Craig Wright loses lawsuit against Hodlonaut in Norway due to Satoshi Nakamoto claims

Magnus Granath, who passes by «Hodlonaut” on Twitter, has won a lawsuit in Norway against Craig Wright, court documents revealed Thursday. Wright has long maintained that he is the pseudonym Bitcoin the creator Satoshi Nakamoto– but Hodlonaut and many others have publicly challenged Wright’s claims.

“I won. Welcome to law,” Hodlonaut tweeted in response to the Norwegian judge’s decision – a callback to Wright’s now infamous “welcome to the law” threat that he issued against Hodlonaut and several others in 2019 after filing a series of defamation lawsuits.

Hodlonaut filed the case in Norway in an attempt to prove that the numerous tweets he published about Wright and Wright’s Nakamoto claims were not in fact defamatory – a way to get ahead of a pending defamation case in the UK. The hearings for the Norwegian case started last month on September 12.

“I expected to win, since the truth is so clearly on my side in this case,” Hodlonaut said Decrypt via DM. “I’m very glad the judge saw it the same way.”

According to the Norwegian verdicttranslated by CoinDeskHodlonaut tweeted in 2019 that Wright was a “pathetic con man”, “shrink”, “clearly mentally ill”, and repeatedly called him a “fraud”, and even created a hashtag satirically bashing Wright.

During the trial, Wright called such statements “obviously very defamatory.”

“There is a difference between a debate and strong language and truth,” Wright said.

Hodlonaut seems to have many supporters. A website called Defending BTC links to one donation page indicating that nearly 2,700 individuals donated over 71 Bitcoin and $74,000 to legal defense costs for the bitcoiner.

In 2019, Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao also tweeted in support of Hodlonaut with the message, “Craig Wright is not Satoshi.”

Andrew Rossow, an adjunct professor of law and attorney familiar with Holdonaut’s case, said Decrypt via e-mail as was Thursday’s ruling “To be expected,“ argues that Wright’s claims “was of such a bold, controversial nature that it almost inevitably welcomes backlash and controversy.“

“There is no evidence that we know of right now that would corroborate Wright’s claims, which opens the door to such criticism as we have seen here from Granath,“ Rossow said.

Preston Byrne, legal partner at Brown Rudnick, called Wright’s previous British “victory” in August against podcaster Peter McCormack “pyrrho.” Wright had sought compensation from McCormack, but was only awarded a single British pound, currently worth $1.13 USD, in part because Wright presented “deliberately falseevidence in the case, the court said.