Satoshi Nakamoto: Who is He? The identity of the enigmatic bitcoin creator, who is a well-known personality in the cryptocurrency field, is unclear.
The British blogger Peter McCormack was convinced of one thing, though: Craig Wright isn’t the solution.
An Australian computer scientist named Wright has long claimed to be Satoshi, the fictitious author of the 2008 white paper that gave rise to bitcoin.
Wright’s claim that he is the creator of the digital currency has sparked a number of legal disputes, some of which are still ongoing. He initially tried to establish his identity as Satoshi in 2016, months after his name first surfaced.
One of them came to a pyrrhic end this week in London when it was discovered that McCormack had seriously damaged Wright’s image by alleging that he was a fake and not Satoshi on several occasions.
However, a high court judge found that 52-year-old Wright had used “deliberately fraudulent evidence” to support his libel suit and awarded him minimal damages of £1.
Mr. Justice Chamberlain determined that one claim made in a video discussion on YouTube was defamatory, while a series of tweets repeating the fraud claims were determined to have seriously harmed Wright’s reputation. McCormack did not present a defense of truth, which is where the defendant in the case tries to show that the allegations are substantially true, for financial reasons.
McCormack’s defense, now on a much more limited basis, was that Wright’s reputation was not seriously harmed by the video or the tweets. Wright stated that the tweets had badly damaged his image since he had been rejected from 10 conferences, which prevented the publication of scholarly papers that were scheduled to be presented at those gatherings.
Wright’s statements were refuted by McCormack with the help of conference organizers. When Wright went on trial in May, the allegations were later dismissed from his case.
Wright, the head scientist of the blockchain technology company nChain and a resident of Surrey, stated that the lawsuit was not undertaken for financial gain but rather for the sake of principle and to persuade people to think carefully before attempting to damage his character.
And the number of court cases keeps growing. Wright is involved in further high court matters. He filed a libel lawsuit against Marcus Granath, a Norwegian Twitter user who also accused the Australian of being a phony. Recently, Granath’s attempt to get the lawsuit dismissed was unsuccessful.
In a separate action, Wright is suing two cryptocurrency exchanges, claiming that a digital asset called Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), which he supports, is the legitimate offspring of the white paper.
A non-profit organization that promotes cryptocurrencies called the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa) is asking the Supreme Court to rule that Wright did not write the white paper. According to their argument, Wright falsified the evidence used to support his claim that he is Satoshi. Wright attempted to get the lawsuit dismissed last year but was unsuccessful. Wright disputes Copa’s assertions.
Before then, there was more legal back and forth. Wright lost his effort to sue Roger Ver, an early bitcoin supporter, in 2020 when a court decided that the US should be the proper jurisdiction for a lawsuit. Ver had called Wright a fraud on YouTube.
Wright avoided having to pay the heirs of his former business partner David Kleiman a multibillion-dollar payment in bitcoins by winning a dispute in the US in December. According to Kleiman’s family, who also credited Wright as co-creators of bitcoin, they are due half of the 1.1 million bitcoins that Satoshi “mined” in total.
It was anticipated that if Wright lost, he would have been forced to shift those bitcoins, which was considered as the sword-in-the-stone test that would establish Satoshi’s real identity. These coins are stored on the bitcoin blockchain, a decentralized database that keeps track of all bitcoin transactions, and are currently worth $25 billion (£21 billion) at the current price of roughly $23,000.
