Bitcoin
UK judge rejects scientist’s claim to be inventor of Bitcoin
A judge of the High Court of London ruled Monday (May 20) that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright lied and falsified documents to support his false claim to be the inventor of bitcoin.
Judge James Mellor ruled in March that Wright’s evidence was not the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” and gave his reasons for this conclusion on Monday, Reuters reported Monday.
The judge said Wright lied and falsified documents to support his claim to be the inventor and that his lawsuits against developers and his views on bitcoin also went against his claims, according to the report.
The process in which this decision was made was brought by the Patent Open Crypto Alliance (COPA) and was intended to prevent Wright from suing bitcoin developers, the report said.
On a Monday blog post that following the rule, COPA wrote that the judgment “forensically demolishes Wright’s fraudulent claims.”
“This decision is a watershed moment for the open source community and, even more importantly, a definitive victory for the truth,” a COPA spokesperson said in the post. “Developers can now continue their important work maintaining, iterating, and improving the Bitcoin network without risking their personal livelihoods or fearing costly and time-consuming litigation from Craig Wright.”
On a Monday publish on X, Wright said: “I intend to fully appeal the court’s ruling on the identity issue. I would like to recognize and thank all my supporters for their unwavering encouragement and support.”
Wright went a step further with his claim to be the creator of bitcoin in May 2016, claiming three publications – BBC, The Economist and GQ – and sending messages digitally signed with cryptographic keys created during the early days of bitcoin’s development.
“These are the blocks used to send 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney in January [2009] as the first bitcoin transaction,” Wright said at the time during his demonstration.
In December 2019, when a judge in Florida ruled that Wright’s late business partner owned half of all the coins Wright mined during 2013 and half of the intellectual property that was created, some cryptography experts I thought he was a fraud.
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