Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by neuropie 3704 days ago
It's very interesting that he asked the media to send coins to one of Satoshi's Bitcoin addresses, and that he would return them. All of Satoshi's original coins are Pay-to-Public-Key, whereas the BBC's money was sent Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH). This means that Craig would have to present a signature along with a public key that just has the same hash as the Satoshi public key, not a signature for Satoshi's public key itself. I think he is banking on finding another key with the same hash, as a final desperate attempt to forge his identity.
2 comments

If Craig Wright did indeed purchase the supercomputer which was placed at number 17 on the list of the world's fastest supercomputers in November 2015, perhaps its sole purpose was to do a collision attack. Although as with other claims, it is uncertain whether he did buy this computer (SGI deny it was bought from them but concede that it could have been bought on the grey market[0]).

[0] http://www.zdnet.com/article/sgi-denies-links-with-alleged-b...

To move the coins in a P2PKH output the signature also needs to include the public key.