Craig Wright is not the inventor of bitcoin, British judge rules

-->Craig Wright is not the inventor of bitcoin. According to the court in London, it has been ‘overwhelmingly’ proven that the Australian computer scientist is not Satoshi Nakamoto. This was reported by The Guardian, among others, in response to the ruling.

Craig Wright is níet Satoshi

Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of bitcoin, is not Australian computer scientist Craig Wright. This puts an end to a two-month drawn-out process. The presiding judge, Mr. Justice (!) Mellor, handed down the sentence within seconds of the conclusion of the case. With the promise to issue “a fairly comprehensive written judgment in due course.”

“However, having considered all the evidence and submissions presented to me during this trial, I have concluded that the evidence is overwhelming,” Mellor said. “First, that Dr. Wright is not the author of the bitcoin white paper. Secondly, Dr. Wright is not the person who performed under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011. Third, Dr. Wright is not the person who created the bitcoin system. And fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the bitcoin software.”

Clear words from the judge, a statement that does not lead to surprise in the bitcoin community. Wright has been sued by a conglomerate of crypto companies called the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa). They want to prevent Wright from continuing to claim that he invented Bitcoin. Jack Dorsey of Block, Coinbase and MicroStrategy, among others, are in the Copa. They accuse Wright of falsifying a significant amount of the documents submitted as evidence.

The experts proved that Wright created several documents using software versions that did not exist at the time the documents were supposedly created. A document was even created via ChatGPT, despite the fact that this software did not exist until years after the document was supposedly written.

Jonathan Hough, acting for Copa’s defense, said Wright’s claim is a “brazen lie and an elaborate false narrative supported by industrial-scale falsification.”

Defense Wright

The expert witnesses for Wright’s defense agreed with many of the assessments. Including the finding that the original document describing bitcoin was created with OpenOffice software. While the version provided by Wright was written with a tool called LaTeX.

In August 2022, Wright won a defamation case against a man who had called him a “fraud” for claiming he was Nakamoto. But damages have only been set at £1. Because the judge had ruled that he had “presented a deliberately false case and deliberately submitted false evidence until days before the trial”.

A Copa spokesperson said: “This decision is a win for developers, for the entire open source community and for the truth. For more than eight years, Dr. Wright and his financial supporters lied about his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto and used that lie to intimidate and bully developers in the bitcoin community. That ends today with the court ruling that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.”