Bitcoin
An Australian computer scientist who claimed to have invented bitcoin has been referred to prosecutors for perjury
LONDON (AP) — An Australian computer scientist has been found to have falsely claimed to be the mysterious creator of the bitcoin cryptocurrency will be referred to British prosecutors for “perjury on a massive scale and forgery of documents,” a London judge said on Tuesday.
Judge James Mellor, who ruled after a civil trial in March that Craig Wright was not the man behind “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the pseudonym that masked the identity of the bitcoin creator, said he would refer evidence in the case to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider whether to lay charges.
“By promoting his false claim to be Satoshi through multiple legal actions, Dr Wright has committed ‘a very serious abuse’ of the process of the UK, Norwegian and US courts,” Mellor said. “If what happened in this case does not justify referral to the CPS, it is difficult to imagine a case that does.”
Mellor ruled at trial that Wright did not invent bitcoin, was not the man behind Nakamoto or the creator of the bitcoin software.
Bitcoin’s murky origins date back to the height of the financial crisis in 2008, when a person or group using the pseudonym Nakamoto published a paper explaining how the digital currency could be sent around the world anonymously, without banks or national currencies.
Speculation about Nakamoto’s identity had swirled for years, and several candidates emerged when Wright emerged to claim the identity in 2016. only to quickly return to the shadowssaying he “didn’t have the courage” to provide more evidence.
In what has been hailed as a major victory for open-source developers, a non-profit group of technology and cryptocurrency companies has successfully sued in the High Court to prove that Wright is not Nakamoto.
The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) argued that Wright committed “industrial-scale forgery” to support a “blatant lie” that he was Nakamoto. The alliance said he used his claim as the inventor of bitcoin to “terrorize” developers into filing litigation to prevent them from further developing the open-source technology.
Wright, who testified during several days of the five-week trialhas denied the allegations. In May, he said on social media platform X that he plans to appeal the ruling “on the issue of identity.”
The ruling had implications for the control of intellectual property rights to the world’s most popular virtual currency. The decision affected three pending lawsuits Wright filed based on his claim to have intellectual property rights to bitcoin.
Mellor granted two injunctions on Tuesday preventing Wright from threatening to sue or taking legal action against developers.
He also ordered Wright to publish details of the ruling against him to “dispel residual uncertainty” that he is not Nakamoto, and to post notices to that effect on his website and on his profile on X, the social media platform, and in his Slack channels.
Messages seeking comment from Wright’s attorneys were not immediately returned.
Bitcoin is the world’s most prominent digital currency and, like others, is not tied to any bank or government. Like cash, it allows users to spend and receive money anonymously, or nearly so. It can be converted to cash when deposited into accounts at prices set by online exchanges.