Satoshi or Faketoshi? Has the identity of Bitcoin creator been revealed in $54bn suit?

Satoshi Nakamoto is the alias used by the person who developed bitcoin, authored the original white paper and deployed its first reference implementation. This personality also developed the first blockchain database which now consists of over 100 million wallets and a million active average users.

The quest to discover the true identity of Nakamoto has largely become important as bitcoin adoption has widely increased since when the initial code began in 2007.

Many crypto enthusiasts have considered Nakamoto to be a team of people because of claims that the code is too well designed for one person. Others say he or she must be a genius and brilliant coder. He has never revealed personal information in discussions and has regularly provided commentary on banking and financial services.

Over the years, since the first version of the bitcoin software was launched in 2009, Nakamoto has collaborated with other developers to make tweaks and improvements. During this time, he alone made modifications to the Bitcoin source code. However, he would later make it open source and gave control of the source code repository and network alert key to Gavin Andresen in 2010. He also transferred related domains, documents and materials to various prominent members of the community at the time.

In honour of his work with cryptocurrency and bitcoin, a monument was raised and announced in Budapest, Hungary. Nakamoto owns over 1,000,000 bitcoin, which puts his net worth at 73 billion making him one of the richest persons in the world.

Now, in a Miami court case that took a week of deliberation, the jury in the Kleiman v Wright trial have reached a unanimous decision that Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin is 100% Craig Wright.

How did this happen? Kleiman v Wright Trial

Craig Wright, a computer scientist from Australia and self-acclaimed inventor of bitcoin was best friends with David Kleiman, a computer forensics expert and former police officer. Both of them worked closely on developing the bitcoin source code.

David passed away in 2013 due to complications from several illnesses and now his estate raised a lawsuit claiming that he was cheated out of credit for being a partner in writing the bitcoin whitepaper under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Throughout the trial which lasted three weeks, the plaintiff (David Kleiman’s brother Ira Kleiman) only had circumstantial evidence to the alleged partnership between Kleiman and Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto and business partnership between the two in mining the 1.1 million Satoshi coins.

The court ruled in favour of Craig Wright but however requested that he paid a sum of $100 million to the Estate of David Kleiman for damages. The ruling means that the court found Craig Wright not guilty on allegations of breach of partnership, civil theft, fraud and unjust enrichment.

And according to Craig, the verdict is a clear validation that he is indeed Satoshi Nakamoto and he alone is behind the development of the bitcoin white paper.

“The jury has obviously found that I am (Satoshi Nakamoto) because there would have been no award otherwise,” he said while promising not to appeal the verdict.

This news has been met by a lot of criticism by the BTC camp with fans awarding Mr Wright the nickname “Faketoshi”. The big question is, how much of this is a cause of the already falling price of bitcoin and how much more consequences is it going to have?

In the midst of the new Omicron coronavirus variant, Bitcoin price has dipped from all-time high of $68,521 to $49,206. Only time will tell if the downward spiral will continue as we approach the festive period fully.