Craig Wright, the Australian businessman who claims to be the pseudoymous Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, recently lost a long-running legal battle in the UK to be recognized as author of the original paper describing it. And now a judge there has issued a report on the matter and on the man, who is described therein as a liar and forger on a "grand scale." Wright, says Judge James Mellor, is not Satoshi Nakamoto. Nor is he even particularly clever.
"All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto."
Mellor also said that Wright's actions in suing developers and his expressed views about bitcoin also pointed against him being Satoshi.
Wright, who denied forging documents when he gave evidence in February, said in a post on X: "I fully intend to appeal the decision of the court on the matter of the identity issue."
No punches pulled whatsoever.
Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. … 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.
Obviously Wright had it coming, but it's a bit unnerving that judges are allowed to just murder people like this.
This gave me a sensible chuckle:
I recognise that Dr Wright will… true to the form he displayed on numerous occasions during his oral evidence .. allege that I didn't understand his technical explanations or the technology … (but) the technology involved in his case is not particularly complex or difficult to understand … the more complex areas of technology in this case did not concern Bitcoin or cryptography but the evidence which exposed his forgeries.
There's like 250 pages of this still to read, all this is from the first four. I figure it's all good because when I looked very briefly for that appendix the first sentence I landed on was "I have reflected on the classes into which these documents fall – 'forged' and 'inauthentic'"
Previously: Craig Wright backs off Satoshi proof offer, wipes blog
