It’s all over bar the shouting! After three days of closing arguments and rebuttals in the U.K. High Court case between the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) and Craig S Wright, Justice James Mellor shared his early findings before retiring to prepare a “lengthy written judgement”.
As to when that judgment might be ready, Mellor would only say that, “it will be ready when it's ready and not before”. However, the judge’s early findings already contained some pretty unequivocal statements.
After thanking the parties for their closing arguments, Mellor stated that he had found the evidence in the case to be overwhelming, and so, for reasons to be explained in the final written judgement, wished to “make certain declarations which I am satisfied are useful and are necessary to do justice between the parties.”
“First, that Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin White Paper.
Second, Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym "Satoshi Nakamoto" in the period 2008 to 2011.
Third, Dr. Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin System.
And, fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software.”
Well, that all seems fairly conclusive then. While it is possible that Wright could pursue an appeal against the eventual ruling, the fact that the judge deemed fit to make such a statement in his early findings seems fairly damning against its chances of success.
So is this the last we will hear of Craig Wright claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto? Just before Justice Mellor’s statement, Wright’s legal team opposed a COPA request for an injunction enforcing just that, claiming it might be an infringement of the defendant’s freedom of expression and that he should be able to say that he is Satoshi within his community.
We will have to wait to discover the eventual outcome of that.
As we observed earlier in the week when the legal teams began their closing arguments, the implications of this judgement reach far further than the outcome of this particular case. Not only does Wright’s loss affect a number of other pending cases (which all depend on him actually having invented Bitcoin), he could also face perjury charges for his actions in court.
So Bitcoin’s biggest lie is over, although one has to wonder what Wright’s intended endgame ever was, if indeed he had one. Did he really expect the community just to accept his claim and let it lie? And lie he did, repeatedly and with ever more serious consequences. Can he ever have imagined that it would snowball to this?
Fortunately, this does leave us with a vacant position for the creator of Bitcoin, and ensures that the granddaddy of all cryptocurrency’s biggest mystery remains intact. Will the real Satoshi Nakamoto ever reveal themself? We continue to observe.