matt on Nostr: It’s difficult to correctly state the importance of the Craig Wright case - on one ...

It’s difficult to correctly state the importance of the Craig Wright case - on one hand the case is absurd, there’s so many good defenses[1] that it doesn’t make sense to contemplate the what-if-we-lose scenario. On the other hand the fact that there’s a lawsuit burning millions of (luckily other people’s - we have generous donors in the form of the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund) pounds has the potential to drive away contributors (it already has to some extent) from bitcoin core, which is a terrible outcome.

[1] obviously the coins were never his, obviously even Bitcoin developers releasing a fork wouldn’t do anything to change bitcoin to steal coins, but more importantly that remedy isn’t even available in the US (where it’s compelled speech because software is speech) and, more generally the software is converted by the MIT license - the very bedrock of the modern open source software ecosystem is that developers have no liability. Without that, open source (and in fact most) software simply would not exist.