Australian who falsely claimed to have invented bitcoin is found in contempt of UK court

LONDON — An Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the founder of the bitcoin cryptocurrency was found Thursday to be in contempt of an order of London’s High Court.

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In a judgment on Thursday, Justice James Mellor said Craig Wright had committed “a clear breach” of the order in March that barred him from launching or threatening further legal action related to bitcoin, which has seen a meteoric rise in value since its launch around the time of the global financial crisis in 2008.

Lawyers for the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, or Copa, a group of technology and cryptocurrency firms, told the court on Wednesday that Wright had issued a claim worth more than 900 billion pounds ($1.1 trillion) related to intellectual property rights connected to bitcoin in October. They argued that constituted contempt of court and that he should be jailed.

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Mellor said it was “beyond any reasonable doubt” that Wright had indeed been in contempt of the court order. The judge was expected to sentence Wright later Thursday.

Wright, who according to court documents is in either Indonesia or Singapore, attended Thursday’s hearing by video link. He did not attend the previous day’s session when Copa made its case.

He said he planned to appeal the contempt finding.

In March, the judge ruled that Wright was not, as he claimed, the mysterious creator of bitcoin, nor the author of the initial versions of the bitcoin software.

For eight years, Wright had claimed that he was the man behind “Satoshi Nakamoto,” the pseudonym that masked the identity of the creator of bitcoin.

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The murky origins of bitcoin date to the height of the financial crisis in 2008. A paper authored by a person or group using the Nakamoto pen name explained how digital currency could be sent around the world anonymously, without banks or national currencies. Nakamoto seemed to vanish three years later and their identity was never established.

In basic terms, cryptocurrency is digital money designed to work through an online network without a central authority — meaning it’s typically not backed by any government or banking institution — and transactions get recorded with technology called a blockchain.

Bitcoin is the largest and oldest cryptocurrency, although other assets like ethereum, XRP, tether and dogecoin have also gained popularity over the years. Some investors see cryptocurrency as a “digital alternative” to traditional money, but most daily financial transactions are still conducted using currencies such as the dollar.

Wright, who first claimed he was Nakamoto in 2016, has been accused of seeking to profit from bitcoin’s huge spike in value. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, for example, bitcoin stood at just over $5,000. Earlier this month in the wake of the U.S. election victory of Donald Trump, who is a big supporter of cryptocurrencies, it breached the $100,000 level for the first time.

The currency remains hugely volatile. On Thursday, it was trading at around $80,000, down nearly a fifth in just a couple of weeks.