Craig Wright Lied About Creating Bitcoin and Faked Evidence, Judge Rules
wired.com
wired.com
The judgement is very clearly written and keeps legalese to a minimum. Anyone could read this and understand the case perfectly well. The simplicity of the final judgement helps (Wright is a pathological liar), but still, it's well written and has some amusing sections.
The British IP courts clearly have access to some very technical judges. Mellor says he was docketed this case due to concern it'd have a lot of technical claims due to being about Bitcoin, but in the end all the technical knowledge required was about Wright's forgeries. Having read parts of the judgement, it's clear that Mellor is fluent in all the knowledge required and wasn't fooled for an instant, even though Wright was constantly babbling about symlinks, Citrix, XCOPY and many other obscure technical topics. Mellor also included a (largely superfluous in the end) explanation of how Bitcoin works that's accurate and clear. My confidence in the abilities of the courts to try such cases has definitely improving having seen this one, though how well this expertise is replicated in criminal cases is unclear.
The skill of the COPA lawyers and with Patrick Madden's ability to detect forgeries was also outstanding. Some of it was very Sherlock Holmes. At one point Wright presented hand-written notes he claimed were from the design phase of Bitcoin (i.e. pre-2009). Madden wrote to the company that manufactured the notepad and learned that specific type of pad post-dated Bitcoin's launch, thus proving the notes were a forgery. In other cases he wrote to the designers of fonts that Wright had used to prove documents had been backdated. There were hundreds of documents with problems like this and Madden/COPA managed to plough through them all.
Wright's side were very well funded. He hired top class lawyers, and even a former judge and a professional prosecutor to run a mock trial for him before the real one. He lost his own mock trial, with the pseudo-judge convinced he wasn't Satoshi, but this somehow didn't stop them proceeding. It's a good reminder that despite the common stereotype, the best funded side doesn't automatically win in legal proceedings.
Is there any possibility for counter-action against Wright? He should be forced to pay every penny of his victims' court costs, at the very least. And shouldn't he be tried for perjury after such a scathing loss?
As for perjury, I asked around and nobody seemed to know if that would happen. How CPS allocates its resources is something of a black box. At least, it's not automatic, although theoretically there's the possibility in the UK of a privately mounted criminal prosecution (it's not only the government that can initiate criminal cases).
Holy shit, he actually named a crypto company after tulips? Isn't that a little bit on-the-nose?
Edit: Though now that I say this, considering the extent of Wrights fraud, lies and likely debts to get this far there is a very high likelihood of suicide.
>Craig Wright Vows to Appeal Damning “Not Satoshi” Verdict. Undeterred by a written verdict exposing his forged evidence, Craig Wright doubles down on debunked Satoshi claims, vows to appeal.
https://dailycoin.com/craig-wright-vows-to-appeal-damning-no...
It didn’t occur to him that he could prove he is Satoshi in other ways?
Is this one of those throw mud (lawsuits) at a wall and see what sticks type of guys?
Theres some other lawsuits surrounding him that are fascinating: people trying to seize some Bitcoin via injecting rules into the codebase, equity owed from early mining, etc. Start at the wikipedia page!
I guess after having spent so much money he's so deep in his lies that his only way was to keep going even as the lies started falling apart (his latest round of fabricated evidence was very sloppy, so I assume he couldn't do a better job because he was running out of time/money).
Of course in reality it would just lead to a hard fork and sow mayhem in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Sure it does, the billionaire's money spends just as well regardless of the ultimate outcome. In fact, in a sense its better for Wright to lose: "Well shucks if it weren't for that pesky court I totally would have reimbursed the funds you advanced me!"
To be fair, he's limited by not actually being Satoshi.