Bitcoin [BTC] is Turing complete, says Craig Wright

On 4th September, Dr. Craig Wright, popularly known as Faketoshi, the Chief Scientist of nChain, spoke about the Turing completeness of Bitcoin during an interview with Deconomy. Craig Wright has been criticized several times for claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.

Currently, Craig is actively involved in Bitcoin Cash [BCH] and states that Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin. According to him, BCH is the original vision and said that they will “ensure that it remains that way.”

The Chief Scientist of nChain said that the Turing completeness of Bitcoin is one of the common fallacy which is not thought of by the majority of the people. He said that Alan Turing, a computer scientist well-known for his Turing machine, followed the ideas of Kurt Godel, a famous mathematician, while writing his paper and calculating.

According to him, Turing considered a computer to be a person because, in the 1930 era, a computer was “literally a person”. Craig stated that a Turing complete machine can compute any computable number, not an infinite number.

“Now, in a hypothetical computer the concept of saying it’s not Turing complete because it can’t compute an infinite number. It’s rather crazy when you think about it because you can’t ever compute an infinite number. That’s the issue it’s not computable.”

He further adds:

“So, these people who say that you need loops that keep going on forever and file within Bitcoin otherwise it’s not Turing complete. I’m missing the key aspect of what turing completeness is, it is the ability to calculate any number.”

Craig remarked that Bitcoin has the ability in its script to calculate and verify any number. However, he points out that the aspects people are concerned about would be the size, since Turing is a large machine. This was followed up with the statement that this would imply on computers as well. Intel Pentium machine cannot compute a certain number as the users would run out of ram and hard drive.

The self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto continued:

“That’s a different issue, that’s just down to the semantics of how much storage you have and in theory you could stop the processing and restart the value after writing it down on a piece of paper or a long enough piece of paper etc. So the simple answer is Bitcoin is Turing complete unfortunately many people don’t actually know what that means they don’t understand the nature of computation”

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