Craig Wright

Craig Wright is an Australian computer scientist and businessman who, from 2016, publicly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin. His claim was widely rejected by Bitcoin developers and researchers, and in March 2024 the High Court of England and Wales ruled that he is not Satoshi Nakamoto, did not write the Bitcoin white paper and did not create the original Bitcoin software. In a detailed judgment that followed, the court found that he had lied extensively and forged documents to support his claim.

Wright was closely associated with Bitcoin SV (BSV), a cryptocurrency created in 2018 by splitting from Bitcoin Cash, which he and his supporters promoted as the true version of Satoshi's design. He worked for years as chief scientist of nChain, a blockchain technology company. His legal campaigns against developers, journalists and critics made him one of the most controversial figures in crypto.

Nobody knows who invented Bitcoin. The inventor used the name Satoshi Nakamoto and disappeared from public view in 2011. Craig Wright said that he was that person, and for years he tried to prove it, mainly by producing documents and by suing people who called him a fraud.

Most experts never believed him, because he did not do the one simple thing that would have proved it: use Satoshi's known cryptographic keys in a way anyone could check. In 2024, a British court looked at all his evidence in a long trial and concluded that he was not Satoshi, and that many of his documents had been faked.

In December 2015, news outlets reported that Wright might be Satoshi, citing leaked documents. In May 2016 he publicly claimed the identity and offered a cryptographic "proof" that researchers quickly showed relied on an old, publicly available digital signature rather than a new signing with Satoshi's private key. He then said he would provide stronger proof but withdrew. Over the following years he registered US copyright claims to the white paper and early code, which do not involve any check of authorship, and cited them as support for his claim.

Wright was involved in a series of high-profile cases:

• Kleiman v Wright. In 2021, a US federal jury in Florida rejected claims that Wright and the late David Kleiman had a partnership owning early bitcoin, but found Wright liable for conversion of intellectual property belonging to a company linked to Kleiman, awarding $100 million.
• Defamation cases. Wright sued podcaster Peter McCormack in England, winning only nominal damages of £1 in 2022 after the court found he had given false evidence, and lost a related case in Norway the same year.
• Developer claims. His company Tulip Trading sued Bitcoin developers, arguing they owed duties to help recover allegedly lost coins; these and other claims against developers were later ended.

The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a group including companies such as Coinbase and Block, sued Wright in 2021 seeking a declaration that he is not Satoshi, to stop him asserting rights over Bitcoin. After a trial in early 2024, Mr Justice Mellor announced on 14 March 2024 that the evidence was "overwhelming" that Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto. His written judgment in May 2024 found that Wright had lied repeatedly and forged documents on a large scale, and the judge referred the matter to prosecutors to consider possible charges of forgery and perjury. The court also issued orders barring Wright from repeating his claims and froze some of his assets to secure legal costs. In December 2024 the High Court found him in contempt of court for bringing a new claim in breach of those orders and imposed a suspended prison sentence.

The COPA ruling was welcomed by many in the Bitcoin community as ending a long-running dispute that had been used to threaten open-source developers with litigation over code they maintain as open source. It also showed courts examining detailed digital evidence, such as document metadata and fonts, to test authorship claims. The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto remains unknown as of November 2026. Other candidates have been suggested by journalists and researchers over the years, without proof, and the coins mined by Satoshi in Bitcoin's early days, recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, have never been moved.

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