol down to its barest bones, resulting in the BTC token they promote with such zeal.

BSV supporters, on the other hand, believe that Bitcoin—in the form of BSV, the only locked protocol that remains true to Satoshi’s original blueprint and can trace its unbroken history back to the Genesis block—can easily serve as a low-cost digital payment system.

Furthermore, BSV’s unparalleled ability to scale allows it to handle the immense data management needs of enterprises, government agencies and Web3 applications at a cost that makes such systems not just feasible but desirable.

Which is why COPA and other similarly deluded prospectors won’t stop their attacks. By proving that Bitcoin is capable of delivering actual utility, disrupting both the ad-driven model of Silicon Valley’s social media giants and the U.S.-based digital payment models, BSV offers a welcome alternative and exposes the rot at the core of these movements.

Utility v. futility

BTC’s reputation took some serious hits this month due to the unprecedented direct attacks by Iran against Israel followed by Israel’s retaliatory strikes. In both instances, BTC’s value cratered as sellers sought refuge in more stable products, aka fiat cash, directly undermining the ‘safe haven’ mantra so relentlessly promoted by the ‘digital gold’ team.

Take Michael Saylor, founder of COPA member MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) and owner of around 1% of all the BTC that will ever be issued. With his entire net worth caught up in BTC, it’s perhaps no surprise that Saylor is the biggest booster of the ‘digital gold’ myth, to the point that he’s been accused of threatening to retaliate against anyone who dares suggest that BTC might be good for anything else.

Matt Odell, managing partner of BTC infrastructure investment outfit Ten31, recently posted a cryptic all-caps note on decentralized social media protocol Nostr that claimed Saylor “HAS ACTIVELY KILLED DEALS TO SUPPORT DEVS. HE IS PROUD OF IT.”

Odell previously claimed that “ONE OF THE BIG ETFs [exchange traded funds] WAS GOING TO DONATE TO OPEN SOURCE DEVS. SAYLOR TOLD THEM IF THEY DID IT HE WOULD CRUSH THEM SO THEY PULLED OUT OF THE COMMITMENT.”

Whatever the reality behind these claims, Saylor did go on CNBC several weeks prior to declare that “people refer to [BTC] as a ‘digital currency,’ and that’s an unfortunate historical artifact.” Saylor likened BTC to “digital property” and argued that BTC “doesn’t have to be a currency. Nobody’s trying to buy a cup of coffee with a fraction of their building on Fifth Avenue.”

Saylor’s defense mechanisms appear sufficiently robust to allow him to deny evidence that directly contradicts those beliefs. For instance, Saylor tweeted ‘Chaos is good’ following Iran’s recent military strike against Israel, even as BTC shed more than 10% of its value.

The reality is that BTC is a hobbled former shell of Bitcoin and that’s just the way everybody in BTC seems to want it. Well, they can have it. They can and will continue to talk about Wright, for all the good it will do them. No one in BSV is thinking all that much about COPA v Wright; the focus here is where it’s always been: real-world utility.

By contrast, the rest of the ‘crypto’ sector is stagnant. Nobody wants to do anything but make lots of money in the shortest period possible without doing anything of benefit to anyone else. Relentless hype cycles drive tokens higher and instill FOMO in the general public, followed by the inevitable crash in which the noobs get rekt and the whole process resets.

Take the current memecoin madness on Solana. It’s like the whole 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) debacle never happened. Except this time the coin issuers aren’t even bothering with white papers detailing how their ‘project’ will change the world.

As Travis Kling remarked earlier this year, “I actually think there is LESS expectation this time around that any of this shit does anything or will EVER do anything … People want to gamble on vaporware and next year looks like a good year to be in the casino.”

Cult following

COPA and its minions like to portray BSV as the Cult of Craig. If anyone is trapped in a Cult of Craig its COPA. They’re the ones who can’t seem to escape the hypnotic control he appears to wield over them.

It would be far more accurate to describe BSV as the Cult of Satoshi. BSV supporters seem to be the only ones that believe Satoshi was right and that when he departed the stage, he left us his blueprints, which are all we need to understand what we’re building and where we’re going.

COPA and their ilk all think Satoshi was wrong, that they know better the intentions behind his creation. BSV backers know that Satoshi’s vision was rooted in utility—be it for low-cost microtransactions or data processing—not establishing a new category of financial elites.

If you really want to know why the BSV community was willing to listen to Wright in the first place, ask yourself this: who else at that time was advocating for a return to Bitcoin’s original vision? Who else was offering a utility-focused alternative to ‘number go up?’

The tires on a Formula 1 might be a wonder of modern technology but for all their engineering wizardry, nobody’s really improved on the wheel’s original concept—or purpose. No one’s trying to reinvent the wheel because reinvention is unnecessary if you got it right the first time. That is, unless you’d prefer the wheel be some proprietary technology that only you control.

Perhaps it’s naïve to believe that the world will ultimately coalesce around a single blockchain. But we’ll keep working towards that goal regardless, based on our belief that when the world is ready, BSV will be there. Whatever Wright’s faults, he will ultimately be vindicated as his faith in the original Bitcoin technology proves correct.

By staying true to the original Bitcoin protocol, BSV is the only blockchain that can rightly be labeled Bitcoin. As such, in a post-Mellor world, people have one of two options: believe the judge is wrong and Wright is Satoshi and Satoshi created BSV, or believe the judge is right and Wright is not Satoshi and Satoshi created BSV. Either way, Satoshi invented Bitcoin and BSV is the world’s only enterprise blockchain.

We’ll leave you with a quote from this site’s founder, Calvin Ayre:

An English court has concluded that Craig is not Satoshi. Despite this, the fact remains that Craig was a driving force behind realizing Satoshi’s vision through the BSV blockchain. He was the only individual that seemed interested in fulfilling Satoshi’s vision of a scalable blockchain that enabled low-cost peer-to-peer payments.

We accept the decision that COPA’s mysterious unknown Satoshi invented BSV because it’s never really mattered to us who Satoshi was. All that matters is the amazing vision he/she had. The further development of that vision will ensure that the technology writes the true history—as well as the future. Long live Satoshi.