The unholiest of holy wars: “Satoshi” vs “Bitcoin Jesus”

What is bitcoin?

Bitcoin is, in theory, a peer-to-peer digital “currency” invented just over ten years ago by someone — or some group — calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto. It’s currently trading at around $6,400, and goes by the ticker “BTC”. We can all agree on those basics, right?

Nope. For a few years now, bitcoin zealots have been at war over how to “scale” bitcoin so as to allow for more transactions to be processed. Like any good holy war, the bitcoin “civil war” last year produced a schism or, in the crypto vernacular, a “hard fork”.

The great bitcoin fork-off saw one of the rival factions split off from the core, creating a kind of clone of the original, generally known as “bitcoin cash”, but just called “bitcoin” by its backers. The clone goes by the ticker “BCH” and is currently trading around $570.

Bitcoin cash’s backers include people like Craig Wright, the man who in 2016 declared that he was Satoshi but then failed to produce the evidence to support that claim, and…