Craig Wright Doubles Down on Satoshi Nakamoto Claim

Craig Wright. His name says it all, and anyone in the crypto community will readily attest that he seems to thrive off the controversy and negative press that he gets. Still, the jabs that he has received have so far failed to dampen his confidence or love for the spotlight. 

The latest in his outrageous case is really a regurgitation of a former one, that of him being Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. However, instead of claiming to be the founder (or founders, as it may very well be) of the premier crypto asset, he is loosening is claim and leaving some room for the prospect of plagiarism. 

“Either I’m Satoshi, or he plagiarized me”

Wright made his statement in a segment of the CC London Investment in Blockchain and AI Conference, which took place between October 14 and 16. There, he claimed that he would be releasing the conclusive proof of his authorship of the original code for Bitcoin. According to him, this proof will be coming out in the form of a thesis he penned down back in 2018, the year when Bitcoin first broke out. 

Wright further claimed that Satoshi copied several sections of his original thesis and used them to form the Bitcoin whitepaper. Asserting his ownership of the Bitcoin code, he authoritatively claimed,

It’s getting tiring

The continuous claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto is the exact reason for Wright’s infamy in the crypto space. He has been linking himself to the Bitcoin creator since 2015, with several profiles on him alluding to the distinct possibility that he could be Nakamoto. 

In December 2015, popular tech news medium Wired aired a story which claimed that Wright “either invented bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did.” The story was based on Emails and documents which were reportedly leaked by “an anonymous source close to Wright” Gwern Branwen, an independent researcher who co-wrote the article.

In like manner, Gizmodo wrote an article that featured documents that were allegedly gotten by a hacker who was able to gain access to Wright’s Email accounts. According to the anonymous hacker, the Satoshi Nakamoto name was, in fact, a pseudonym used by Wright and his late friend and business partner, cybersecurity specialist David Kleiman. 

Enter: the Kleimans 

It is worth noting that Ira Kleiman, brother of the late David, sued Wright for the possession of billions of dollars in Bitcoin, which he claimed Wright stole. At the time, the lawsuit claimed that Wright unlawfully appropriated over 500,000 BTC tokens (worth about $4 billion at press time) that he had mined with David in the early Bitcoin days, as well as a few other intellectual properties. 

In August, Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart of the Southern District of Florida ruled in favor of the Kleiman estate, adding that Wright should immediately provide access to the Tulip Trust, a Bitcoin trust which Wright claimed he and David Kleiman had stored about 1 million BTC while they worked together. 

However, Wright’s attorneys applied for a 30-day extension for all discovery and deadlines on September 17, citing the need to discuss further with the Kleiman estate as part of their “extensive settlement negotiations.”