Bitcoin trial: Defendant wins dispute over $50B in Bitcoin

[TexasTowelie]

Source: AP

NEW YORK (AP) — Craig Wright, a computer scientist who claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin, prevailed in a civil trial verdict Monday against the family of a deceased business partner that claimed it was owed half of a cryptocurrency fortune worth tens of billions.

A Florida jury found that Wright did not owe half of 1.1 million Bitcoin to the family of David Kleiman. The jury did award $100 million in intellectual property rights to a joint venture between the two men, a fraction of what Kleiman’s lawyers were asking for at trial.

“This was a tremendous victory for our side,” said Andres Rivero of Rivero Mestre LLP, the lead lawyer representing Wright.

David Kleiman died in April 2013 at the age of 46. Led by his brother Ira Kleiman, his family has claimed David Kleiman and Wright were close friends and co-created Bitcoin through a partnership.

Read more: https://www.bozemandailychronicle.com/ap_news/business/bitcoin-trial-defendant-wins-dispute-over-50b-in-bitcoin/article_cff881b7-03a9-50f2-a9a7-4062a3bd4337.html

[ancianita]

1. So Satoshi Nakamoto's been unmasked and Bitcoin mythology smashed?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto

On 8 December 2015, Wired wrote that Craig Steven Wright, an Australian academic, "either invented bitcoin or is a brilliant hoaxer who very badly wants us to believe he did".[52] Craig Wright took down his Twitter account and neither he nor his ex-wife responded to press inquiries. The same day, Gizmodo published a story with evidence supposedly obtained by a hacker who broke into Wright's email accounts, claiming that Satoshi Nakamoto was a joint pseudonym for Craig Steven Wright and computer forensics analyst David Kleiman, who died in 2013.[53] Wright's claim was supported by Jon Matonis (former director of the Bitcoin Foundation) and bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen.[54]

A number of prominent bitcoin promoters remained unconvinced by the reports.[55] Subsequent reports also raised the possibility that the evidence provided was an elaborate hoax,[56][57] which Wired acknowledged "cast doubt" on their suggestion that Wright was Nakamoto.[58] Bitcoin developer Peter Todd said that Wright's blog post, which appeared to contain cryptographic proof, actually contained nothing of the sort.[59] Bitcoin developer Jeff Garzik agreed that evidence publicly provided by Wright does not prove anything, and security researcher Dan Kaminsky concluded Wright's claim was "intentional scammery".[60]

In May 2019, Wright started using English libel law to sue people who denied he was the inventor of bitcoin, and who called him a fraud.[61] In 2019 Wright registered US copyright for the bitcoin white paper and the code for Bitcoin 0.1.[62] Wright's team claimed this was "government agency recognition of Craig Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto";[63] the United States Copyright Office issued a press release clarifying that this was not the case (as they primarily determine whether a work is eligible for copyright, and do not investigate legal ownership, which, if disputed, is determined by the courts).[64]

[TexasTowelie]

2. I look at it this way, whether his claim to have invented Bitcoin is true or not

he is the biggest scammer in history. He either scammed people with a lie or with the truth of inventing the scam of cryptocurrency. His name will be in the history books forever.

[ancianita]

3. You're probably right. I like the story. It served the anonymity of the real bitcoin inventor well.

To me, blockchain was his really great invention, not bitcoin. But distributed ledgers are brilliantly democratic.

That other guy can have bitcoin credit.
The downside is the cat and mouse games used by governments and the corrupt on the dark web to buy/sell weapons and pathogens.

[NullTuples]

4. One could also say that distributed ledgers...

...are the ultimate form of, "privatize profits, socialize costs" when the full cost and all impacts are taken into account.

[ancianita]

5. One could. That's been the gist of my argument to my daughter who's got her own Bitcoin wallet and

cryptocurrency spread, along with plenty of Ripple. She's not listening. She's bought a dental trip to Acapulco with bitcoin, and plenty of other things I don't know about. Even at age 52, she's holding out for the fall of the U.S. dollar and the Big Reset.