Square’s COPA asks UK court to rule Craig Wright didn’t create Bitcoin
Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) is suing blowhard Craig Wright for failing to prove their claim to the Satoshi Nakamoto moniker.
COPA has asked the court to rule that Wright holds no ownership over the Bitcoin whitepaper in spite of his legal claims made earlier this year.
The Square-led non-profit shared their request with the UK High Court in a tweet on Monday. COPA previously requested Wright submit proof of their Nakamoto claim by Feb 19.
Other COPA members include crypto exchanges Coinbase and Kraken.
Wright has made an apparent living by claiming to be Bitcoin’s creator, starting in December 2015 when Wired and Gizmodo relayed supposed “troves of evidence” as proof.
Both investigations are now considered to be the result of elaborate hoaxes backed by mountains of forged documents.
- Generally, Nakamoto can prove they’re Nakamoto by signing a transaction.
- Specifically, they need to use a private key tied to one of Bitcoin’s earliest blocks.
- They can also move some of the early Bitcoin that only they could’ve mined.
But even after multiple publicity stunts, Wright has been unable to prove they built Bitcoin. Questions also remain as to whether Wright maintains undergraduate-level knowledge of computer science concepts.
Wright has even gone so far as to embroil himself in at least two separate efforts to fork Bitcoin over the years, most recently Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) in late 2018 — a fork of Bitcoin Cash (which is a fork of Bitcoin).
Industry analysts commonly consider BSV (and BCH to a lesser extent) a failed “ghost chain” with little-to-no organic adoption.
‘Ghost-chain’ Wright persists in the media, somehow
Still, Wright — backed by mouthpiece blogs sharing his lore — continues to find his way into headlines.
Not to mention, prominent tech publications still aren’t immune to wading through Wright’s contextual aura, even in the wake of Wired and Gizmodo’s blunders.
Earlier this year, ZDNet published a series of shallow takes on BSV’s development. One claimed its purported transaction scalability “will become very attractive for enterprises.”
On the surface, the ZDNet reports in question appear to conflate BSV with Bitcoin (BTC) to capture readers interested in BTC — which speaks to the ease at which biased information spreads through mainstream press.
“However, all are not happy with Bitcoin SV Genesis upgrade plans. Miners of other Bitcoin protocols, such as Bitcoin BTC, seem to feel threatened by Craig Wright, who I think is indeed Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin,” wrote ZDnet’s Eileen Brown in 2020.
Frustratingly, some of ZDNet’s pro-BSV reports were published after Wright bombastically threatened anyone hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper with lawsuits in late Jan.
Programmers and Jack Dorsey’s Square Crypto (which sponsors Bitcoin’s development) were served notices.
Bitcoin is open source. Nobody owns it. Nobody owns the Bitcoin whitepaper, either. Nakamoto released the doc under the permissive MIT license, which broadly allows free re-use and republishing.
So, it’s no surprise that COPA — which defends open source crypto technology — is now taking the fight to Wright.
[Read more: Craig Wright says he’ll sue over the Bitcoin whitepaper — these 108 sites don’t care]
However, the license has one known disadvantage. Anyone can take a MIT license project, change the branding, and sell it as proprietary software — which echoes criticism OKCoin shared when the exchange delisted BSV and BCH earlier this year.