On July 16, Craig Wright posted a legal disclaimer on his website, stating unequivocally that he is not the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
This announcement follows a recent ruling by the United Kingdom High Court of Justice. The disclaimer also references a summary of the court’s findings provided by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a group dedicated to promoting open-source innovation in the crypto space.
The key points in Wright’s statement include his admission that he did not author the Bitcoin white paper and that he does not hold copyright over the technology described in it.
In 2023, Wright sued several Bitcoin developers, alleging they infringed on his copyrights related to the distributed ledger technology and claimed rights to the Bitcoin database. Since 2016, Wright had been asserting that he was Satoshi Nakamoto. The dispute peaked in 2024 when COPA presented extensive evidence refuting Wright’s claims.
During the trial, COPA enlisted forensic experts and on-chain analysts who demonstrated that Wright had created numerous forgeries and manipulated metadata. Judge James Mellor concluded that the errors in Wright’s documents and metadata were inconsistent with the work of Bitcoin’s true creator, ruling definitively that Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto.
Recently, the UK High Court froze Wright’s assets to enable podcaster Peter McCormack to recover $2 million in legal fees from a defamation lawsuit Wright filed in 2019. Additionally, Judge Mellor has recommended that Wright be investigated for perjury by the Crown Prosecution Service.
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