LONDON (AP) — An Australian computer scientist has been found to have falsely claimed to be the mysterious creator of Bitcoin cryptocurrency will be referred to British prosecutors for “large-scale perjury and forgery of documents,” a London judge said on Tuesday.
Judge James Mellor, who ruled after a civil trial in March that Craig Wright was not the man behind “Satoshi Nakamoto”, the pseudonym that masked the identity of the creator of bitcoin, said he will forward evidence in the case to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider whether to press charges.
“By advancing his false claim to be Satoshi through multiple legal actions, Dr. Wright committed ‘a very serious abuse’ of the process of the UK, Norwegian and US courts,” Mellor said. “If what happened in this case does not justify referral to CPS, it is difficult to imagine a case that does.”
Mellor ruled at trial that Wright did not invent bitcoin, was not the man behind Nakamoto or the creator of the bitcoin software.
Bitcoin’s murky origins date back to the height of the financial crisis in 2008, when a person or group using the pseudonym Nakamoto published a paper explaining how the digital currency could be sent around the world anonymously, without banks or national currencies.
Speculation about Nakamoto’s identity swirled for years and several candidates emerged when Wright emerged to claim the identity in 2016, only to quickly return to the shadowssaying he didn’t “have the courage” to provide further evidence.
In what was considered a major victory for open source developers, a non-profit group of technology and crypto companies successfully sued in High Court to prove that Wright is not Nakamoto.
The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) argued that Wright had committed “industrial-scale forgery” to support a “blatant lie” that he was Nakamoto. The alliance said he used his claim as the inventor of bitcoin to “terrorize” developers by filing lawsuits to stop them from further developing the open-source technology.
Wright, who testified during several days of the five-week trial, denied the accusations. In May, he said on social media platform X that he plans to appeal the ruling “on the question of identity.”
The judgment had implications for controlling intellectual property rights for the world’s most popular virtual currency. The decision affected three pending lawsuits that Wright filed based on his claim to own the intellectual property rights to Bitcoin.
Mellor granted two injunctions on Tuesday preventing Wright from threatening to sue or file lawsuits against developers.
He also ordered Wright to publish details of the ruling against him to “dispel residual uncertainty” that he is not Nakamoto and to post notices to that effect on his website and on his profile on X, the social media platform, and on his channels on Slack.
Messages seeking comment from Wright’s attorneys were not immediately returned.
Bitcoin is the most prominent digital currency in the world and, like others, it is not linked to any bank or government. Just like Cash, it allows users to spend and receive money anonymously, or primarily. It can be converted into cash when deposited into accounts at prices set in online trading.
