Technically true, but he's looking for $4 b-b-billion.
Some thoughts about this that interest me:
- Things like the Bitcoin Cash fork & DAO fork arguably set the precedent that the developers control the funds. They never should have done that because now anybody can argue "you did it for them, why not me?" And this time it's being argued in the legal domain instead of just on heated GitHub comments. Judges aren't known for understanding the details of blockchains and can probably swing either way on this, especially if you jurisdiction shop.
- The "assets you don't own" part. He can't prove he had the keys, or lost the keys. But he just needs to present a compelling argument, not have an argument beyond a shadow of a doubt. The fact that the real Satoshi is unlikely to appear to defend themself makes it easier for Wright to argue Wright had the keys at some point, even if he wasn't the first or last owner.
- Combining these points: If you have established you will change the blockchain through a compelling argument; and if _nobody_ presents the keys; but if you have the best compelling argument _without_ the keys, then the coins probably belong to you.
- The big problems that lead to this situation were opening the Pandora's box of blockchain forks; & the tying of physical identities to wallets through KYC (which was the death of BTC.)
Anyone can file a lawsuit if they pay the filing fees.
If they hire a lawyer, the lawyer must uphold the ethical standards of the bar, which carry suspension/disbarment penalties. Those standards generally include a good-faith belief in the legal merits of your client's case, adherence to all laws and court procedures, speaking up when you believe a law is about to be broken, etc.
The client (you) will eventually be called as a witness, and you can go to jail if you lie on the stand or otherwise present false evidence. Unfortunately, the penalties seem to happen a lot less often than the perjury. That's partly because perjury is a criminal offense, carrying a higher burden of proof than a civil claim.
The main consequence of perjury in civil court is that it tends to cause you to lose. But when you're bringing cases with no serious prospect of success for collateral purposes... it doesn't really matter if you lose, and if lying is the only way you might win... The other consequences seem calibrated for otherwise upstanding people that actually care about the consequences of their actions, not for grifters using the courts as a weapon.
He lost a high profile case last year against a podcaster who called him a fraud. The judge ruled against Wright and found that he had "advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial".
Sadly this is not true. Wright was ruled to have won the case but had the damage award reduced to only 1 pound.[1] (Wright is being bankrolled by billionaire Calvin Ayre. They are not worried about the money here.)
How someone can win a case while found to have "advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial" just goes to show how utterly deranged the British legal system is. As long as it is such, scammers like Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre will continue to torment innocent people.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/01/craig-wri...
> looking at the “big picture”, Dr Wright was awarded only nominal damages, so Mr McCormack is the successful party, as were the defendants in Joseph v Spiller and FlyMeNow,
...and the court awarded McCormack his costs for the trial on an indemnity basis-- which still doesn't cover his time lost and stress due to this, but it's about as good as you can get as a defendant. EXCEPT, in the interest in finality the court declined to reverse a ruling from an earlier stage of the trial that awarded Wright his costs, and Wright has now delivered his bill of £3.379m, still attempting to deliver on his public promise[*] of ruining McCormack.
So the fact that Wright "won" £1 isn't preventing a somewhat just outcome this case... because the court still rightfully regarded that as a loss for the purpose of awarding costs. The bigger issue is that the UK awards costs incrementally and so has left McCormack potentially paying Wright's inflated costs for his earlier efforts to get the deliberately false case discharged. And, of course, Wright is appealing is his "win" too.
Since Wright himself isn't funding his litigation, this suit was well worth his time in chilling his critics. And it has worked too: it's been difficult to get outlets cover what he's doing, except in the form of repeating both-sideism rendition's of Wright's press releases. I had previously been told outright by a least one journalist at a big publication that they didn't want to print on his claims being falsified because they didn't want to get mired in litigation.
[*] The most recent of which was also breach of a court embargo in the ruling on the case, which Wright was sent up for contempt for ... which had no effect "Faced with a 17,000-word skeleton argument advanced by Wright’s new attorneys, buttressed by 1,600 pages of legal authorities, [The court] concluded that the cost of continuing outweighed the benefits." in other words, he simply DOSed the court and the court dropped it.
Obviously he's fighting the costs, which are due to earlier phases of the proceedings where McCormack tried to get the case summarily dismissed and was unsuccessful, resulting in Mr. Wright being awarded costs.
Maxwell has is own history of drama, but I can certainly agree with him that Craig Wright sucks.
I'm flattered, but that's not so! I was a relatively insignificant developer (e.g. 163 mostly minor commits to a project that has had >24k)-- though I've been frequently targeted in public, in part due to my own error in choosing to discuss Bitcoin with naysayers rather than just ignoring them. If you wanted to call me an formally outspoken Bitcoin philosopher, I wouldn't argue!
But the post in question was on a thread about Wladimir who was, in fact, lead developer of the Bitcoin Core project for many years, and the most active developer as far back as 2011. He posted shortly after Wright won an appeal overturning our summary dismissal stating that he regretted ever participating in open source specifically because the MIT license waver of liability was not, apparently, strong enough to get an abusive lawsuit dismissed on a summary basis. (the page is now down as he's mostly dropped off the internet since).
Or, that Dorsey has initiated litigation against Wright to steal his patent portfolio here: https://www.opencrypto.org/
Dorsey is a sociopath.
