Judge Rules Imposter Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto

By Zoltan Vardai of Cointelegraph

Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the Bitcoin network, according to Judge James Mellor’s ruling in the United Kingdom on March 14, reported BitMEX Research. 

Closing arguments began in London on March 12 in the lawsuit brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) lawsuit against Wright, an Australian computer scientist who claimed to be Nakamoto since 2016.

COPA was seeking injunctive relief to prevent Wright from further claiming to be Nakamoto. Wright has been accused of massive document forgery for supporting his claim of being the pseudonymous Bitcoin founder. According to COPA’s closing submission:

“Dr. Wright has been shown to have lied on an extraordinary scale. […] He has invented an entire biographical history, producing one tranche after another of forged documents to support it.”

The trial began on Feb. 5. Wright had offered to settle the case out of court on Jan. 24, but COPA declined.

COPA was founded in 2020 “to encourage the adoption and advancement of cryptocurrency technologies and to remove patents as a barrier to growth and innovation.” Its 33 members include Coinbase, Block, Meta, MicroStrategy, Kraken, Paradigm, Uniswap and Worldcoin. 

In 2023, the Wright sued 13 Bitcoin Core developers and a group of companies, including Blockstream, Coinbase and Block, for copyright violations relating to the Bitcoin white paper, its file format and database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain.

In response to the lawsuit, the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund said:

“For years, prominent contributors to the Bitcoin community have been the subject of abusive lawsuits […] These lawsuits are frivolous but effective. Many developers have decided it’s not worth the time, stress, money, and legal risk to continue working on Bitcoin.”

Wright filed United States copyright registration for the Bitcoin white paper and the code within it in 2019.

The Bitcoin white paper is now subject to an MIT open-source license, allowing anyone to reuse and modify the code for any purpose. A court injunction would prevent Wright from further copyright claims on it.