An Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the creator of bitcoin has been given a one-year suspended prison sentence after the high court in London ruled he was in contempt because he would not stop suing people.
Mr Justice Mellor had already found that Craig Wright, 54, repeatedly lied about his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the person or people who launched bitcoin – the cryptocurrency that was first mined in 2009 and recently soared in value to £79,000.
Wright had claimed intellectual property rights associated with bitcoin, but that was demolished when the high court found he lied about his role, deploying often clumsy forgeries “on a grand scale” and “technobabble”. The real Nakamoto is likely to be a billionaire because they are thought to own 1 million bitcoins.
Wright was then ordered to stop taking legal actions against bitcoin developers, but defied that court order in October when he brought suits against cryptocurrency developers amounting to more than £900bn in respect of his claimed intellectual property rights related to bitcoin.
In a high court judgment handed down in May, Mellor said that Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person, “however, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is”. He said he was an “extremely slippery witness”.
Sick burn from the judge
