Craig Wright: Finally, truth is the victor

Why the fake Satoshi ruling is important

On his own website Craig Wright is forced to tell the truth

I have written a few times here about the extraordinary courtroom battle (one where I played a minor role) which ended with Craig Wright’s ridiculous claim to be Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto being comprehensively trashed by a High Court judge.

What was terrifying to me was how Wright almost got away with it, exploiting the London courts to wage legal warfare against people who questioned his claims but didn’t have the wealth to defend themselves. With the backing of casino billionaire Calvin Ayre, he seemed invincible - until that is COPA, an industry body with equally deep pockets, came along and said enough is enough.

Now Mr Justice Mellor, the judge who Craig Wright patronised until he found he was a Cambridge engineering graduate with a pretty good grasp of technical matters, has issued another of his blockbuster judgments. This one deals with the consequences for Dr Wright of his conduct during the court battle with COPA, when he produced document after document to prove his “Satoshi” status only for just about every one to be shown to be fake.

And once more Judge Mellor delivers the goods. His judgment outlines the sheer monumental waste of time imposed on the courts by Wright’s manic quest to prove a lie:

“Dr Wright’s litigation based on his false claims has occupied vast Court resources, including at least 54 days of UK Court time before the Identity Issue trial and the 24 days of that trial, plus all the judicial time on top of days spent in the courtroom.”

The impact of litigation on the targets - people who had never imagined themselves involved in expensive legal drama - is outlined in painful detail. Norwegian Magnus Granath and Peter McCormack from the UK each dared to take on Wright:

“Each man suffered five years of personal hell. Mr Granath was hunted down, with a bounty for his identification. He received threats from a private investigator while he was with his six year-old daughter, and was subject to physical surveillance. Mr McCormack was hospitalised twice due to a cardiac condition (SVT) resulting from stress. Mr Granath had to give up his job as a primary school teacher, and both missed out on business opportunities.”

As well as threats couched in legal language, Craig Wright took to social media to whip up hate against the people he regarded as his enemies. In this he was backed by his supporter Calvin Ayre, whose CoinGeek stable of websites could be relied upon to cover the COPA trial as one certain to end in triumph for Wright. While Ayre has sought to minimise his role in funding the whole Satoshi fraud, the judge quotes evidence from the COPA trial making clear that is nonsense:

“Since 2015, Dr Wright has been able to find huge financial resources to support his claim, despite supposedly having a salary of about £160,000.  At least some of this financial support has come from Mr Ayre, who participated Dr Wright’s bailout in 2015 and provided funding for the McCormack action, as well as investing a very large sum in nChain.”

He continues: “As Mr Ayre’s leaked email of September 2023 shows, he has also been happy to use his CoinGeek website as a megaphone for Dr Wright’s claims.”

But all of this was building up to the key question - should Wright be held to account for the way he lied in court to try to prove he was Satoshi? The answer from the judge was a resounding yes:

“Dr Wright’s sinister and mendacious campaign to establish himself as Satoshi over many years and involving wholescale lies and forgery requires an extraordinary response.”

And that response was a referral to the Crown Prosecution Service for it to consider whether Wright deserves to be prosecuted “for his wholesale perjury and forgery of documents and/or whether a warrant for his arrest should be issued and/or whether his extradition should be sought from wherever he now is.”

The judge also asked the CPS to consider whether nChain’s CEO Stefan Matthews should also be prosecuted for perjury over the lies he told in the witness box. These included the claim that Wright had given him an early version of the Bitcoin White Paper in 2008 which the judge describes as a “barefaced” and “cynical” lie “in view of the prospective financial gain which Dr Wright and those supporting him (including Mr Matthews) stood to gain if Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi had been upheld.”

Just to put the cherry on the cake, the judge also ordered Wright to post statements on his social media channels and his own website making clear that the court had found that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto. Perhaps he might soon add “and I can confirm that I still owe Rory Cellan-Jones 0.01701 BTC (then worth £5, now £850) after my failed 2016 attempt to prove the lie that I am Satoshi.” But I am not holding my breath..

Why, I hear you ask, does any of this matter? Well for one thing it is one victory against those wealthy people who believe they can subvert our legal system to bully their critics into silence. But I also see it as one small win in the biggest most important conflict of our times, the battle between truth and lies.

It comes at a time when the owner of my favourite social media platform has turned it into a hellish playground for extremists and conspiracy theorists of all stripes while claiming it is a more trustworthy source of true facts than what he refers to as “legacy media”. (Note by the way that a blind reporter Gary O’Donoghue from legacy media outfit BBC News was giving one of the first truthful accounts of the Trump assassination attempt while Twitter was awash with conspiracist garbage.)

And that extremely wealthy individual is now lending his support to the man who appears very likely to become the next President of the United States, someone who has as little regard for the truth - or an independent judicial system - as does Craig Wright. So, in these dark times, thank you Mr Justice Mellor for showing that the truth does still matter.