Long-time claims of being the man who started the cryptocurrency craze are invalidated
BitMEX Research reports that UK Judge James Mellor has ruled that Carl Wright is not the pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto in his declaration on March 14.
Closing arguments in the suit filed by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) against Wright began in a London courtroom on March 12. Wright is an Australian computer scientist who has claimed since 2016 that he’s Nakamoto.
COPA was seeking a court injunction to stop Wright from making further assertions to be Nakamoto. The defendant has been blamed for massive document forgery to support his claims of being the elusive Bitcoin creator.
COPA’s closing submission reads, “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.”
Wright proposed an out-of-court settlement on January 24, which COPA declined just ahead of the trial, which started on February 5.
Founded in 2020, COPA was created “to encourage the adoption and advancement of cryptocurrency technologies and to remove patents as a barrier to growth and innovation.”
Wright sued 13 Bitcoin Core architects and several other companies in 2023, including Coinbase, Block and Blockstream, for copyright infringements connected to the Bitcoin white paper, its file structure and Bitcoin blockchain database rights.
The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund issued a response to the lawsuit, saying, “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 for a US copyright in 2019 for the Bitcoin white paper and its code. An injunction from the court would stop Wright from any further copyright claims.
