That Guy Claiming to Be Satoshi Nakamoto Just Got Beat Down by a Judge

"He is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is."

Please Stand Up

Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who has long claimed to be Bitcoin's mysterious creator Satoshi Nakamoto, has been declared a fraud.

As Wired reports, a judge in the United Kingdom has ruled that Wright perpetrated a long-running scheme, including extensive document forgery, in service of the lie that he was Nakamoto.

In his scathing rebuke, High Court Justice James Mellon eviscerated the Aussie prevaricator, saying that although "many of Dr. Wright’s lies contained a grain of truth," he's told too many over the years to keep them straight.

For the better part of the last decade, the Aussie fraudster has claimed to anyone who will listen that he was the original author of the 2008 white paper that led to Bitcoin's invention. When asked to prove it, Wright has provided various excuses, including that he "stomped on the hard drive" that contained the smoking gun — but a lack of hard evidence hasn't stopped him from testifying in multiple countries that he's the real Nakamoto.

Overwhelming Evidence

Beyond that outlandish insistence, the Aussie programmer also founded his own cryptocurrency, called Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, and sued people who challenged his claim to fame. With this latest judgement, which was brought after a group of crypto firms called Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) sued to set the record straight, continuing his shenanigans will be difficult.

"It is clear that Dr. Wright engaged in the deliberate production of false documents to support false claims and use the Courts as a vehicle for fraud," Mellor wrote in his ruling. "I am entirely satisfied that Dr. Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto."

In mid-March, the same British judge ruled in a rare snap decision in the COPA suit that evidence of Wright not being Nakamoto "is overwhelming," and this final judgment seems to be the nail in the coffin of the Aussie fabulist's "reign of terror," as one user on X-formerly-Twitter called it.

"Dr. Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person," Mellor wrote in the more recent ruling. "However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is."

Wright, to his end, announced on X that he plans to appeal the ruling, but with the evidence stacked so thoroughly against him, it seems that his house of cards may finally have tumbled for good.

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