ALBAWABA – A court in London has opened its doors for a case brought upon by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a non-profit organization founded by Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder, and several key figures in the Crypto industry like Coinbase and Microstrategy, against an Australian computer scientist named Craig Wright, who alleges to be the highly debated Bitcoin Inventor, dubbed “Satoshi Nakamoto” in the Bitcoin Whitepaper manifesto released with the currency in 2008, in hopes to confirm or deny these claims.
The UK High Court received this case from COPA in response to several suits filed by Craig Wright against multiple Bitcoin developers regarding intellectual property over the Crypto coin claiming to be the inventor behind it, which COPA described as hindering the progress of Bitcoin development by pushing developers away, adding in their claim that Wright does not have copyrights over neither the original Bitcoin Whitepaper nor the original code for the currency, thus hoping the court would prove Wright is not Nakamoto.
Earlier in January, Wright had reached out to COPA with a settlement offer, which COPA refused, commenting on X that the offer had loopholes which would allow Wright to still cause a legal battle in the industry, claiming that documents provided by the programmer are forged and accepting such offer would force them to admit he is Nakamoto, with commenters naming him “Faketoshi” in response to his claims.
In Dec. 2015, Wright was listed as the potential Bitcoin inventor by both Wired and Gizmodo, basing their nomination on a trail of leaked documents, suggesting that the computer scientist is either the actual creator of Bitcoin or an intelligent fraud, later on, Wired published an updated story denying he is the mastermind behind the new monetary system, saying that the documents had inconsistencies in them.
Australian computer scientist Craig Wright arrives at the High Court in London on February 5, 2024 (AFP)
The case started with both COPA’s and Wright’s legal teams’ opening statement, Jonathan Hough KC representing COPA said in his statement that Wright’s actions were “deadly serious” asking the court to stop him, calling the case an “elaborate narrative supported by forgery on an industrial scale.”
Defending Wright, Lord Grabiner KC stood over the court to question that if these claims against Wright are true, why did the real Satoshi Nakamoto speak out against Wright’s claims, explaining that he could easily do that in a confidential manner, given the potential harm these developments can cause to a variety of people and the enormous amount of money at stake.
The court’s session ended on a positive note for Wright and his team after the judge accepted the admittance of new evidence by Wright’s team, who claimed they had an early draft of the Bitcoin Whitepaper that had not been revealed before, against the well of multiple protestors from COPA and Bitcoin developers, the court will go back in session later today.
