The public message is another significant blow to the technopreneur’s credibility. Wright is currently in the middle of a court case with the brother of his former business partner, Ira Kleiman.
Craig Wright, an Australian technopreneur who has widely claimed to be Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, has been publicly denounced by the accounts and wallets that he claims to own.
A list of Bitcoin addresses that Wright had presented as being his holdings in an ongoing court case were “inadvertently” made public by plaintiffs on May 21st of this year. While it was only accessible for a brief period of time, 145 of the addresses were then used to sign a public message that accused Wright of being a “fraud” and making it apparent that he does not actually own or control them.
The court case was initiated by Ira Kleiman, brother of Wright’s past business partner David Kleiman, and is seeking half of 1.1 million bitcoins (roughly around $9.6 billion worth) that the pair had allegedly mined in the early days of the leading cryptocurrency. The case is also on intellectual property, and is hinged on whether Wright can prove that he holds the keys to the cryptocurrency.
While the list was quickly resealed by Kleiman’s legal team, it is still accessible on Court Listener and has enabled another individual to lay claim to addresses that they hold the keys to. The individual signed a message with his keys that also accused Wright of being a “liar” and a “fraud”.
“Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn’t have the keys used to sign this message. The Lightning Network is a significant achievement. However, we need to continue work on improving on-chain capacity. Unfortunately, the solution is not to just change a constant in the code or to allow powerful participants to force out others. We are all Satoshi.” the message read.
The message was first discussed by audiences on Reddit, with claims that the addresses are for Bitcoin mined back in 2009 and that have remained in place since.
Wright had told the court that his billions of dollars held in Bitcoin were kept in “Tulip Trusts”, but that he could not prove that he had control over the keys because of attorney-client privilege. The judge has accused Wright of “abusing” this client-attorney privilege to withhold over 11,000 documents and prevent proceedings.
Last August 2019, Wright was also ruled to have argued in bad faith, admitted false evidence, and perjured himself.