Craig Wright’s case against Bitcoin SV developers reopened • The Register
A company owned by the man who claims to have invented Bitcoin is suing the developers of a fork of Bitcoin. Although the case was already dropped once, it is being reopened and a UK court will hear the Seychelles company’s version of events next month.
The Court of Appeal in England and Wales has decided that the case of Tulip Trading against the developers of Bitcoin SV will be reopened. Tulip is suing 15 people and a Swiss non-profit organization, the Bitcoin Association, the developers behind Bitcoin SV, part of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
Tulip Trading, a British company, is one of several cryptocurrency vehicles owned by Australian Doctor of Theology Craig Wright (it is not related to another legal entity with a similar name, defunct Dutch supplier Tulip Computers).
Bitcoin SV, short for “Bitcoin Satoshi Vision,” was forged from Bitcoin Cash in November 2018. Bitcoin Cash, in turn, was forged from Bitcoin in 2017. As long ago as 2015, we reported that Wright owned an Australian company called Tulip Trading.
As the Court of Appeal puts it:
The developers deny that they owe administrators or other duties to Tulip. They claim that they have “nothing like the power or control that Tulip claims, and that duties of the kind that Tulip contends for would be highly onerous and unenforceable.”
The judges said they would allow the appeal, but warned that “the conclusion is not that there is a fiduciary duty in law in the circumstances alleged by Tulip, only that the case presented raises a serious question to be tried.”
Back in 2016, Wright claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous programmer who invented Bitcoin. This claim is controversial, and Wright has previously sued people who have thrown it out, though he lost that case in 2020. Litigation over Wright’s claim to be Satoshi was still ongoing as of January of last year.
In 2019, Wright was ordered by a Florida court to hand over Bitcoin then worth approximately $5 billion. As we reported in January 2022, Wright said he was hacked and lost access to two wallets containing the money, and sued the developers of Bitcoin SV to change the code to give him access to two wallets: one with 449 coins and one second with 155.
We note that Bitcoin SV is currently valued at around $40. Thus, the BSV604 can be sold for as much as approx. USD 25,500. Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto really is, they mined about 5 percent of all Bitcoin, and have somewhere between 750,000 and 1.1 million BTC. Although the value of Bitcoin has fallen sharply for a few years, this stock is currently valued at $17 billion to $24 billion. ®
