Craig Wright: The Man Who Swore He Was Satoshi

On 14 March 2024, at the end of a trial in London that had opened on 5 February, Mr Justice James Mellor of the High Court did something judges rarely do: he announced his verdict from the bench before writing it up. The evidence, he said, was overwhelming. Craig Steven Wright, an Australian computer scientist who had spent eight years telling the world he was Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin, was not Satoshi. He had not written the Bitcoin white paper. He had not written the original software.

The written judgment followed on 20 May 2024. It ran to 1,736 paragraphs. Mellor found that Wright had lied to the court extensively and repeatedly and had committed forgery "on a grand scale" to support what the judge called his biggest lie. Wright, he wrote, was "not nearly as clever as he thinks he is". The case cost Wright more than £5.9 million in his opponents' legal costs. In December 2024 it also cost him a suspended prison sentence.

The claim

Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin design in October 2008, ran the network with a handful of volunteers and vanished in 2011. Coins mined in those early years, about a million bitcoin by most estimates, have never moved. Whoever controls them would be one of the richest people alive.

Wright's name surfaced in December 2015, when Wired and Gizmodo published stories suggesting he might be Satoshi, based on leaked documents. Hours later the Australian Federal Police searched his Sydney home and business, a raid linked to a tax investigation rather than to Bitcoin. In early 2016 Wright privately showed Gavin Andresen, then one of Bitcoin's lead developers, what he said was proof. On 2 May 2016 he published his "proof" in a blog post and gave interviews to the BBC, The Economist and GQ.

The proof did not survive a day. Proving ownership of a bitcoin address is simple: the owner uses its private key, a secret number that works like a signature only the account holder can produce, to sign a fresh message. Anyone can check it. Wright's blog post instead offered a signature that researchers quickly found had been copied from a public Bitcoin transaction made in 2009. It was the equivalent of proving you own a house by showing a photograph of the deed that was already on the land registry website. Wright never produced a fresh signature, then or since.

Eight years of lawsuits

He did produce litigation. From 2019 Wright, by then chief scientist at the London blockchain company nChain and the loudest champion of Bitcoin SV, a rival version of Bitcoin created in a November 2018 split, sued people who called him a fraud. He sued the podcaster Peter McCormack for libel in England and won, but in August 2022 the judge awarded him £1, finding he had given deliberately false evidence. He sued Magnus Granath, a Norwegian known online as Hodlonaut; a Norwegian court ruled for Granath in October 2022. Through his company Tulip Trading, Wright sued Bitcoin's volunteer developers, claiming they owed him help recovering about 111,000 bitcoin he said had been hacked. In April 2019 he registered US copyright in the Bitcoin white paper; the US Copyright Office then stated publicly that registration does not verify who wrote a work.

In the United States, the family of Dave Kleiman, a computer forensics expert who had died in 2013, sued Wright in Florida, claiming a share of bitcoin they said the two men had mined together. In December 2021 a jury cleared Wright of most claims but ordered $100 million to the pair's company for taking intellectual property. The trial did not decide whether Wright was Satoshi.

The lawsuits frightened the people who maintain Bitcoin's code, almost all of them unpaid. In 2021 the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a group whose members include Jack Dorsey's payments company Block and the exchange Coinbase, sued Wright in London for a declaration that he was not Satoshi. The case came to trial in February 2024.

What the court found

Expert witnesses took Wright's documents apart. Papers dated 2007 and 2008 carried traces of software, typefaces and metadata from years later. Mellor found that Wright had forged documents to support his claim and then forged more to explain away the first set. Wright's attempts to answer the experts, the judge said, became "technobabble". His long-time business associate Stefan Matthews, who testified that Wright had shown him a draft of the white paper more than a year before it was published, was also disbelieved.

On 16 July 2024 Mellor granted COPA and the developers a worldwide injunction: Wright may not claim to be Satoshi or sue or threaten anyone on that basis, in any country. He had to post a notice of the ruling on his own website. The judge sent the papers on Wright to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) to consider charges of perjury and forgery, and said the CPS should also look at Matthews's evidence.

Contempt, and after

Wright did not stop. On 10 October 2024 he issued a new claim in London against COPA, Block's Square Up Europe and Bitcoin developers, seeking about £911 billion. Mellor found it a "flagrant" breach of the injunction. On 19 December 2024, with Wright absent and reported to be in Asia, the judge found him in contempt and sentenced him to 12 months in prison, suspended for two years; Wright would serve it only if he breached the orders again. He was also ordered to pay about £144,000 in costs. Mellor remarked that Wright appeared to know exactly which countries had no extradition treaty with the UK.

The Court of Appeal refused him permission to appeal the identity ruling. In March 2025, after finding that his application had improperly used artificial intelligence and risked misleading the court, it ordered him to pay £225,000 in costs. On 12 May 2025 the High Court made a general civil restraint order, barring him from starting cases in the High Court or county courts for three years without permission.

Wright has not been charged with perjury or forgery, and the CPS has announced no decision. As of 16 October 2026 he continues to post about Bitcoin's design. He has still never moved a coin from Satoshi's early addresses or signed a single message with Satoshi's keys.