The case of Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the creator of bitcoin, has been referred to the Crown Prosecution Service over a potential prosecution for perjury and forgery.
“The evidence is overwhelming,” Mellor said at the time, “that Dr Wright is not the author of the bitcoin white paper.” In the written judgment that followed, Mellor said that Wright lied “extensively and repeatedly” in written and oral evidence. “Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim … Dr Wright’s attempts to prove he was/is Satoshi Nakamoto represent a most serious abuse of this court’s process.”
Wright’s written evidence was called out as a potential forgery before the trial even opened, and his own expert witnesses appeared to concur. In cross-examination, Wright dismissed the allegations, and claimed his expert witness was not suitably qualified. “If I had forged that document then it would be perfect,” he said at one point.
In a ruling on Tuesday, Mellor said he will refer “relevant” papers in the legal action to the CPS to consider whether criminal charges should be brought against Wright.
Crown Prosecution Service NOT Child Protective Services
As an American that confusion is the entire reason I opened the article. Then I saw “Australia” and “Crown Prosecution Service” and stopped being confused.
Honestly, he should be referred to both. For someone to pursue a lie this long, with basically no one else believing him, takes a special kind of immaturity and stubbornness we normally reserve for politicians.
Wright’s written evidence was called out as a potential forgery before the trial even opened, and his own expert witnesses appeared to concur. In cross-examination, Wright dismissed the allegations, and claimed his expert witness was not suitably qualified. “If I had forged that document then it would be perfect,” he said at one point.
Hahahaha
I’m not sure which is funnier, that he is disparaging his own expert witness or that he admits to have excellent forgery skills.
LMFAO
I distinctly remember the first few members of the page where Satoshi posted his whitepaper, the original .PDF outlining Bitcoin in the famous September 2008 thread on SA (SomethingAwful).
Craig or Christopher Wright was one of the usernames, and he claimed to be an Australian Investment Banker.
He and Satoshi used different usernames, and went offline at different intervals. That doesn’t mean much but we began to speculate that Wright was Satoshi, just swapping over accounts, because we were all teenagers and speculation was fun (like trying to ascertain the identity of Moot on 4chan).
Obviously none of that ended up being true because Satoshi completely fucked off the Internet in ~2012.
From what I’ve heard on the grapevine, he’s living out on a farm in Oregon with his autistic sister and has completely turned his back on the Internet and financial markets/industrial society as a whole, given what they did to his starry-eyed ideological digital based currency, turning it into yet another instrument of slavery rather than a means to liberation.
But we’ll never know.
None of this had to happen. The legal system could have just said, okay, if you are Satoshi, sign a message with the key used by Satoshi. And if he was able to do so, he would have guaranteed to be Satoshi, or at least hacked Satoshi.
A part of me wishes Nick Szabo would just admit to it already (point blank, not accidentally do so then try and backtrack).
