Craig Wright’s case referred for potential perjury and forgery prosecution after losing legal battle with crypto firms

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.

  • NazEnglish
    3·
    5 months ago

    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.