The trial took an unusual turn even before it began
The creator of Bitcoin under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto is not Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, a high court judge has ruled, ending a two-month trial in London
In a highly unusual decision, the presiding judge — Justice Mellor — delivered a verdict within seconds of the case's conclusion, promising to issue a «fairly lengthy written judgment.» in due course, The Guardian notes.
“However, having considered all the evidence and material put before me in these proceedings, I have concluded that the evidence is overwhelming,”, Mellor said.
“First of all, Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. Second, Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto between 2008 and 2011.
Third, Dr. Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin system. And fourthly, he is not the author of the original versions of the Bitcoin software.
Craig Wright was sued by a conglomerate of cryptocurrency companies called the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa), which sought to stop him from continuing to claim that he invented cryptocurrency and using this to expand his influence in the sector.
Litigation took an unusual turn even before it began, The Guardian emphasizes. The Copa conglomerate, which includes Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey's block, Coinbase and Bitcoin investment firm MicroStrategy, accused Wright of falsifying a significant number of documents presented as evidence.
The panel's expert witnesses said they found evidence of backdated edits created or modified using versions of software that did not exist at the time the documents were allegedly created. Copa claimed that one document contained traces of ChatGPT's involvement in its creation, despite the fact that the software did not exist until years after the document was supposedly written.
Jonathan Hough, representing Copa, told the high court that Wright's claim was a «blatant lie and an elaborate false narrative, backed by industrial-scale counterfeiting.»
Wright's defense expert witnesses agreed with many of the assessments, including the conclusion that the original document describing Bitcoin was written using OpenOffice software, while the version provided by Wright was written using a tool called LaTeX.
Under cross-examination after the trial began, Wright subsequently raised concerns that Dr Simon Plakes, an expert appointed by his own lawyers, was not qualified for the task. «I didn't choose Dr. Plakes, I didn't want Dr. Plakes,» Wright said. — Doctor Plax is a psychologist. He has a degree in psychology. He has no qualifications in information security.
Asked whether his position was that «the expert you called is not a qualified expert to testify about what he covers in his reports,» Wright replied: «If you're asking me that directly, then yes.
In August 2022, Wright won a libel case against a man who called him a “fraud” for claiming to be Nakamoto. But damages were set at just £1 after the judge ruled he had “made a false case and presented false evidence days before trial”.
A Copa spokesman said: “ This decision is a win for the developers, for the entire open source community, and for the truth. For over eight years, Dr. Wright and his financial backers lied about being Satoshi Nakamoto and used those lies to intimidate developers in the Bitcoin community. It ends today with a court ruling that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.”