I am Amused

Craig Wright, who has maintained that he is the the anonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, while refusing to provide any supporting evidence and while leaving billions of dollars (11 figures, even after the crash) of Bitcoin on the table, has won a libel case in the UK against blogger blogger Peter McCormack for claiming that he was a fraud.

This is not surprising.  Libel law in the UK is notoriously slanted toward the plaintiff.

Unfortunately, the court, observing that Mr. Wright had repeatedly submitted false evidence in the case, awarded him just £1, and called him a liar:

For years Craig Wright has claimed that he is the mythical figure who created bitcoin. But a legal bid by the Australian computer scientist to defend his assertion that he is Satoshi Nakamoto resulted in a pyrrhic victory and a tarnished reputation on Monday.

A high court judge in London ruled Wright had given “deliberately false evidence” in a libel case and awarded him £1 in damages after he sued a blogger for alleging that his claim to be the elusive Nakamoto was fraudulent.

“Because he [Wright] advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial, he will recover only nominal damages,” wrote Justice Chamberlain.

Wright had sued blogger Peter McCormack over a series of tweets in 2019, and a video discussion broadcast on YouTube, in which McCormack said Wright was a “fraud” and is not Satoshi. The issue of Nakamoto’s identity was not covered by the judge’s ruling because McCormack had earlier abandoned a defence of truth in his case.

I have no direct evidence as to whether the litigious Mr. Wright is or is not Satoshi Nakamoto, but the judge said that he was lying through his teeth, so I'm inclined to believe that he is not author of that now notorious white paper.

My theory, which is definitively the worst out there, is that Mr. Nakamoto is a pseudonym for Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, the real creators of the comic book Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.