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Craig Wright Cuts False ‘Bitcoin Inventor’ Claim from Website Following Legal Defeat

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Teuta Franjkovic
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Key Takeaways

  • After a legal battle, a UK court ruled Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto and ordered him to publicly acknowledge this on his website.
  • Despite Wright’s claims being debunked, the true identity of Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, remains unknown.
  • With Wright out of the picture, other potential candidates, such as Hal Finney and Nick Szabo, continue to be the subject of speculation.

Since the inception of the cryptocurrency industry, there has been widespread curiosity about the identity of Bitcoin’s creator. Satoshi Nakamoto, an enigmatic online figure, published a paper in 2008 that laid the foundation for cryptocurrency. 

In 2016, Australian businessman and computer scientist Craig Steven Wright claimed  he was the mastermind behind Bitcoin, stating that he played the primary role with assistance from others. His declaration led to significant controversy and several legal battles, all of which he lost. 

After his recent string of legal setbacks, Wright is now required to inform the public on his website that he is not the inventor of Bitcoin.

“Not Satoshi”: Craig Wright Loses Bitcoin Inventor Claim, Must Post Court Order

Earlier this year, a UK court ruled that Craig Wright was not the inventor of Bitcoin, finding that he had “extensively and repeatedly” lied and forged documents to claim otherwise.

Justice James Mellor has mandated Wright to display a legal notice on his website  stating that he is not the inventor of Bitcoin. This notice, which should remain on display for six months, indicates that Wright lied ‘extensively and repeatedly’ during court proceedings where he claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Craig Wright website
Credit: craigwright.net

It accuses him of forging documents “on a grand scale” to support a false narrative. The notice highlights Wright’s actions as a “most serious abuse” of legal systems in the UK, Norway, and the US. It also links the full court judgment against him, including an appendix detailing his forged documents.

COPA Wins Legal Battle and Substantial Damages from Craig Wright

The notice is part of a dissemination order issued by Justice James Mellor, the UK judge overseeing the case against Craig Wright brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a non-profit organization representing Bitcoin developers.

Judge Mellor’s ruling  reaffirmed that Wright was not Bitcoin’s inventor and ordered him to pay over £6 million in legal costs to COPA despite his annual income of about £160,000. 

Judge Mellor had also ordered Wright  to post the legal notice on his Twitter/X account and on Slack channels he used to communicate with his followers, clarifying that he is not the inventor of Bitcoin. 

Despite this order, Wright has yet to update his X account with the required notice. His most recent post from May 20 declared his intention to appeal the ruling, although Mellor indicated that Wright has yet to apply for permission formally.

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto?

Since October 2008, when Satoshi Nakamoto published Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , there has been much debate about their real identity.

Now, with Craig Wright out of the picture, some individuals are believed to be the real Satoshi:

  • Elon Musk: Rumors about Musk being Nakamoto began with a blog post on Medium  by Sahil Gupta, a former intern at Musk’s SpaceX. Gupta suggested Musk’s expertise made him a plausible creator of Bitcoin. However, Musk has denied these claims.
  • Dorian Nakamoto: In March 2014, Newsweek magazine claimed that Satoshi Nakamoto was Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto , a Japanese-American physicist living in California. Dorian Nakamoto refuted this, stating that he had not had internet access since 2013 and had never heard of Bitcoin until a reporter approached him. He faced significant stress and confusion due to the report and started a fundraising page to sue the magazine.
  • Nick Szabo: A computer programmer and cryptographer, Szabo developed Bit Gold  in the late 1990s, a precursor to Bitcoin. While some believe Szabo could be Nakamoto, with Elon Musk pointing toward the programmer’s influence on the crypto industry, Szabo has consistently denied these rumors.
  • Hal Finney (late): A cryptographer who received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction from Nakamoto. Some suggest that Finney, the first to download Bitcoin’s software, could have been Nakamoto sending Bitcoin to himself. Despite intriguing correspondences and timeline discrepancies with Nakamoto, Finney, who passed away in 2014, always denied being Bitcoin’s creator.

Satoshi’s Silent Fortune: Billions in Bitcoin, Identity Unknown

Satoshi Nakamoto’s net worth remains a mystery, primarily because of Bitcoin’s anonymous nature and the difficulty in identifying which wallets belong to him. It’s widely believed that Nakamoto could own at least 1 million Bitcoins, which would value his holdings at around $20 billion based on current market prices.

Despite this vast wealth, none of the Bitcoins assumed to be Nakamoto’s, except for the original 10 BTC sent to Hal Finney in 2009, have ever been moved or spent from their original wallets. This inactivity could be a strategic choice to maintain anonymity, considering the potential personal upheaval and significant risks from various actors, including nefarious individuals and governments, that such a revelation could bring.

In October 2023, Satoshi Nakamoto’s verified Twitter account, @Satoshi, broke its five-year silence with a tweet describing Bitcoin as a ‘predicate machine,’ where ‘predicate’ suggests a characteristic or relation. This tweet quickly attracted significant attention, amassing over 3.2 million views. The account’s last activity before this had been on October 31, 2018. However, the latter post has since been deleted.

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Teuta Franjkovic

Teuta is a seasoned writer and editor with more than 15 years of experience. She has expertise in covering macroeconomics and technology as well as the cryptocurrency and blockchain industries. She has worked for several publications as a journalist and editor, including Forbes, Bloomberg, CoinTelegraph, Coin Rivet, CoinSpeaker, VRWorld and Arcane Bear. Teuta began her professional career in 2005, working as a lifestyle writer at Cosmopolitan in Croatia. From there, she branched out to several other publications, covering mainly business and the economy. She then turned her attention to the world of cryptocurrency and blockchain, believing that crypto is among the most important inventions in the history of humanity. Her involvement in fintech began in 2014 and she has since lent her expertise in writing, editing and gathering information about the world of crypto, blockchain, NFTs and Web3. An all-round news hound, mentor, editor, and writer, Teuta enjoys teamwork and good communication. She holds a WSET2 diploma and has a thing for chablis, punkrock music and shoes. She also holds a double MA in Political science and Entrepreneurship.
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