The Craig Wright saga found its way back into the crypto timeline this week as it casually happens once in a year.
This time, though, instead of letting it drift into yet another circular argument about identity, authorship and Bitcoin white paper published in 2008, Ripple’s CTO stepped in with a short but very direct rebuttal that immediately pulled the discussion back to the public record that has followed self-proclaimed Satoshi for years.
It started with Wright's own post arguing that civil courts cannot declare fraud, implying that every past ruling was opinion rather than a finding, which is contrary to legal rulings stating that he is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper.
Ripple's CTO David Schwartz made debunking Wright's thesis easy to understand, too. He just had to refer to the legal definition of the term "fraud," which shows that fraud is not some unreachable criminal threshold but a well-defined tort built on misrepresentation, where a false or reckless statement made with the intent that someone rely on it, and causing actual harm when they do, is enough to satisfy the standard, and this is exactly the ground on which multiple judges evaluated Wright’s conduct before concluding that his filings included forged documents, inconsistent sworn statements and attempts to mislead the court.
Safe to say the conversation shifted immediately, because the crypto market has seen this pattern many times: Wright surfaces a new promotional angle around BSV, the filings reappear, the judges’ wording gets quoted again and the narrative resets to the same baseline — that none of the "I am Satoshi" claims survived contact with formal proceedings, and that every attempt to reopen the debate still runs into the same stack of rulings that closed it.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team