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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Case, and that "the Copyright Office does not investigate whether there is a provable connection between the claimant and the pseudonymous author."[49]In order to resolve Wright's claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) sued Wright in the High Court in London, and hearings were heard in February and March of 2024.[50] On 14 March, after a five-week trial Mr Justice Mellor ruled that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.[51] The written judgment released on 20 May stated that documents submitted as evidence to substantiate Wright's claim to be Satoshi were forgeries, and Dr Wright had "lied to the court extensively and repeatedly".[52]Legal issuesDave Kleiman estateIn February 2018, the estate of Dave Kleiman initiated a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida against Wright over the rights to US$5 billion of bitcoin, claiming that Wright defrauded Kleiman of Bitcoins and intellectual property rights.[53][54][55]In August 2019, Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart, ruling on a motion to force Wright to list his early bitcoin holdings, ordered that, for the purposes of this case, the Kleiman estate owned half the bitcoin holdings that Wright mined in partnership with Kleiman from 2009 to 2013, as Wright's "non-compliance with the court's orders is willful and in bad faith." Wright was also ordered to transfer half of the partnership's intellectual property as well as pay Kleiman's reasonable attorney fees in bringing the motion. Reinhart said that the court was not required to decide, and would not decide, whether Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto, and was not required to decide and did not decide how much bitcoin Wright controlled.[56]Reinhart said that "Dr. Wright's demeanor did not impress me as someone who was telling the truth" and that he rejected Wright's testimony in the motion: "Dr. Wright’s story not only was not supported by other evidence in the record, it defies common sense and real-life experience."[57]Following a three-week trial in late 2021, a jury found Wright liable for conversion but awarded Kleiman's estate US$100 million in damages while Kleiman's estate had sought upwards of US$25 billion at trial. Wright took the position that verdict served as a vindication of his role in inventing bitcoin and stated that he would not appeal the jury's findings.[58][59]Defamation casesIn May 2019, Wright started using English libel law to sue people who accused him of lying about being the inventor of bitcoin, and who called him a fraud.[9] Wright also served legal notices to Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the cryptocurrency Ethereum, who called Wright a fraud; Roger Ver, an early bitcoin entrepreneur and advocate; and Peter McCormack, a podcaster.[60] Wright ended up dropping his lawsuit against Buterin by letting it expire.[citation needed]In the case against McCormack, the
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