The Horribly Stupid Saga Of Craig Wright, The Fake Satoshi, Should Now Be Over

It’s been a while since we last mentioned Craig Wright here on Techdirt. We’ve been pretty clear all along, like pretty much everyone else, that Wright was so obviously full of shit in claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and then trying to claim patents and copyrights over all kinds of Bitcoin/cryptocurrency related things.

Over the last few years, Wright has been continuing to make a pest of himself with lawsuits. In 2021 he sued a bunch of core Bitcoin developers, claiming that he lost encrypted keys to billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin when he was hacked, and demanding that the Bitcoin developers patch Bitcoin code to give him back the money.

All of this seemed utterly ridiculous for all sorts of reasons, but it was awful for those developers in particular who were just trying to develop Bitcoin. Suddenly, they faced the prospect of a full trial after a judge allowed the case to move forward last year, positioning it for a full trial. With some funding help from Jack Dorsey, the developers were able to fight back somewhat, allowing the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) to go even further in challenging Wright’s claims.

The last few months have not gone well for Wright in court (to put it mildly).

The legal challenge from COPA put Wright in a position of having to prove that he was Satoshi or basically to fuck off. That trial did not go well. In March, the judge declared that Wright clearly was not Satoshi and did not write the original Bitcoin whitepaper. This was hardly a surprise to anyone, but given how the case against the Bitcoin developers had progressed, there was real nervousness about how the court would rule here. But the judge was pretty explicit on this point:

“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 in the period 2008 to 2011. Third, Dr Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin System. And, fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software.”

A month later, in April, Wright just out and out dropped the case against those Bitcoin developers.

Now, a month after that, we have a follow-up judgment in that original case that goes beyond just what Wright is not. Now the judge is calling out Wright for apparently lying and forging documents to make his case. The ruling and its related appendix are brutal. The ruling itself is well over 200 pages of fascinating detail. But the summary and the conclusions are all you really need to know.

From the summary:

Dr Craig Steven Wright (‘Dr Wright’) claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto i.e. he claims to be the person who adopted that pseudonym, who wrote and published the first version of the Bitcoin White Paper on 31 October 2008, who wrote and released the first version of the Bitcoin Source Code and who created the Bitcoin system. Dr Wright also claims to be a person with a unique intellect, with numerous degrees and PhDs in a wide range of subjects, the unique combination of which led him (so it is said) to devise the Bitcoin system.

Thus, Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Many of Dr Wright’s lies contained a grain of truth (which is sometimes said to be the mark of an accomplished liar), but there were many which did not and were outright lies. As soon as one lie was exposed, Dr Wright resorted to further lies and evasions. The final destination frequently turned out to be either Dr Wright blaming some other (often unidentified) person for his predicament or what can only be described as technobabble delivered by him in the witness box. Although as a person with expertise in IT security, Dr Wright must have thought his forgeries would provide convincing evidence to support his claim to be Satoshi or some other point of detail and would go undetected, the evidence shows, as I explain below and in the Appendix, that most of his forgeries turned out to be clumsy. Indeed, certain of Dr Wright’s responses in cross-examination effectively acknowledged that point: from my recollection at least twice he indicated if he had wanted to forge a document, he would have done a much better job.

If Dr Wright’s evidence was true, he would be a uniquely unfortunate individual, the victim of a very large number of unfortunate coincidences, all of which went against him, and/or the victim of a number of conspiracies against him.

The true position is far simpler. It is, however, far from simple because Dr Wright has lied so much over so many years that, on certain points, it can be difficult to pinpoint what actually happened. Those difficulties do not detract from the fact that there is a very considerable body of evidence against Dr Wright being Satoshi. To the extent that it is said there is evidence supporting his claim, it is at best questionable or of very dubious relevance or entirely circumstantial and at worst, it is fabricated and/or based on documents I am satisfied have been forged on a grand scale by Dr Wright. These fabrications and forgeries were exposed in the evidence which I received during the Trial. For that reason, this Judgment contains considerable technical and other detail which is required to expose the true scale of his mendacious campaign to prove he was/is Satoshi Nakamoto. This detail was set out in the extensive Written Closing Submissions prepared by COPA and the Developers and further points drawn out in their oral closing arguments.

And from the conclusion:

Overall, in my judgment, (and whether that distinction is maintained or not), Dr Wright’s attempts to prove he was/is Satoshi Nakamoto represent a most serious abuse of this Court’s process. The same point applies to other jurisdictions as well: Norway in particular. Although whether Dr Wright was Satoshi was not actually in issue in Kleiman, that litigation would not have occurred but for his claim to be Satoshi. In all three jurisdictions, it is clear that Dr Wright engaged in the deliberate production of false documents to support false claims and use the Courts as a vehicle for fraud. Despite acknowledging in this Trial that a few documents were inauthentic (generally blamed on others), he steadfastly refused to acknowledge any of the forged documents. Instead, he lied repeatedly and extensively in his attempts to deflect the allegations of forgery.

Also, there’s this:

I tried to identify whether there was any reliable evidence to support Dr Wright’s claim and concluded there was none. That was why I concluded the evidence was overwhelming

That one had the emphasis in the original.

Wright has already said he’ll appeal, and we’ve seen over the years that this guy thrives off of the media coverage (I’d been debating over the past year whether to cover any part of this case, but finally figured now was the time to highlight just this brutal decision).

No one has seriously believed that Wright had any connection to Satoshi. His years-long campaign of bullying and nonsense should fade into the ugly dustbin of history. It should be seen as an example of brazen mendacity in pursuit of great wealth, without a care in the world for who he would run over and destroy in the process.

I hope we can retire the Craig Wright tag with this story, though I fear he’ll still be causing a nuisance somewhere.