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After a long legal dispute, the High Court of Justice in London has officially decided that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
One of the great mysteries of the Bitcoin community since its inception has been entirely tied to the beginning itself: Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? This pseudonym is all we need to identify that developer or developers who created Bitcoin: writing its whitepaper, mining the Genesis Block, executing transactions, and corresponding with people in the crypto community before Bitcoin. However, when Bitcoin began to receive the smallest amount of recognition from the wider world, he officially relinquished any authority over Bitcoin as a project and disappeared. In the years that followed, there were many attempts to determine Satoshi's identity, but nothing came to fruition.
However, community members weren't just trying to unmask Satoshi from an outside perspective. Additionally, there have been efforts by many people to publicly claim that they are, in fact, the true creators of Bitcoin. One of the most prominent figures in this regard is software developer Craig Wright, who made the bold statement in 2016 and faced years of ridicule from prominent members of the Bitcoin community. Although Wright has fought off his critics through litigation, he has faced repeated defeats on this front. However, the threat of libel suits remained a constant specter around media coverage of Wright's claim for 8 years, and as a result many of his actions went unreported.
Ultimately, this stifling atmosphere prompted the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) to take a bold step in 2021 when it sued in the British courts seeking a ruling on whether Wright owned the copyright to the Bitcoin whitepaper. This legal battle has not featured much in public discourse since the lawsuit was first filed, for understandable reasons, even as British courts have ruled against Wright's claims about Satoshi in lawsuits unrelated to COPA. Although settlement options were presented by Wright's legal team, COPA ultimately rejected them all, under the reasoning that such a settlement would require implicitly accepting his claim. If Craig Wright were merely a fraud, he would not have the ability to make any concessions on the nature of Bitcoin ownership. After years of a clear pattern of detention, the trial began in February 2024.
A particularly noteworthy tactic that Wright's team used “repeatedly” was that if Wright was not really Satoshi Nakamoto, the real Satoshi would have to unmask himself to definitively disprove the claim. More than anything else, this particular claim revealed a great deal of interest in Satoshi's true identity. For example, as the trial approached in January 2024, nearly $1 million in bitcoin was transferred to Satoshi's wallet from an anonymous source, sparking coverage from major media sites that the bitcoin creator himself might reveal. The hype generated by this event led to rampant speculation, as image macros began to circulate claiming that characters from the two simplified Japanese scripts, katakana and hiragana, would be pronounced as “Satoshi Nakamoto” while resembling the English letters of the famous Satoshi candidate's name, Hal. Vinnie.
Even if Bitcoin was created by code-breaking and encryption enthusiasts, this claim is somewhat questionable, as it would require mixing and matching two different Japanese scripts in a random manner. For example, the “to” syllable in Satoshi is a different alphabet than the same syllable in Nakamoto, and there seems to be no fixed rule when these two writing systems alternate. However, Hal Finney has still been dead since 2014, which explains why Satoshi has remained silent with Bitcoin booming to the maximum that has occurred in the past 10 years.
If nothing else, renewed speculation of this kind was a clear sign that the trial had captured Bitcoin users' collective imagination on the subject. It was a major point of interest at the time, when many of Bitcoin's early developers and collaborators began submitting private correspondence with Satoshi into the public record to be used as evidence. Adam Back, the developer of the “Hashcash” protocol in the 1990s that directly inspired the Bitcoin mining algorithm, revealed a brief email correspondence initiated by Satoshi in which the two discussed Hashcash’s relationship with Bitcoin. Early collaborator Marty “Sirius” Malmi, on the other hand, released a much larger collection of emails on a wider range of looser topics, totaling 120 pages. These emails gave new insight into the character of Bitcoin's creator and likely would never have come to light without criminal proceedings.
However, once the proceedings were over, Judge James Malor cited “overwhelming evidence” when he made an immediate ruling against Wright's claims. COPA independently released some evidence against Wright, including a particularly damning accusation that Wright used ChatGPT to forge documents “on an industrial scale.” Their legal team accused Wright of a “widespread campaign of dishonesty and fraud” that “went astray[ed] “To a farce,” he went so far as to claim that Wright was fabricating new documents during the five-week trial. Mallor claimed that he would provide a more detailed account of his reasons later, but the actual ruling is clear. Craig Wright is not Satoshi, nor is he the author of the white paper. He did not create Bitcoin or its software.
The importance of this ruling is clear for two main reasons: not only does it prevent Wright from continuing his years-long practice of filing defamation lawsuits against individuals and media outlets that deny his claims about Satoshi, but it also prevents him from suing developers on the basis of this ruling. of copyright infringement. This “chilling effect” on active Bitcoin developers is a major reason why COPA decided to take up this fight. If nothing else, having an established legal precedent would make it considerably easier to dismiss similar claims in the future. COPA filed a purely civil suit against Wright, which is unlikely to result in any kind of direct financial compensation and certainly will not lead to prison time. However, the full written judgment has not yet been issued.
Craig Wright's extensive campaign to prove that he is the real Satoshi Nakamoto has turned into one of the long-running features of the Bitcoin space, even as he spent long periods of time under the radar. Nearly half of Bitcoin's entire lifespan included Wright as a character, as he resurfaced from time to time to vigorously defend his “reputation and intellectual property” as the true genius behind Bitcoin. No one can guess how the man would personally accept this new defeat in his mission. Will he retire quietly from the scene? Will he continue to seek other legal battles over this topic in different jurisdictions? Will the British legal system somehow blame him for this behaviour?
It's unclear whether or not we can once and for all close the book on Craig Wright after this defeat. However, it is important to take into account how the whole issue has sparked interest in Bitcoin assets. Bitcoin has grown to an unimaginable degree since Satoshi Nakamoto first disappeared, and the question of his true identity may seem completely marginal next to the billions of inflows into new Bitcoin ETFs or other market factors in 2024. However, it is still early days for Bitcoin. Clearly controlling our community, this experiment has created an opportunity for enthusiasts to sift through and discuss a wealth of new material from Satoshi.
The question then is not “Who is Satoshi Nakamoto” but rather “Where did Bitcoin come from”? Understanding Bitcoin's humble origins is crucial to understanding its bright future, after all. Even if the world of Bitcoin has been irrevocably transformed by new acceptance from the financial institution, there are still basics to remember. Bitcoin will always be decentralized, it will always be a currency. Our goals are not just to make speculative investments and acquire fiat currencies, but to radically disrupt the world of fiat currencies altogether. As long as we can keep our eyes on the ball, there's no telling how far Bitcoin can advance.
