Britain’s Supreme Court has ruled that Dr. Craig Wright, the man who claims to have invented Bitcoin, presented false evidence as part of his latest defamation court battle, awarding him just £1 ($1.23) in damages as a result.
Judge Martin Chamberlain wrote that his judgment that Wright’s original case, v podcaster Peter McCormackhad been “deliberately false”.
Before the trial, Wright claimed he had been disinvited from various academic conferences and events after McCormack sent several tweets claiming Wright was not the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakomoto, but a “fraud”.
McCormack subsequently submitted evidence from the organizers of some of the events concerned, contesting Wright’s claims.
Wright then amended his case and retracted significant amounts of the evidence he had previously submitted, claiming the errors were inadvertent. Judge Chamberlain rejected this explanation as untrue.
Although the judge also found that McCormack’s tweets had caused serious harm, even without evidence of withdrawn invitations from academic conferences, he took the false case into account when handing down his sentence and awarded Wright just £1 damages.
The judge added that the bogus case warranted “more than a mere reduction” in damages, and concluded that it was “unconscionable” for Wright to receive anything more than a nominal amount.
McCormack, Wright celebrate winning case
Responding to the verdict on Twitter, McCormack said he and his legal team were “very pleased” with the judge’s findings.
Wright’s lawyers at Ontier LLP also welcomed the ruling, to the extent that it found McCormack’s statements had caused Wright’s reputational damage.
Wright himself said in the same press release that he planned to appeal the ruling on the basis that his Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism, had not been taken into account.
“As expected, the independent courts across different jurisdictions, including those with juries benefiting from an examination of all the evidence, conclude that I am the one I have admitted that I am since I was named as Satoshi by the media in 2015,” he said. “However, too little consideration is given to the impact my Asperger’s has on my communication. I intend to appeal the negative findings in the judgment where my evidence was clearly misunderstood.”
Wright added that he would continue his legal fight to the “harmful attacks designed to trivialize [his] reputation stop.”
He also said in the trial that his autism made it difficult for him to lie and that it meant that he was unable to fully explain the matter.
But Chamberlain said in his judgment that even if he had this in mind, evidence in Wright’s initial testimony was “not only insufficiently or incorrectly explained” but false.
Unpacking Wright’s claim to fame
Despite the circulation of a number of theories about Satoshi Nakamoto’s identityno one has ever been confirmed as the creator of Bitcoin.
Wright was singled out as the person most likely to be Satoshi in one The cable article from 2015but the publication wrote later that it was possible he falsified the clues implicating him.
He has nevertheless continued to claim that he is the inventor of Bitcoin, and has used English libel law to take people who dispute this to court. The case against McCormack is one in five lawsuits launched by Wright in 2019 against leading crypto figures who had called him a fraud. One was abandoned, one dropped and one dismissed.
The case against the pseudonymous Twitter personality Hodlonaut is still ongoing after the Supreme Court rejected an attempt of Hodlonaut – real name Magnus Granath – to have the case dismissed in May this year.
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