There's evidence of deliberate deception, alongside a suspicious lack of evidence about what transpired out of view of the public. So there are grounds to believe this guy is full of shit.
To play devil's advocate, this guy might be adept at deception because he's deceived people regarding his pseudonym for many years. (Just a thought.)
I don't know, Nic doesn't know despite many words to convince you otherwise, you don't know, we all don't know. I choose the fun explanations and wait to see if I'm right, with the completely reasonable position that I, nor anybody else, cannot possibly know if the theory is correct with the data available.
The alternative is getting upset about it and smashing keyboards, which most folks seem to be doing. Who cares? Seriously, why does it matter? He is or he isn't. Wait and see.
To me, Gavin Andresen's position on this is the fly in the grand conspiracy ointment, and it's funny how all of the theories involve Andresen being incompetent or compromised to work around that problem. I saw people start referring to the possibility that one of the highest folks in Bitcoin is autistic and easily fooled by a con man, and I was just laying in bed last night reading it and shaking my head. This thread is doing it, too, discussing a person they've never met and how he's lost his senses or accepted payment to lie.
No one is getting upset about it and smashing keyboards. You do a disservice to your argument when that sort of caricature has to be the only alternative to your arguably gullible "prove a negative" attitude towards this.
Nic doesn't know despite many words to convince you otherwise
While you claim that you have no stake or position in this, your other post borders on the bizarre, with you seemingly completely misunderstanding the arguments made and then, having carefully constructed an absurd strawman, you confidently knock it down.
Anyone can be tricked by a con man with no shame. This includes very smart people. Anyone who controls the hardware and the network can render virtually any proof useless without moving outside of their control (which is extremely easy to do), and it can be a fun parlour trick. In this case we have someone with a long history of casual trickery (if not fraud) who, while under an impending cloud of peril, and with months to contrive a magic trick, convinced a single person.
I'm unconvinced you read my comment and are instead painting me with a "disagrees with the Bitcoin community's consensus and is therefore bizarre" brush
You've plied this valiant contrarian noise in virtually all of your comments on this. I'm personally a critic of Bitcoin. I most certainly am not in the "community". Yet the evidence that we have leans overwhelmingly towards "con man". I honestly believe someone would have to have a serious bias to ignore the overwhelming evidence that they are being had.
Your claim that anyone thinks he's "subverting cryptography" immediately cast your comment as hysterical. No one has seriously argued this.
You mean convinced at least five people and three editors
He convinced one or two people. Editors and journalists will run with the weakest of evidence because it's salacious and draws viewers. Do you really think they provide evidence of anything?
I'm sitting here with a complete lack of ability to care
Your rhetoric betrays that you actually do care. Very much. And each time you claim that it's some heroic stand that is only be squelched by the bitcoin insiders, it makes you look a little more foolish.
To your substantial edits: you're trying entirely too much to tell everyone how little you care. To quote Shakespeare, the lady (or man) doth protest too much.
I don't see the sort of vetting you claim has happened. Wright's proof is fraudulent (https://dankaminsky.com/2016/05/02/validating-satoshi-or-not...), people proved this in less than a day. Your journalist friends were either deceived, or ran the story in hope of getting pageviews..
