There are quite a few doubts in the community as to whether Craig Wright is the inventor of Bitcoin. But that doesn’t stop the Aussie and Wannabe-Satoshi-Nakamoto from pursuing intellectual property claims in court. His latest targets: crypto exchanges Coinbase and octopuses.
read also
The previous year, the software developer had prevailed on technical grounds in a lawsuit in which it asserted copyrights to the seminal document of the crypto world. Of course, the court’s decision did not prove that he was the author of the white paper, but now plaintiff Wright strikes a blow. According to his office, he wants Coinbase and octopuses prevent BTC from promoting BTC as Bitcoin, for example by using the logo. The lawsuit is therefore worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Other trials are already planned.
Bitcoin different from Bitcoin?
The claim that BTC is not Bitcoin may initially be confusing and at best invites philosophical speculation. But from the point of view of Wright and his lawyers, things are relatively simple. Because according to the IT developer, today’s BTC was only created in 2017 as an independent project. Around this time, the BTC blockchain split off from Bitcoin Cash in a hard fork, with the latter giving rise to the niche currency Bitcoin Satoshi Version (BSV) personally promoted by Wright in 2018. For the 51-year-old pass for Satoshi Nakamoto, however, only this project adheres to the original spirit of the white paper.
Simply put, the plaintiffs’ assertion that a digital asset that does not strictly adhere to the Bitcoin protocol and is connected to the Bitcoin blockchain is not Bitcoin and should not be marketed or labeled as such,
explains why Wright’s lawyer, Simon Cohen. In addition other crypto exchanges had around octopuses previously removed BSV from its own platform in 2019. The move came in response to a series of warnings Wright was using to back up his claim of BTC authorship.
Is Wright Satoshi?
However, the question of whether Craig Wright is actually the inventor of Bitcoin and the author of the associated white paper has not yet been satisfactorily answered. The community exposed alleged evidence from 2016 as a technically adept fake.
In a lawsuit with the heirs of his former business partner David Kleiman, Wright was able to partially assert himself, however. The heirs claimed that Kleiman was involved in the invention of BTC alongside Wright. They demanded half of the coins of the multi-billion dollar wallet, which consists of the first bitcoin blocks mined and is therefore attributed to Satoshi.
If Wright had lost the case, he would have had to ultimately prove by a transaction with this wallet that he was in fact the inventor of cryptocurrency – or not. Either way, the court fined him $100 million for intellectual property theft. However, Wright did not increase the amount, so in March the court imposed heavy penalty interest on him. For the supposed crypto billionaire Wright, these are certainly just peanuts.
Want to buy Cardano (ADA)?
We show you the best providers where you can buy and sell Cardano in minutes.
To the guide