The mystery of the creator of Bitcoin remained unsolved: the court did not recognize the Australian scientist as the “father” of cryptocurrency

The creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, is not Australian computer scientist Craig Wright, a high court judge has ruled at the end of a two-month trial in London.

In a highly unusual decision, the presiding judge, Judge Mellor, delivered his verdict within seconds of the case ending, promising to issue a “fairly lengthy written judgment” in due course, The Guardian notes.

“However, having considered all the evidence and submissions presented to me during 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 fourth, he is not the original author 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 its influence in the sector.

The trial 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 investment firm Bitcoin 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 forgery”.

Expert witnesses for Wright’s defense agreed with many assessments, including the conclusion that the original document describing Bitcoin was compiled 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. “Dr. Plaks is a psychologist. He has a degree in psychology. He has no information security qualifications.”

Asked if 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 decision that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.”