Although Australian computer scientist Craig Wright has insisted for years that he was none other than the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the maiden cryptocurrency Bitcoin (BTC), the United Kingdom’s High Court Judge James Mellor has ruled there was no evidence to support his claims.
As it happens, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a non-profit community fighting against patents and litigation that stunt the growth in crypto, took Craig Wright to court last month over his statements that he was the mysterious Bitcoin creator, as well as the author of the crypto asset’s white paper.
‘Not Satoshi Nakamoto’
While presenting the closing submissions that began in London on March 12, the COPA, which fought Wright’s Bitcoin authorship claims in an effort to prevent him from suing other developers or claiming intellectual property rights over Bitcoin’s technology, stated that:
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“Dr Wright has been shown to have lied on an extraordinary scale, and it is difficult to think of a precedent for what he has done. He has invented an entire biographical history, producing one tranche after another of forged documents to support it.”
After receiving the closing arguments, Judge Mellor announced his early findings on some key issues and stated that the evidence was “overwhelming” that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, according to the X post published by BitMEX Research on March 14.
Meanwhile, Michael Saylor, the founder of the business analytics software firm MicroStrategy, who also served as its CEO until August 2022, later transitioning into the role of chairman, and who purchased a substantial amount of Bitcoin on MicroStrategy’s behalf, shared the news on social media:
Who is Craig Wright?
As a reminder, Dr Craig Wright is an Australian computer scientist and businessman, as well as the former CEO of the technology firm Hotwire Preemptive Intelligence Group (Hotwire PE), which planned to launch the world’s first Bitcoin-based bank but failed due to regulatory obstacles.
Claiming he is Bitcoin’s creator, Wright went as far as even accusing Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) of breaching copyright laws after tech writer Andy Baio discovered back in 2023 that the technology behemoth’s macOS operating systems came equipped with their own copy of the Bitcoin white paper.
On top of that, he argued in 2022 that there were people who could confirm that he indeed was Satoshi, although he never revealed who or where these people were. However, he declared that being the founder of Bitcoin “actually makes life harder” and that neither money nor fame motivated him.
Ultimately, the said interview turned sour when the host, Hamish MacDonald, started insisting that Wright produce concrete evidence to support his claims, which seemed to irk Wright, who then proceeded to swear at MacDonald, telling him to “pick up a law book, and look what proof is.”
In roughly the same period, the London High Court refuted Wright’s claims as false in a lawsuit in which Wright accused crypto podcaster and blogger Peter McCormack of libel over stating that he wasn’t Satoshi and that his claims of being Satoshi were fraudulent.
Earlier, in June 2021, Ethereum (ETH) founder Vitalik Buterin also hit out at the self-proclaimed Nakamoto, comparing Craig Wright with the former United States President Donald Trump and daring his lawyers to sue him, as Finbold reported on June 9, 2021.
