Australian Craig Wright Sentenced to One Year in Prison for Impersonating Bitcoin Inventor "Satoshi Nakamoto"

The Australian Craig Wright is not the Bitcoin inventor "Satoshi Nakamoto". This was established by an English court in March.

Australian Craig Wright, who claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto," has been sentenced to one year in prison by an English court for filing further lawsuits despite being prohibited from doing so.

The sentence was handed down on Thursday and is suspended for two years. However, Wright must pay 145,000 pounds in legal costs within two weeks.

The court had previously established that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim that was central to four of the five lawsuits he filed.

In a fourth lawsuit, the industry association COPA sued Wright, seeking a declaration that he is not Sakomoto (case no. IL-2021-000019). This was to ensure that Wright stopped harassing people from the Bitcoin orbit.

In a fifth action (Ref. BL-2021-000313), brought on behalf of Wright's company Tulip Trading Limiteds, Wright sought to require Bitcoin programmers to manipulate the blockchain to recover 111,000 Bitcoin that had been lost. Mr. Sakamoto's identity played no role in these proceedings. An appeals court found last year that the blockchain manipulation claim was not hopeless, but Wright has since dropped the lawsuit.

Despite being prohibited from filing further lawsuits, Wright continued to do so, prompting COPA to apply for a conviction for contempt of court, which was ultimately granted.

In his new lawsuit, Wright is again asserting intellectual property claims, this time to the value of 911 billion pounds (a good 1.1 trillion euros).

The court found that Wright's new lawsuit is indirectly claiming that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, as only Nakamoto could, if at all, claim the allegedly infringed rights.

Additionally, the court's previous order prohibits Wright from asserting a list of intellectual property claims relating to Bitcoin at all, regardless of whether he is directly claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Thus, Wright was convicted of contempt of court for filing the new lawsuit despite being prohibited from doing so.

Throughout the proceedings, Wright has not made any friends in court with his fisticuffs. Not only does he repeatedly put forward legally untenable arguments, he also violates the procedural rules.

For example, he has lodged an appeal directly with the Court of Appeal, although it should be lodged with the court of first instance. He has also served documents on defendants abroad without the required authorization.

In addition, Wright has repeatedly accused the judge of bias. The central element of this allegation is apparently a typo in a tweet by a third party. According to this, the judge is said to have attended a COPA event, i.e. one of the plaintiff's events – not in itself a reason for bias. However, he was actually referring to CIPA, an organization of British patent attorneys. The judge noted that he had never been to a COPA event and rejected the claim of bias.

The current judgment of the England and Wales High Court can be cited as [2024] EWHC 3315 (Ch), the case number is IL-2021-000019. The court documents are subject to the Open Government Licence 3.0.

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This article was originally published in German. It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.