CoinDesk: Craig Wright May Have Created Bitcoin, But Don't Tell Our Readers

Author: Charlie Martin

The leading cryptocurrency news site doesn’t want its readers to hear the unvarnished truth about a trial that could determine ownership of Satoshi Nakamoto’s massive reserve of Bitcoin tokens.  

On November 1, CoinDesk reporter Cheyenne Ligon published an article titled, ‘Kleiman v. Wright: Bitcoin’s Trial of the Century Kicks Off in Miami.’ The article’s subhead read, ‘At stake: The ownership of Satoshi Nakamoto’s 1.1 million BTC.’ The lede paragraph noted that the trial could “perhaps answer one of Bitcoin’s greatest mysteries: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto and what happened to the estimated 1.1 million BTC in his possession?” 

The next day, Ligon’s article was edited to change the subhead to read: ‘At the center of the case: the potential ownership of 1.1 million BTC.’ (Emphasis added.) The lede was also changed to read that the trial “may provide insight into some of Craig Wright’s claims that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin.” 

Source

The intention behind the edits appears to have been the injection of a greater dose of skepticism regarding Australian inventor Wright’s claims to being the individual behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym, which if true would make Craig Wright the author of the Bitcoin white paper. The other impact was to minimize the suggestion that the trial’s outcome would produce a definitive statement on who owns the 1.1m unsplit BTC tokens in the so-called Tulip Trust.  

Ligon’s Live Article, Edited the Next Day

Ligon’s subsequent articles on the trial have continued this more pejorative tone towards Wright, effectively putting a finger on the scale in terms of how CoinDesk’s readers interpret the proceedings and the evidence presented therein. Which raises some obvious questions: what happened to make Ligon change her stance and why did she feel compelled to continue down this road?  

The November 2 edit came around half an hour after Ligon’s article was publicly lambasted on Twitter by Alan Silbert. Alan is the brother of Barry Silbert, CEO and founder of the Digital Currency Group (DCG), a major investor in all things BTC, including CoinDesk. Replying to both CoinDesk and Ligon’s accounts, Alan tweeted: “This article should have never seen the light of day. C’mon gang. Headline alone is absolutely awful.” 

CoinDesk’s willingness to reply ‘how high’ when Silbert ordered it to jump is understandable when you consider that DCG’s investments include crypto exchange Coinbase. The prospectus that preceded Coinbase’s direct listing on the Nasdaq exchange cited “the identification of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous person or persons who developed Bitcoin, or the transfer of Satoshi’s Bitcoins” as some of the major risk factors that could adversely affect the exchange’s fortunes.  

Ligon’s original article was also slammed by a host of Twitter personalities, including many prominent BTC maximalists. Among these discontented ranks were podcaster Peter McCormack, Kraken director Dan Held, BTC developer Peter Todd, Magnus Granath (@Hodlonaut), Alex Gladstein and Dan Darkpill, to name just a few, many of whom applauded CoinDesk’s editing of Ligon’s original text.  

While some of the above individuals are engaged in their own litigation with Wright, they also have a shared stake in ensuring that Wright is not identified as Satoshi, something which even the plaintiffs suing Wright don’t deny. In fact, Wright = Satoshi is the cornerstone of the plaintiffs’ case, otherwise there’s no ownership of a vast fortune from which Wright can pay damages for allegedly depriving his former colleague Dave Kleiman of his share of this BTC motherlode. 

While Wright has a deserved reputation as an acquired taste, it isn’t just his personality getting under the skin of all these naysayers. Wright’s rival protocol BSV theoretically poses a threat to BTC’s current domination of the cryptocurrency market. While BSV remains a relative outlier in terms of token value, a mainstream media spotlight on Wright’s identity as Satoshi could spark greater interest in BSV and its focus on upscaling individual blocks on the blockchain to permit peer-to-peer transactions on a level that rivals traditional payment channels.    

Granted, CoinDesk’s willingness to toe its owners’ line isn’t much of a shock, as all media outlets since the dawn of time have reflected the views of their publishers, sometimes blatantly so. But as the sector’s leading media voice – often quoted verbatim by mainstream outlets – CoinDesk bears a greater burden of responsibility to accurately report critical events without applying too much self-serving spin.  

Similarly, Wright’s individual opponents are quick to assemble a social media posse comitatus to ride down any information that challenges their preferred narrative. This too, has an impact on mainstream media, who tally up the number of these individuals’ followers and assign their utterances a veracity that isn’t necessarily warranted.  

There’s little hope of convincing the maxis of reining in their excesses, but if CoinDesk proves incapable of or unwilling to toe the factual line, it’s worth asking what other misrepresentations it might be offering its readers. With many individuals now allocating significant portions of their investment portfolio to crypto projects, history will not look kindly on outlets that promoted misinformation aimed at benefiting a select few at the possible expense of the many.  

The civil trial now underway in a Florida federal court could have a major impact on the current makeup of the cryptocurrency sector, particularly if the court orders Wright to share his purported 1.1m BTC stockpile with the Kleiman camp. Liquidity of that magnitude flooding the market all at once could have significant downward pressure on the BTC token’s value.  

If CoinDesk and its backers truly believe their technology is the superior one, then they should have little to fear from the trial’s outcome. They should allow their readers to make up their own minds, rather than channel Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men by assuming that their readers can’t handle the truth.  

It’s probably unrealistic to expect CoinDesk’s backers to allow the site’s writers and editors the freedom to relay ‘just the facts’ information to readers. Everyone, it seems, has a dog in this hunt, and naked self-interest often trumps journalistic integrity. That’s why it’s important for mainstream media outlets to cast a critical eye on anyone attempting to put an overly partisan spin on the daily events of this trial. To paraphrase the legal maxim, let justice be done though the heavens (and/or BTC’s value) fall.