November 15, 2019, has come to pass, and yet another claim from Craig Wright has proven to be nothing more than conjecture.
One year ago, Wright claimed in a tweet that after a year’s time, he would release details on an alleged unrepairable flaw in both Bitcoin (BTC) and Litecoin (LTC) that essentially renders both coins dead on their feet.
According to the so-called ‘responsible disclosure’ tweet, the bug has something to do with the segregated witness (SegWit) upgrade that was rolled out for both Bitcoin and Litecoin in 2017. Wright also mentioned that both cryptocurrencies would be “shown to have no utility” and “are dead” before signing off with “Dead coin walking.”
We have arrived at day 0, my friends.
How are our "dead coins walking" doing? ?? https://t.co/xq53r4aImv
— Arthur van Pelt – Dragon Industries (@MyLegacyKit) November 15, 2019
However, despite the warning that Bitcoin and Litecoin would be rendered broken, both Bitcoin and Litecoin appear to be running just fine. The only noteworthy thing that did happen today was a flash-fill of the mempool, which resulted in temporarily higher transaction fees and longer waiting periods for unconfirmed transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Fortunately, this was only a temporary issue that has already resolved itself, according to Jochen-Hoenicke.de’s real-time mempool charts.
On the more practical side of things, Bitcoin did lose some ground today as its market capitalization fell to just over $153 billion, while its market dominance still hovers around 66%. Similarly, Litecoin is also suffering slight losses, losing just over 3% of its value amid a negative downturn for most cryptocurrency markets.
This isn’t the first time Wright has predicted the demise of Bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies. Back in May 2019, he created a blog post where he said, “When BTC disappears, it will not disappear slowly, it will disappear in moments.” Similarly, in November 2018 Wright could be seen threatening to crash the Bitcoin market, whereas just days prior, he had threatened Roger Ver because he supported the Bitcoin Cash (formerly Bitcoin ABC) side of the November 2018 Bitcoin Cash fork.
Since Craig Wright claims to be sitting on a nest of over 800,000 BTC, one might think that destroying Bitcoin’s credibility and value would be a relatively simple task. After all, he would only need to dump a fraction of his stash to completely crash the Bitcoin market.
However, since it is quite clear that Wright isn’t actually Satoshi Nakamoto, this almost certainly won’t happen. Until then, Wright’s threats against Bitcoin are likely to remain exactly that — just threats.
Images courtesy of Twitter.
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