Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who claims to be the creator of Bitcoin, has won his defamation lawsuit against prominent cryptocurrency blogger and podcaster Peter McCormack.
However, the academic was awarded an infinitesimal £1 in damages as the result of a legal battle that took several years. It is worth noting that Wright was suing for as much as $122,000.
Despite ruling in Wright's favor, U.K. High Court Justice Martin Chamberlain only awarded nominal damages in the case after it turned out that Wright lied about some key parts of his evidence. In particular, he lied about being disinvited from academic conferences because of McCormack. The judge wrote:
The controversial academic filed his lawsuit against McCormack back in April 2019 after the latter called the self-proclaimed Satoshi a fraud.Dr Wright advanced a deliberately false case as to the disinvitations from academic conferences in his Amended Particulars of Claim and his first witness statement.
McCormack, the host of the "What Bitcoin Did" podcast, thanked his lawyers for their "diligent work" in his statement. He claims to be "very pleased" with the outcome.
Wright's pyrrhic victory has attracted plenty of ridicule on Twitter. Paolo Ardoino, chief technology officer at Bitfinex and Tether, quipped that the amount of money that the nChain scientist won will not be enough to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks.
In the past, the litigious computer scientist also sued Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin for libel, but the case was eventually abandoned. His lawsuits against Blockstream CEO Adam Back and Bitcoin Cash proponent Roger Ver were dropped and dismissed, respectively.
Is Craig Wright Satoshi?
Notably, the court has not ruled on whether or not Wright actually created Bitcoin despite the favorable ruling.
It is worth noting that McCormack offered the academic as much as $315,000 if the latter could sign a Bitcoin transaction with the help of Satoshi's private keys.
Valeria Blokhina
