Vitalik Buterin attacks self-proclaimed Bitcoin founder Craig Wright, calls him a scammer

Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin is not buying Craig Wright’s claims of being the anonymous founder of Bitcoin. Instead, he has hit out at the Australian computer scientist, calling him a scammer.

In a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast, Buterin tagged Wright a “scammer,” comparing him to the former U.S. President Donald Trump for discussing issues that people resent. Buterin goes a step further to dare Wright’s lawyers to sue him after singling out the resentment surrounding Bitcoin’s block size war. He said:

I view Craig Wright as being kind of like a Donald Trump figure and that like, he’s not very intellectual. I think he gets a big audience because he says things that like to play to the resentments that people have. Like in the wake of this block size war…

According to Buterin, Wright started on the right foot and made some positive contributions to the Bitcoin block debate. His arguments earned him some followership from the Bitcoin Cash community. However, things began to turn sour when he claimed he was Satoshi Nakamoto.

According to the Ethereum founder, Wright’s cover was blown when he started stating several technically wrong things. For instance, Buterin pointed to Wright’s arguments that Bitcoin’s elliptic curve is good for cryptographic pairings, a claim that he couldn’t defend.

Both individuals first had a fallout in 2018 during the Deconomy conference. They were both panelists at the conference and argued about the animosities and disagreements of supporters of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. Buterin concluded that Wright was a fraud for his lack of a solid argument on small block position.

Let’s go to court

Wright is no stranger to lawsuits. In fact, it would come as a surprise if he does not sue Buterin. At the beginning of the year, Wright went after several crypto platforms, threatening to sue them for hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper on their sites. A London court actually considered his claims of being Satoshi and allowed him to serve a copyright lawsuit against the publisher of Bitcoin.org.

More recently, Wright launched a lawsuit against 16 Bitcoin developers. This time around, he wanted to retrieve the private keys of two addresses with 111,000 Bitcoins.