The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) has accused self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor Craig Wright of forging documents. On Monday, the nonprofit said in court that Craig Wright repeatedly used fake documents to support his claim that he authored the Bitcoin whitepaper.
In his twentieth witness statement, COPA’s lawyer, Philip Nathan Sherrell, said that Wright’s assertion of his authorship of the Bitcoin 2008 whitepaper was ‘a brazen lie.’ COPA’s case against the Australian computer scientist commenced trial in the UK yesterday.
Craig Wright Built Bitcoin Defense on Lies
According to Sherrell, Wright submitted provably false documents on at least three occasions. Wright always submitted these documents after failing to produce them on time for his trial.
According to Sherrel, an independent auditor and an expert appointed by Wright, Dr. Placks, agreed on the inauthenticity of the first set of forged documents. Similarly, Sherrell asserts that another of Wright’s experts, Dr. Lynch, corroborated findings that Wright forged a second set of documents he found on a “new drive.”
The third set, written with a software package called LaTeX, was proved false by the first independent auditor and Lynch. Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder, Satoshi Nakamoto, used OpenOffice, not LaTeX, to create the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Wright now wants to submit a fourth set of late documents, the “Application documents,” which Sherrell argues will be as inauthentic as the previous submissions. COPA asserts that the court should not admit these documents.
Jonathan Hough, KC, a senior COPA legal team member, told the court that Wright’s claim to the title of the Bitcoin inventor was founded completely on forgeries. In a written submission to the court, he wrote,
“Dr Wright has consistently failed to supply genuine proof of his claim to be Satoshi: instead, he has repeatedly proffered documents which bear clear signs of having been doctored.”
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Wright’s lawyers say COPA has failed to disprove that their client is not Nakamoto. The second day of the trial will take place today.
Wright’s Battle to be Called the Bitcoin Inventor
COPA sued Craig Wright in April 2021 for claiming he wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper. In their original court filing, COPA asked the courts to restrain Wright from claiming he authored the document. The nonprofit rejected a settlement from Wright in January.
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The claimed Bitcoin inventor has fought several lawsuits, including a defamation case against podcaster Peter McCormack. A UK judge awarded him one British pound sterling in damages. He also lost a case in Norway against Hodlonaut, a pseudonymous individual who alleged that Wright was not Nakamoto.
In addition to claiming authorship of the whitepaper, Wright created a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV), which he claims is based on Satoshi’s true vision of a decentralized currency. The Bitcoin SV price is up 0.7% in the past 24 hours.
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