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A British judge found that Craig Wright “lied repeatedly and extensively” in a case related to Wright’s claim that he is bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto. “Dr. Wright’s attempts to prove he was/is Satoshi Nakamoto represent a most serious abuse of this Court’s process,” Justice James Mellor of England’s High Court of Justice wrote in a ruling published today.
Wright’s evidence for being Nakamoto “is at best questionable or of very dubious relevance or entirely circumstantial and at worst, it is fabricated and/or based on documents I am satisfied have been forged on a grand scale by Dr. Wright,” Mellor’s ruling said.
Today’s written ruling came two months after Mellor delivered an oral verdict in which he said the evidence shows Wright is not the person who created bitcoin. The written ruling said, “it is clear that Dr. Wright engaged in the deliberate production of false documents to support false claims and use the Courts as a vehicle for fraud. Despite acknowledging in this Trial that a few documents were inauthentic (generally blamed on others), he steadfastly refused to acknowledge any of the forged documents. Instead, he lied repeatedly and extensively in his attempts to deflect the allegations of forgery.”
Mellor’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), which said it sued Wright to disprove his bitcoin-inventing claims and stop him from claiming intellectual property rights to the system. Wright, an Australian computer scientist, started claiming that he created bitcoin in 2016.
“Definitive win for the truth”
The oral ruling in March, which came after a six-week trial, already seems to have had an effect on Wright’s legal claims. “In the weeks since the initial ruling, Wright has abandoned multiple lawsuits that were either connected to or built upon his claim to being the creator of Bitcoin,” Wired wrote today.
COPA called today’s ruling “a watershed moment for the open-source community and even more importantly, a definitive win for the truth. Developers can now continue their important work maintaining, iterating on, and improving the Bitcoin network without risking their personal livelihoods or fearing costly and time-consuming litigation from Craig Wright.”
A statement posted on Craig Wright’s X account today said, “I fully intend to appeal the decision of the court on the matter of the identity issue.” Wright’s X account bio calls him the “Creator of Bitcoin.”
According to Mellor’s ruling, “Dr. Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person” but “is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr. Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.”