[HN Gopher] Of regrets
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Of regrets
Author : nullc
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-02-06 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (laanwj.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (laanwj.github.io)
| nullc wrote:
| A con artist has filed multiple lawsuits in the UK against the
| current and former (increasingly, as more quit) developers of
| Bitcoin demanding billions of dollars, part in retaliation for
| their failure to back up his obviously false claims of being
| Bitcoin's creator and in part as part of an insane plot to steal
| billions of dollars in Bitcoin. Unfortunately, his efforts are
| financed by at least one (and possibly multiple) persons with far
| more wealth than morals who have been promised a share of the
| spoils.
|
| The poster of the linked article, Wladimir Van der Laan, was one
| of the most active developers of Bitcoin since 2011. I'm also
| another early bitcoin developer, now former, and another one of
| this conman's legal attack targets.
|
| A key point about vexatious litigation, especially in places like
| the UK which lack protections against SLAPPs, is that the
| attacker doesn't need to win the lawsuit to achieve his goals: He
| can cause his victims millions of dollars in legal costs,
| phenomenal impositions on their time and privacy, and great
| psychological stress-- losing nothing himself but what he paid
| for his attorneys. Winning or not is more or less incidental, as
| the culprit here said quite explicitly online before commencing
| his lawsuits (saying that the intent was to destroy his targets
| and their families financially and psychologically). That fact
| that none of us were in the UK or had any dealings in the UK
| doesn't matter because open source software is available
| everywhere.
|
| For that reason its important that it be possible to discharge
| frivolous litigation as quickly and efficiently as possible. As
| open source developers the cost/benefit of publishing our work
| can be pretty dicey to begin with, so it's important that the
| licenses we use not gratuitously open up avenues for litigation
| from the users since there are no revenues to pay for such things
| as a cost of doing business.
|
| In his first lawsuit, he alleged to own billions of dollars in
| Bitcoin (coins which are already well known to have belonged to
| the MTGox exchange) and that in 2020-- coincidentally just as his
| obligations to repay his lenders were coming due-- thieves
| entered into his home to install a "wifi pineapple" to hack his
| computers and steal the keys and that when he discovered this
| "hack" he wipes his computers to clear the compromise,
| conveniently making sure there would be no evidence of the "hack"
| or ever owning the coins to begin with. The coins in question
| have not moved. He then filed a lawsuit against a dozen former
| and current developers arguing that as developers they have a
| fiduciary responsibility to introduce a backdoor into the bitcoin
| cryptosystem to "recover" "his" coins. In three years there has
| been no comment or apparent action by the police over this theft
| which, if it were real, would likely be the highest value heist
| in recorded history.
|
| The case seemed obviously baseless to us, owing to obvious
| falsehood of his claims, the impossibility of his request (people
| would not adopt this backdoored version, even if anyone was
| willing to make themself complicit in his attempted theft by
| writing it for him), the pointlessness of it (he just pay someone
| to write it (or do it himself, if he could program) and half the
| defendants had long since stopped working on Bitcoin), the fact
| that even the police don't have a positive duty to save anyone
| from harm, and the unambiguous disclaimer of liabilities in our
| software license -- without which we never would have published
| it in the first place.
|
| And keep in mind that he's already been found by judges in
| several countries to have perjured himself, submitted faked
| evidence, etc. in other cases (as shown in this collage of
| rulings against Wright,
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FoMUonbXkAEbJbL?format=jpg&name=... )
|
| The trial court agreed (
| https://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2022/667.html ), ruling
| that his case didn't have more than a fanciful chance of success.
| But he appealed and the decision was reversed (
| https://nt4tn.net/scammer-craig-wright/Tulip_v_Van_Der_Laan_...
| ). He's now gloating on slack and twitter that he's already "won"
| because we'll be 'ruined' by having to pay the 7-figure cost of
| his successful appeal and by publishing whatever dirt he can
| extract from our private data obtained in discovery.
|
| (The second lawsuit, which has yet to come before a court alleges
| that the targets are violating "his" copyright by distributing
| the Bitcoin "block format" and bitcoin documentation, nevermind
| the fact that Bitcoin has been released under the MIT expat
| license since day one, and that this bozo's claims of being
| Bitcoin's creator are totally discredited and obviously false.
| He's also filed additional lawsuits against community members and
| journalists for expressing the view that his claims of having
| created Bitcoin are false).
|
| Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, the enforceability of
| the disclaimer of liability is critical to all of open source and
| the court's unwillingness to summarily dismiss an effort to
| compel the authorship and publication of a backdoor in a
| cryptographic security scheme from a supposed user who hopes to
| benefit from the backdoor should be a concern to all open source
| developers.
| anewhnaccount2 wrote:
| How are they going to seek the damages given the defendants
| probably don't own any property in the UK?
| aliqot wrote:
| Is there an organization covering the legal defense fund of
| these devs, or a crowdfund effort that you know of? Supporters
| of cryptoassets or not, I think we can all identify with this
| being a big problem that can bite us, as developers of free
| software, in other ways if we don't make a stand here with a
| case as visible as this. This is a dangerous precedent.
| rjbwork wrote:
| This is insane. The UK seems completely unequipped for a bad
| faith actor of this magnitude. I'm a huge cryptoskeptic, but
| what this guy is doing is straight up _evil_. I hope you and
| everyone else come out relatively unscathed, and I 'm sorry
| you've got to deal with this loon.
| kanzure wrote:
| Maybe it is time to enshrine open-source software development
| into law, and out of the realm of merely relying on an old
| copyright hack. It was a very clever hack, of course, but maybe
| the software industry has outgrown it and needs more legal basis
| to rely on.
| jrm4 wrote:
| If only there were a different license that kind of predicted
| all of this and governed itself accordingly? At least some kind
| of much better starting point from which to begin these things?
| If only someone had thought of that?
|
| In all seriousness, it appears as if I'm the first to mention
| the GPL in this thread and I find that very odd. There's your
| _starting_ point.
| epicureanideal wrote:
| How do we accomplish that without an army of lobbyists?
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Hold the entire world's technology industry hostage.
|
| Nice multi-billion dollar business you got there, be a real
| shame if somebody started introducing subtly-breaking bugs
| into that critical library you use, wouldn't it?
| kanzure wrote:
| Well, extortion and blackmail isn't exactly a way of
| further legitimizing open-source software development.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Works for the copyright industry, doesn't it?
| kanzure wrote:
| Major corporations have entire strategies built around open-
| source, with many household names that you know (Facebook,
| Microsoft, Google, ...). According to random estimates on the
| internet, open-source software is a $50 billion annual
| market. There's enough "there" there to get you something.
| nhchris wrote:
| Can somebody elaborate? The article claims the MIT license's no-
| warranty clause has been voided in the UK, but provides no
| details or a source.
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