Who Owns Bitcoin? Craig Wright is suing Coinbase and Kraken

There are quite a few doubts in the community as to whether Craig Wright is the inventor of Bitcoin. But that doesn’t stop the Australian and Wannabe-Satoshi-Nakamoto from pursuing intellectual property claims in court. His latest targets: the crypto exchanges Coinbase and Kraken.

The year before, the software developer prevailed for technical reasons in a lawsuit in which he asserted copyright claims to the founding document of the crypto world. Of course, the court ruling did not prove his authorship of the white paper, but now the complaining Wright strikes the big blow. According to his office, he wants Coinbase and Kraken prevent from promoting Bitcoin as Bitcoin, for example by using the logo. The lawsuit is therefore worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Further lawsuits are already planned.

Bitcoin different from Bitcoin?

The statement that Bitcoin is not Bitcoin may initially be confusing and at best invite philosophical speculation. But from the perspective of Wright and his attorneys, things are relatively simple. Because according to the IT developer, today’s Bitcoin was only created in 2017 as an independent project. At that time, the Bitcoin blockchain split off from Bitcoin Cash in a hard fork, with the latter giving rise to the niche currency Bitcoin Satoshi Version (BSV) personally promoted by Wright in 2018. For the 51-year-old posing as Satoshi Nakamoto, however, only this project adheres to the original spirit of the white paper.

Put simply, the plaintiffs’ contention that a digital asset that does not strictly adhere to the Bitcoin protocol and is connected to the Bitcoin blockchain is not Bitcoin and should not be marketed or labeled as such.

In addition to other crypto exchanges had about Kraken already removed BSV from its own platform in 2019. The move came in response to a spate of warnings Wright was using to substantiate his paternity claim on BTC.

Is Wright Satoshi?

However, the question of whether Craig Wright is actually the inventor of BTC and the author of the associated white paper has not yet been satisfactorily answered. The community exposed an alleged proof from 2016 as a technically adept fake.

In a lawsuit with the heirs of his former business partner David Kleiman, however, Wright was able to partially assert himself. The heirs claimed that Kleiman was involved in the invention of Bitcoin alongside Wright. They demanded half of the coins from the multi-billion dollar wallet, which consists of the first BTC blocks mined and is therefore assigned to Satoshi.

If Wright had lost the case, he would have had to finally prove through a transaction with this wallet that he was actually the inventor of the crypto currency – or not. Either way, the court fined him $100 million for intellectual property theft. However, Wright did not raise the amount, so in March the court imposed a hefty penalty interest on him. For the supposed crypto billionaire Wright, these are certainly just peanuts.