Australian 'bitcoin inventor' a liar, Jack Dorsey-backed group tells UK court

As a legal battle for ownership of the cryptocurrency gets underway, lawyers representing a group backed by Jack Dorsey called the claim made by an Australian computer scientist to be the creator of bitcoin “a brazen lie.”

Craig Wright claims to be the author of the 2008 white paper that was published under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto” and serves as the basis for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

He contends that this indicates he is the owner of the white paper’s copyright and the bitcoin blockchain’s intellectual property.

However, the London High Court is being asked by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), whose members include Dorsey’s payments company, Block, and Twitter, to declare that Wright is not Satoshi.

The climax of years of conjecture regarding Satoshi’s true identity is the five-week hearing, during which Wright is scheduled to testify starting on Tuesday.

After claiming to be Satoshi for the first time in public in 2016, Wright has sued cryptocurrency exchanges and developers.

However, COPA claims that Wright has never offered any credible evidence and charges him with routinely fabricating documents to back up his claims—a charge that Wright refutes.

According to COPA’s attorney Jonathan Hough, Wright’s assertion was “a brazen lie, an elaborate false narrative supported by forgery on an industrial scale” as Wright sat through the trial.

Hough referred to Wright’s purported use of ChatGPT to create forgeries when stating that “there are elements of Dr. Wright’s conduct that stray into farce.”

But according to court documents, Anthony Grabiner, Wright’s attorney, has provided “clear evidence demonstrating his authorship of the white paper and creation of bitcoin.”

Grabiner continued, calling it “striking” because no one else had made a formal claim to be Satoshi.

(With agency inputs)