Craig Wright: The Man Who Swore He Was Satoshi

Claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Courts ruled he was lying.

Craig Wright, self-proclaimed Satoshi

Craig Wright is an Australian computer scientist who spent nearly a decade claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. He filed hundreds of lawsuits. He threatened developers. He presented forged evidence. In March 2024, a UK court demolished his entire fiction in what became one of the most devastating judicial rulings in tech history.

Wright first appeared on the scene in December 2015 when Wired and Gizmodo published investigations suggesting he might be Satoshi. He met privately with Bitcoin core developers and showed them what he claimed was a cryptographic signature proving his identity. But when asked to provide the same proof publicly, he refused. The signature turned out to be copied from a publicly available early Bitcoin transaction.

Over the next several years, Wright filed hundreds of lawsuits against developers, researchers, podcasters, and anyone who publicly denied his claims. He sued the Bitcoin core development team. He sued Peter McCormack. He sued Magnus Granath. The legal campaign was so aggressive that it became a form of intimidation, forcing people to spend time and money defending themselves in court against a well-funded liar.

The whole thing came to a head in February 2024 when the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) - backed by Jack Dorsey, Coinbase, and others - brought a case to establish once and for all whether Wright was Satoshi. The six-week trial was devastating. Justice James Mellor ruled on March 14, 2024 that the evidence was "overwhelming": Wright was not Satoshi.

The written judgment, delivered on May 20, 2024, was 1,736 paragraphs of surgical demolition. Mellor found that Wright had engaged in forgery "on a grand scale." Documents Wright presented as proof had been backdated. Metadata didn't match. Fonts that didn't exist in 2008 appeared in documents supposedly written in 2008. The judge wrote that Wright was "not nearly as clever as he thinks he is" and had "lied repeatedly and extensively."

The court imposed a worldwide anti-suit injunction preventing Wright from ever again claiming to be Satoshi or suing anyone over that claim. Both Wright and his associate Stefan Matthews were referred to the Crown Prosecution Service for consideration of perjury charges.

Wright never moved a single bitcoin from the Satoshi wallets. He never produced a valid cryptographic signature. The simplest proof in all of crypto - signing a message with Satoshi's private key - was something he could never do. Because he doesn't have the keys. Because he's not Satoshi.