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He attempted to sue Bitcoin core devs to alter the algorithm to hand over Satoshi's coins. On the basis that he lost the keys and that the maintainers have a du

He attempted to sue Bitcoin core devs to alter the algorithm to hand over Satoshi's coins. On the basis that he lost the keys and that the maintainers have a duty to him to help him recover them. Every part of the lawsuit was just batshit insane. The most insane part was that an UK court allowed the lawsuit to be heard, and forced dozens of people not living in UK to pay big money to defend themselves.

solarengineer 2y ago
Do the defendants have the right and the opportunity to sue for legal fees and damages for having to fight this vexatious court case?
- nullc 2y ago
  We were awarded our legal fees. However, these the legal fees are only a part of the total cost, which includes lost income from the time expended, disruption of our personal lives, alienation from our passions and professions, damage to our reputations from false claims spread by Wright in furtherance of his fraud, etc. At least one of Wright's targets were hospitalized over stress induced cardiac problems due to the litigation. We can bring separate fraud charges for some of these damages, though they're not likely to be entirely recoverable. However, Wright appears to be a lifelong grifter with little to no personal means to pay any judgement and attaching his sponsors for this litigation would be an extra level of difficulty. Even ignoring the potential of non-recovery, doing so would mean years of additional mud wrestling with this pig ("and the pig likes it!"), and a further impact on our lives which we'd just like to continue. We might be forced to however, because he and his conspirators seem to be showing little sign of stopping and going on the offensive might be necessary because simply losing and paying costs may not be enough to stop them.
pavlov 2y ago
While the lawsuit was insane, it serves a good reminder that when Bitcoiners proudly proclaim that “governments have no power over them”, it’s not quite that simple in lots of ways. If the governments of the world really started to believe their fiscal powers or national currencies were threatened by crypto, they have an extensive repertoire of tools to shut it down.
- chabes 2y ago
  I disagree. This lawsuit was against a single individual. There is nothing here that is threatening to crypto as a whole. One thing that will make it harder to regulate as time goes on is that more people will be financially involved. From traditional finance getting involved through funds, to the masses getting involved, the ecosystem has grown far beyond the fringe, and will continue to do so with each successive hype cycle. Hell, many governments themselves have skin in the game now. I’m curious how you think serious crippling legislation or enforcement would play out. EDIT: additional thought… this case protects the industry, not the other way around. The industry was being attacked by a fraudulent individual, and the government defended the industry.
  - speerer 2y ago
    This is a misunderstanding. The lawsuit was not one suit: it wrapped up one against Wright, but several that he instigated against others. This involved dozens of individuals and companies, sued by him for various ends such as control over the word "Bitcoin", control over bitcoins themselves, and forcible changes to the protocols. It was absolutely a threat to Bitcoin and other crypto.
- janandonly 2y ago
  Governments can shut down the core developers, or at least force them into hiding and force them to use nyms (like they should do, as cypherpunks anyways). But stopping people from downloading and running some code… well on a closed eco system like Apple App Store, sure, you can pressure a company into compliance, but how are you going to stop determined people? Who download and share code over I2P and TOR? It’s off course true that if it really came to this globally, the price of bitcoin would probably tumble and be more compatible to other currently more privacy forward coins like Monero .
  - sgt101 2y ago
    Well, you make it a capital office, or less draconian... make it an offense punishable by 10 years of hard labour in a dire penal camp somewhere cold. In addition you make it an offense to fail to disclose knowledge of the use of such capabilities, and you institute a system of rewards to positively encourage disclosure. Perhaps you call it social credit. You are correct that there are a few people who would defy such a system, a very few.
meowfly 2y ago
It looks like the UK is considering perjury and I hope they follow through and are aggressive on it. We can't have incentive structures where the upside is becoming fabulously rich but the downside is a slap on the wrist.
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  There was no potential upside of becoming fabulously rich. Nobody can “extract” those keys.
  - pests 2y ago
    No need to extract keys, the Bitcoin devs could just change the code. Even lock up the original and mint new ones for Craig. It's just code in the end. Similar to how Eth changed the code to nullify the DAO hack.
    - greyface- 2y ago
      The Ethereum DAO rollback fork was (for better or worse) widely supported by the community. It's not likely that a court-ordered fork to reassign Satoshi's coins to Wright would have anywhere near the same level of support.
      - samtheprogram 2y ago
        But if it were to happen, what are the chances a fork of Bitcoin (that doesn’t respect this ruling) becomes more mainstream than Bitcoin? Less than 10%, and that’s generous.
        throwaway48540 2y ago
        I see it the other way. 10% chance that the Craitoshi fork of BTC becomes mainstream.
        2y ago
hollerith 2y ago
>The most insane part was that an UK court allowed the lawsuit to be heard, and forced dozens of people not living in UK to pay big money to defend themselves. Minor correction: according to the wikipedia article on Wright, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance sued Wright, not the other way around. However, IIUC Wright's attempts over many years to fraudulently extract patent licensing fees and other undeserved benefits from the industry drove industry leaders to spend money to sue Wright. Those attempts included Wright's suing many people. I'm outraged by Wright and hope Wright is forced to stand trial in criminal court for perjury and forgery.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tim333 2y ago
  I think that was a different court case. Wright has been involved in several.
  - nullc 2y ago
    You're both right and wrong. Here is a summary of cases recently at play. 1. Wright defamation lawsuit against a podcaster. (UK) 2. Wright defamation lawsuit against a bitcoin fan. (UK) 3. Bitcoin fan's declaratory judgement claim over wright's threats of defamation litigation (the case above). (Norway) 4. Wright lawsuit against Bitcoin.org for copyright infringement for distributing the Bitcoin whitepaper (UK). 5. Wright lawsuit against a dozen current and former Bitcoin developers for failing to backdoor the Bitcoin system to enable Wright to "recover" billions of dollars of coins he says are his. Wright claimed he was owed billions of pounds of damages for this failure. (UK) 6. Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) declaratory judgement claim against Wright triggered by threats of copyright infringement claims for distributing the bitcoin whitepaper. (UK) 7. Wright's lawsuit against 14 current and former Bitcoin developers and a number of Bitcoin related companies for infringing his copyright in the "Bitcoin block file format", copyright in the Bitcoin whitepaper (because there is a copy in the blockchain), and his database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain. This case claimed damages in the hundreds of billions of pounds. (UK) Here is how they've played out and interacted: 1. Podcaster was bankrupt, abandoned his defense, Wright won but was only awarded 1 pound in damages because he lied about how he was harmed. Podcaster left with utterly ruinous legal fees, health compromised, etc. 2. / 3. Norway case was intended to preempt UK case due to very bad UK defamation laws. But Brexit happened and the Norway case no longer preempted and the Bitcoin fan had to face litigation in both jurisdictions. Defeated Wright in Norway, but Wright was granted an appeal which due to how the law works in Norway would essentially be a retrial. UK version of the case case gets stayed on the Norway appeal (but only after huge costs. Wright's target, a school teacher, was forced to abandon his career due to the time imposition. Norway appeal gets held pending COPA case by mutual agreement. 4. Bitcoin.org owner is pseudonymous, Wright and associates made various violent threats. Credible fear that absurd lawsuit was just to determine his location in order to make threats more coercive. In the UK you cannot defend yourself against a claim without identifying yourself (unlike the US where anonymous speech is connected to your 1A rights), so he lost by default. Website operator is ordered to pay nearly a million dollars in "costs" for his unopposed default and is unable to appeal the costs for the same reason as caused the default. Appealed, lost, Appealed to the UK supreme court, but lost. Bitcoin whitepaper and software were restricted on bitcoin.org. 5. Wright defeated on jurisdiction grounds. Successful appeal. Case ordered to be split into a preliminary issue trial for him to prove he ever owned coins in question. Wright abandoned the case after three years and millions spend on both sides a day before his disclosure for the preliminary issue trial was due. Court made a followup ruling that his case was completely without merit. 6. 7. A preliminary issue trial in ordered for 7 on the question of Wright being Bitcoin's creator, since he couldn't own those rights without being. This is merged into the COPA declaratory judgement case which is over the same question. This merged trial is called the "identity trial" in much of the documentation. So this is why there is why there is some confusion as to Wright being the claimant or the defendant in the recent trial: He was both, claimant with respect to 7 and defendant with respect to 6, and the trial was jointly a trial of both cases. At the conclusion of the joint trial, which found Wright's claims to be fraudulent, 6,7 were lost. The court also acted to eradicate the outstanding costs in cases 1, 4. Wright abandoned cases 2 and 3. Wright is appealing the identity trial currently. You can take a look at his new twitter account for an idea of how that's going: https://x.com/CsTominaga/with_replies https://x.com/CsTominaga/with_replies [I'm a defendant in 5 and 6]
ruthmarx 2y ago
> forced dozens of people not living in UK to pay big money to defend themselves. At the risk of not being able to enjoy castles and blood pudding on vacation, couldn't they just ignore the suit?
- nullc 2y ago
  Unfortunately most developed nations are generally willing to domesticate the foreign judgements of other developed nations. There are exceptions, e.g. the SPEECH ACT makes many UK defamation claims largely unenforceable in the US... but even if you think you'd be able to block enforcement in your own jurisdiction, if you are wrong you likely forfeit being able defend the claim on its merits. You also have to deal with any organizations you do business with who are exposed to the UK being ordered to take adverse actions like freeze or seize your accounts. Because an outlaw in the UK is no joke either, you'd potentially have to spend the rest of your life at risk of being arrested if by happenstance you found yourself in that jurisdiction (e.g. due to a rerouted aircraft), face discrimination from future employers or potential business contacts because of the specter of a judgement hanging over you. That said, had we not been able to secure funding for our defense we might well have defaulted anyways: if the defense would have bankrupted us, we'd be better off saving our funds and hoping to avoid enforcement of the judgement bankrupting us. But fortunately, Jack Dorsey and the chaincode founders stepped up.
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    > Unfortunately most developed nations are generally willing to domesticate the foreign judgements of other developed nations. There are exceptions, e.g. the SPEECH ACT makes many UK defamation claims largely unenforceable in the US... but even if you think you'd be able to block enforcement in your own jurisdiction, if you are wrong you likely forfeit being able defend the claim on its merits. I don't think this is true at all for the US, right? Not just because of the first amendment, but in general I don't think UK judgements are enforceable at all in the US. I wouldn't even think it would be enforceable in commonwealth countries. Do you have any examples of UK judgements such as those we are discussing being enforced in any of the five eyes countries aside from the UK?

solarengineer 2y ago

Do the defendants have the right and the opportunity to sue for legal fees and damages for having to fight this vexatious court case?

nullc 2y ago
We were awarded our legal fees. However, these the legal fees are only a part of the total cost, which includes lost income from the time expended, disruption of our personal lives, alienation from our passions and professions, damage to our reputations from false claims spread by Wright in furtherance of his fraud, etc. At least one of Wright's targets were hospitalized over stress induced cardiac problems due to the litigation. We can bring separate fraud charges for some of these damages, though they're not likely to be entirely recoverable. However, Wright appears to be a lifelong grifter with little to no personal means to pay any judgement and attaching his sponsors for this litigation would be an extra level of difficulty. Even ignoring the potential of non-recovery, doing so would mean years of additional mud wrestling with this pig ("and the pig likes it!"), and a further impact on our lives which we'd just like to continue. We might be forced to however, because he and his conspirators seem to be showing little sign of stopping and going on the offensive might be necessary because simply losing and paying costs may not be enough to stop them.

pavlov 2y ago

While the lawsuit was insane, it serves a good reminder that when Bitcoiners proudly proclaim that “governments have no power over them”, it’s not quite that simple in lots of ways. If the governments of the world really started to believe their fiscal powers or national currencies were threatened by crypto, they have an extensive repertoire of tools to shut it down.

chabes 2y ago
I disagree. This lawsuit was against a single individual. There is nothing here that is threatening to crypto as a whole. One thing that will make it harder to regulate as time goes on is that more people will be financially involved. From traditional finance getting involved through funds, to the masses getting involved, the ecosystem has grown far beyond the fringe, and will continue to do so with each successive hype cycle. Hell, many governments themselves have skin in the game now. I’m curious how you think serious crippling legislation or enforcement would play out. EDIT: additional thought… this case protects the industry, not the other way around. The industry was being attacked by a fraudulent individual, and the government defended the industry.
- speerer 2y ago
  This is a misunderstanding. The lawsuit was not one suit: it wrapped up one against Wright, but several that he instigated against others. This involved dozens of individuals and companies, sued by him for various ends such as control over the word "Bitcoin", control over bitcoins themselves, and forcible changes to the protocols. It was absolutely a threat to Bitcoin and other crypto.
janandonly 2y ago
Governments can shut down the core developers, or at least force them into hiding and force them to use nyms (like they should do, as cypherpunks anyways). But stopping people from downloading and running some code… well on a closed eco system like Apple App Store, sure, you can pressure a company into compliance, but how are you going to stop determined people? Who download and share code over I2P and TOR? It’s off course true that if it really came to this globally, the price of bitcoin would probably tumble and be more compatible to other currently more privacy forward coins like Monero .
- sgt101 2y ago
  Well, you make it a capital office, or less draconian... make it an offense punishable by 10 years of hard labour in a dire penal camp somewhere cold. In addition you make it an offense to fail to disclose knowledge of the use of such capabilities, and you institute a system of rewards to positively encourage disclosure. Perhaps you call it social credit. You are correct that there are a few people who would defy such a system, a very few.

meowfly 2y ago

It looks like the UK is considering perjury and I hope they follow through and are aggressive on it. We can't have incentive structures where the upside is becoming fabulously rich but the downside is a slap on the wrist.

idunnoman1222 2y ago
There was no potential upside of becoming fabulously rich. Nobody can “extract” those keys.
- pests 2y ago
  No need to extract keys, the Bitcoin devs could just change the code. Even lock up the original and mint new ones for Craig. It's just code in the end. Similar to how Eth changed the code to nullify the DAO hack.
  - greyface- 2y ago
    The Ethereum DAO rollback fork was (for better or worse) widely supported by the community. It's not likely that a court-ordered fork to reassign Satoshi's coins to Wright would have anywhere near the same level of support.
    - samtheprogram 2y ago
      But if it were to happen, what are the chances a fork of Bitcoin (that doesn’t respect this ruling) becomes more mainstream than Bitcoin? Less than 10%, and that’s generous.
      - throwaway48540 2y ago
        I see it the other way. 10% chance that the Craitoshi fork of BTC becomes mainstream.
        2y ago

hollerith 2y ago

>The most insane part was that an UK court allowed the lawsuit to be heard, and forced dozens of people not living in UK to pay big money to defend themselves. Minor correction: according to the wikipedia article on Wright, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance sued Wright, not the other way around. However, IIUC Wright's attempts over many years to fraudulently extract patent licensing fees and other undeserved benefits from the industry drove industry leaders to spend money to sue Wright. Those attempts included Wright's suing many people. I'm outraged by Wright and hope Wright is forced to stand trial in criminal court for perjury and forgery.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tim333 2y ago
I think that was a different court case. Wright has been involved in several.
- nullc 2y ago
  You're both right and wrong. Here is a summary of cases recently at play. 1. Wright defamation lawsuit against a podcaster. (UK) 2. Wright defamation lawsuit against a bitcoin fan. (UK) 3. Bitcoin fan's declaratory judgement claim over wright's threats of defamation litigation (the case above). (Norway) 4. Wright lawsuit against Bitcoin.org for copyright infringement for distributing the Bitcoin whitepaper (UK). 5. Wright lawsuit against a dozen current and former Bitcoin developers for failing to backdoor the Bitcoin system to enable Wright to "recover" billions of dollars of coins he says are his. Wright claimed he was owed billions of pounds of damages for this failure. (UK) 6. Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) declaratory judgement claim against Wright triggered by threats of copyright infringement claims for distributing the bitcoin whitepaper. (UK) 7. Wright's lawsuit against 14 current and former Bitcoin developers and a number of Bitcoin related companies for infringing his copyright in the "Bitcoin block file format", copyright in the Bitcoin whitepaper (because there is a copy in the blockchain), and his database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain. This case claimed damages in the hundreds of billions of pounds. (UK) Here is how they've played out and interacted: 1. Podcaster was bankrupt, abandoned his defense, Wright won but was only awarded 1 pound in damages because he lied about how he was harmed. Podcaster left with utterly ruinous legal fees, health compromised, etc. 2. / 3. Norway case was intended to preempt UK case due to very bad UK defamation laws. But Brexit happened and the Norway case no longer preempted and the Bitcoin fan had to face litigation in both jurisdictions. Defeated Wright in Norway, but Wright was granted an appeal which due to how the law works in Norway would essentially be a retrial. UK version of the case case gets stayed on the Norway appeal (but only after huge costs. Wright's target, a school teacher, was forced to abandon his career due to the time imposition. Norway appeal gets held pending COPA case by mutual agreement. 4. Bitcoin.org owner is pseudonymous, Wright and associates made various violent threats. Credible fear that absurd lawsuit was just to determine his location in order to make threats more coercive. In the UK you cannot defend yourself against a claim without identifying yourself (unlike the US where anonymous speech is connected to your 1A rights), so he lost by default. Website operator is ordered to pay nearly a million dollars in "costs" for his unopposed default and is unable to appeal the costs for the same reason as caused the default. Appealed, lost, Appealed to the UK supreme court, but lost. Bitcoin whitepaper and software were restricted on bitcoin.org. 5. Wright defeated on jurisdiction grounds. Successful appeal. Case ordered to be split into a preliminary issue trial for him to prove he ever owned coins in question. Wright abandoned the case after three years and millions spend on both sides a day before his disclosure for the preliminary issue trial was due. Court made a followup ruling that his case was completely without merit. 6. 7. A preliminary issue trial in ordered for 7 on the question of Wright being Bitcoin's creator, since he couldn't own those rights without being. This is merged into the COPA declaratory judgement case which is over the same question. This merged trial is called the "identity trial" in much of the documentation. So this is why there is why there is some confusion as to Wright being the claimant or the defendant in the recent trial: He was both, claimant with respect to 7 and defendant with respect to 6, and the trial was jointly a trial of both cases. At the conclusion of the joint trial, which found Wright's claims to be fraudulent, 6,7 were lost. The court also acted to eradicate the outstanding costs in cases 1, 4. Wright abandoned cases 2 and 3. Wright is appealing the identity trial currently. You can take a look at his new twitter account for an idea of how that's going: https://x.com/CsTominaga/with_replies https://x.com/CsTominaga/with_replies [I'm a defendant in 5 and 6]

ruthmarx 2y ago

> forced dozens of people not living in UK to pay big money to defend themselves. At the risk of not being able to enjoy castles and blood pudding on vacation, couldn't they just ignore the suit?

nullc 2y ago
Unfortunately most developed nations are generally willing to domesticate the foreign judgements of other developed nations. There are exceptions, e.g. the SPEECH ACT makes many UK defamation claims largely unenforceable in the US... but even if you think you'd be able to block enforcement in your own jurisdiction, if you are wrong you likely forfeit being able defend the claim on its merits. You also have to deal with any organizations you do business with who are exposed to the UK being ordered to take adverse actions like freeze or seize your accounts. Because an outlaw in the UK is no joke either, you'd potentially have to spend the rest of your life at risk of being arrested if by happenstance you found yourself in that jurisdiction (e.g. due to a rerouted aircraft), face discrimination from future employers or potential business contacts because of the specter of a judgement hanging over you. That said, had we not been able to secure funding for our defense we might well have defaulted anyways: if the defense would have bankrupted us, we'd be better off saving our funds and hoping to avoid enforcement of the judgement bankrupting us. But fortunately, Jack Dorsey and the chaincode founders stepped up.
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  > Unfortunately most developed nations are generally willing to domesticate the foreign judgements of other developed nations. There are exceptions, e.g. the SPEECH ACT makes many UK defamation claims largely unenforceable in the US... but even if you think you'd be able to block enforcement in your own jurisdiction, if you are wrong you likely forfeit being able defend the claim on its merits. I don't think this is true at all for the US, right? Not just because of the first amendment, but in general I don't think UK judgements are enforceable at all in the US. I wouldn't even think it would be enforceable in commonwealth countries. Do you have any examples of UK judgements such as those we are discussing being enforced in any of the five eyes countries aside from the UK?