An Australian computer scientist who claims to have invented bitcoin is not “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the pseudonym of the cryptocurrency’s inventor, a London High Court judge ruled on Thursday.
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Craig Wright has long claimed to have authored a 2008 white paper, the foundational text of bitcoin, published under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto.”
The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa) took Wright to court to stop him from suing bitcoin developers, asking the court to recognize that Wright was not Satoshi.
With that, judge James Mellor pointed out in closing arguments that the evidence that Wright was not Satoshi was “overwhelming”.
“Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto from 2008 to 2011,” he highlighted.
As a result, Copa, whose members include payments company Block (SQ), owned by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, said the decision was “a victory for developers, for the entire open source community and for the truth” .
“For more than eight years, Dr. Wright and his financiers lied about his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto and used this lie to intimidate developers in the Bitcoin community,” said a Copa spokesperson in a statement.
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“This ends today with the court’s decision that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto,” he celebrated.
A spokesperson for Craig Wright said he was “not prepared to speak to anyone at this time.”
Furthermore, Copa accused Wright of frequently falsifying documents to substantiate his claim, including during the trial itself, which Wright denied when he gave evidence.
The organization’s lawyer, Jonathan Hough, said at the start of the trial in February that Wright’s claim was “a blatant lie, an elaborate false narrative supported by forgery on an industrial scale.”
Hough highlighted that “there are elements of Dr. Wright’s conduct that amount to farce,” citing alleged use of ChatGPT to produce fakes.
“Dr. Wright’s conduct is also extremely serious. Based on his dishonest claim to be Satoshi, he pursued claims he estimates in the hundreds of billions of dollars, including against numerous private individuals,” he added.
