- A BSV hackathon contributor has been stiffed by the blockchain, which has used his idea and claimed it as their own
- BSV’s new coin freezing tool was thought up by the contributor, who was promised IP rights, but hasn’t got them
- Craig Wright has claimed that other people have and are trying to steal his IP
A BSV hackathon contributor has accused the blockchain of stealing his IP and using it for its own means. The Bitcoin fork, which launched in 2018 and has been sinking ever since, yesterday revealed a ‘blacklisting management tool’ which allows miners to freeze coins on its blockchain at the request of the authorities, but the idea’s originator claims that he designed the tool as part of a 2021 hackathon and that BSV has stolen it without crediting him. The allegation is particularly ironic given that BSV’s ideological father figure, Craig Wright, has accused his detractors of trying to steal his IP in the past, including the companies that make up the Crypto Open Patent Alliance.
Freezing Tool Designed for Wright to Take BSV
BSV’s plans for a freezing tool relate to Craig Wright’s claim to have had a billion dollars’ worth of BTC and BSV stolen from him in the 2020 ‘pineapple hack’. Wright tried to sue the developers of the blockchains and the BSV-owned Bitcoin Association to give him his coins back, even though the only evidence supporting it has been proved to be fraudulent, and his case was thrown out of court, although he has been given leave to appeal.
Despite winning the case, the Bitcoin Association felt it needed to settle with Wright out of court. This allowed him to press ahead with the coin retrieval process, with BSV announcing it was working on the tool, even though Wright didn’t actually have the court order he had said would be required. To help out Wright, the supposedly independent Bitcoin Association changed its wording to say that a “valid court order (or document of equivalent value)” would be accepted as proof of ownership.
BSV Backdated Copyright to Deny Creator IP
The tool launched yesterday, but it seems that BSV has tried to pull a fast one on the creator. The tool was added to Github earlier this month but backdated to 2020, a year before the person who created the tool, as part of a 2021 hackathon, actually gave them a prototype:
So they entered that Blacklist Manager stuff in August 2022 on Github, backdated the Copyright to 2020, and they’re going to be sued for promised IP rights by a BSV hackathon contributor who gave them the idea & code in 2021.
Sounds all very BSV to me, yes.
h/t @richardbensberg pic.twitter.com/WQQh3Fg7f2— No Rest For The Wicked 🔥 ∞/21M ⚡ (@Arthur_van_Pelt) October 6, 2022
The irony of a Craig Wright-backed project stealing someone’s IP and backdating the copyright is almost unbelievable. Wright used fraudulent evidence to obtain $56 million worth of IP in 2013, before claiming that the litany of forgeries and document manipulation that has dogged him for almost 10 years was the result of insiders of his companies trying to steal his IP.
Wright has also hit out at the court case brought by COPA, which he says is just an attempt to get him out of the way and get his IP awarded to the companies involved. It seems like Wright’s new motto is ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’.
