Craig Wright - finally silenced?

Man who claimed he invented Bitcoin gets suspended prison sentence

I thought I’d heard the last of Craig Wright. Back in the summer the Australian who claimed he was the Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto and launched lawsuit after lawsuit against anyone who denied this claim suffered a humiliating court defeat. He was ordered to post prominent notices announcing he was not Satoshi, and he was referred to the Crown Prosecution Service over his conduct during his court battle with the Bitcoin developers organisation COPA when he produced mountains of forged documents.

Craig Wright in 2016 - he’s not smiling now

But, after initially complying with the order, he left Britain, opened a new ‘X’ account repeating many of his old lies (then again, X is the chosen home of the world’s biggest liars) and launched a whole new lawsuit against Bitcoin developers, including Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, demanding $1.2 trillion.

A clearer case of contempt of court would be hard to find and so this week Dr Wright has been back in the High Court. Or rather he hasn’t. On the first day of his contempt hearing, he failed to make an appearance, even via videolink from the Asian country where he is presumed to be skulking. He had apparently said that he was too poor to buy an air ticket (perhaps because his casino billionaire backer Calvin Ayre has withdrawn all funding) and he rejected an offer from COPA to meet his travel expenses.

But on Thursday he did appear on the end of a video link for his sentencing hearing after Judge James Mellor found that he was in contempt for what he called a “flagrant breach” of the order he had given earlier this year. He sentenced him to a year in prison, suspended for two years. The judge also threw out Wright’s lawsuit.

But when he was asked where he was, the man who has turned vexatious litigation into a lifestyle refused to say anything more than “Asia”. There is speculation that he may be in Thailand which has no extradition treaty with the UK.

At first I thought that giving Wright a suspended sentence had let him off the hook. But now, after talking to some lawyers, I think it may be rather clever, leaving the Australian fantasist with a dilemma. If he does return to the UK, avoids repeating his contempt or launching more lawsuits, he can stay out of prison and get on with his life. If he refuses to return, then the UK and many other countries around the world, become dangerous territory where he is liable to be arrested and imprisoned.

It seems probable that Craig Wright will carry on refusing to admit defeat, like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail insisting “these are merely flesh wounds” as another limb is severed. What is to be hoped is that our legal system which he has abused for years, clogging up the courts, and harassing blameless software and crypto developers who cannot afford to match his expenditure on lawyers, will finally say enough is enough.