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The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, remains the biggest mystery in the global crypto industry.
Countless articles and podcasts have been dedicated to finding the person, or people, who launched bitcoin, which is now the bedrock of a whole new asset class and billions of dollars’ worth of investments.
For some years, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright claimed to be Satoshi, based on his alleged evidence of a tech background, related meetings, and pages of documents.
But a UK court earlier this year put an end to the frenzied speculation — ruling that Wright is not the developer of bitcoin and saying that he had been extensively and openly lying. As a result, the true identity of Satoshi remains a mystery.
The challenge against Wright was made by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa), an industry group that is backed by companies including exchanges Coinbase and Kraken, software company Microstrategy, and Sam Altman’s cryptocurrency project Worldcoin. They sought to end Wright’s assertion to be Satoshi, a claim he has used to back claims for billions of dollars in damages against bitcoin developers for alleged thefts.
The curious case centred on the issue of intellectual property rights and proving that Wright did not have legitimate authorship claims over Satoshi’s bitcoin white paper, crypto’s important founding text. This was published in 2008, and describes a peer-to-peer payments system that stands apart from traditional financial institutions, relying instead on blockchain technology.
“It was an unusual beginning,” says Phil Sherrell, partner and head of the London office at law firm Bird & Bird, which represented Copa in the case. Wright was represented by Shoosmiths. Instead of being a fraud trial, the focus was on showing that Wright did not have any rights over Satoshi’s bitcoin white paper and that he was not Satoshi.
“Ultimately, it always seemed likely to lead to a ‘Is he Satoshi?’ trial — the copyright ownership issue was the vehicle to get there,” explains Sherrell.
The case was brought after Wright began, in late 2020, emailing crypto developers and businesses that hosted the bitcoin white paper on their websites, asking them to take it down, recounts Sherrell. Crypto developers and executives “became concerned about where that might lead, and whether this was the start of a campaign in relation to other Satoshi IP rights”, he adds.
To prove that Wright was not Satoshi, Sherrell’s team began collecting evidence that would show he was lying. “It ultimately almost played out like a fraud trial — the whole focus of the litigation was to undermine the documents and information Wright relied on to try to prove he was Satoshi,” Sherrell says.
In one instance, the lawyers set about trying to disprove the legitimacy of handwritten notes. Some of the Brisbane-born computer scientist’s evidence relied on handwritten notes that he claimed had been written in the early 2000s, scribbles of ideas about bitcoin before the white paper was published.
Sherrell’s team tracked down the printer of the notepad in China, proving that the exact version of that notebook had not been released until years after Wright’s claims.
In another example, the lawyers picked apart Wright’s claims that some of his computer documents had been typed before 2008, using evidence from font designers. The witnesses testified that some fonts “hadn’t even been created until years after the alleged date of the document”, according to Sherrell.
In the judgment handed down by the UK High Court in May, the presiding judge, Justice Mellor, said Wright “was not able to put forward any coherent explanation for the forgeries, which had been exposed, and yet he could not bring himself to accept that he was responsible for them”.
“Dr Wright lied to the court extensively and repeatedly,” the judgment concluded. “Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged . . . As soon as one lie was exposed, Dr Wright resorted to further lies and evasions.”
Sherrell says: “It became clear that everything that Wright said was based on things you could already find in the public domain about Satoshi’s life.”
A legal notice on Wright’s website now states that he is not Satoshi and that he has been ordered not to carry out any more legal proceedings based on these false claims.
“It’s a victory for common sense and justice,” says Sherrell.
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