JAKARTA - The figure who claims to be the creator of Bitcoin, Craig Wright, has struggled to prove his claims in court. In a trial between Wright and Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), an organization that opposes Wright's copyright claim to Bitcoin, Wright failed to say who had received Bitcoin from Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for the creator of Bitcoin.
Wright, who is an Australian computer scientist, has claimed since 2016 that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, who created Bitcoin in 2009. However, this claim has been opposed by many, including COPA, which was founded by major companies such as Meta, Block, and MicroStrategy. COPA sued Wright on charges of falsifying documents and abusing copyright.
In the trial that took place on February 5, 2024, Wright was asked for evidence that he had sent Bitcoin to people involved in the early development of Bitcoin, in addition to Hal Finney and Zooko totaling, who was known as Satoshi's first Bitcoin recipient. Wright claimed to have sent Bitcoin to hundreds of people, through his companies whose addresses were considered Satoshi's. However, when asked to name the person's names, Wright could not answer.
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"Gavin is already talking about it now. It had no value at the time, sir. Most of it was anonymous," Wright said, referring to Gavin Andresen, a Bitcoin developer who once supported Wright's claims, but later withdrew his support.
Wright was also asked about a blog post he signed cryptographically to prove he was Satoshi, which experts later denied. Wright insisted that the signing was valid evidence, and that he did not need to have a private key associated with Satoshi to prove his identity.
"You don't prove by having an identity through ownership of something. You prove with knowledge. Who are you. What you created," Wright said.
However, Wright's argument did not convince the judge and prosecutor. Judge Edward James Mellor had to remind Wright several times to answer questions clearly and briefly. Prosecutors also pointed out that some of the documents Wright submitted as evidence had been falsified or edited, and that the expert witness Wright himself did not support his claims.
One of the expert witnesses was Spencer Lynch, who was hired by Wright's legal team to analyze Wright's documents. Lynch admitted that he could not verify the authenticity of the documents, and that there was a possibility that the documents had been manipulated.
The trial was closely followed by the crypto community, which largely rejected Wright's claim as Satoshi. One of the Twitter accounts reporting the trial was @bitnorbert, who said Tuesday's trial was "the strongest Bitcoiner show in court today."
"Overall, it was another day of a man who was cornered without power to collapse in court, his power was forced to shut up and watch," he wrote.
The trial is still ongoing, and it is not yet known when there will be a verdict. If Wright fails to prove that he is Satoshi, he could face serious legal consequences. In addition, he could also lose his claim of about a million Bitcoins, which is worth about USD 15.8 billion (IDR 249 trillion) at the moment.
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