Craig Wright Threatened to Crash The Bitcoin Price… So, What Happened?
There are many halving predictions yet to come true — among them Satoshi claimant Craig Wright’s “long-term advance notice” from 2018 that he intended to crash the Bitcoin price.
The warning emerged from a Slack group that Wright uses to communicate with his acolytes, and his dastardly scheme makes fascinating reading.
Dismissed at the time
Wright’s sell-off threat came just prior to the much-hyped fork of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain to create Bitcoin SV.
Although there were some true believers who clearly relished the prospect of these events actually occurring, it was dismissed by many at the time as typical Wright braggadocio and self-promotion.
Rolling iceberg gathers no moss
According to Wright, the sale would consist of a rolling iceberg order on a single exchange followed by significant orders on other exchanges. Iceberg orders are split into smaller lots with visible and hidden parts, the hidden parts only becoming apparent once the visible parts have been executed.
This was intended to significantly crash the BTC price and be matched with a 10x leveraged short to capitalize on this.
Simultaneously, Wright planned to throttle the network hash, rejecting all transactions other than “unrecognised SegWit TXs to miners and our own Exchange TXs.”
This was to occur via the addition of 51% of network hash power prior to the price crash, although no further details of how this would be achieved were given.
Computer says “No”
As Cointelegraph reported, Bitcoin’s third halving event happened as scheduled, with the only untoward outcome so far being YouTube pulling the plug on our livestream party and a vague sense of disappointment from underwhelmed hodlers.
The hash rate has so far been relatively unaffected, and unless Wright was behind the weekend’s Bitcoin price drop, then we can only assume that the halving he’s planning to hatch his scheme for is the one due in 2024.
Looks like everyone can breathe easy again… for another four years, at least.