A court case has been won by a computer scientist who claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin, allowing him to maintain a billion-dollar cryptocurrency stockpile.
The jury denied Craig Wright’s former business partner half of the assets, according to BBC. Mr Wright will keep 1.1 million Bitcoins worth $54 billion (£40 billion) as a result of this decision.
Wright will, however, compensate Dave Kleiman’s family with $100 million for infringing on their intellectual property.
What you should know
According to the family of Mr Kleiman, a computer security expert who died in 2013, the two men collaborated to create and mine the first Bitcoin, which Mr Wright then allegedly stole.
In 2008, a white paper published under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto detailed the creation of the cryptocurrency.
Mr Wright has claimed to be Nakamoto since 2016, albeit this allegation has been debunked.
In the civil lawsuit, a Miami jury found Mr Wright not guilty on nearly all of the grounds raised by Mr Kleiman’s family.
Is Mr Wright the real Satoshi Nakamoto?
Due to the solved mystery of Bitcoin’s origin, the court verdict received a lot of attention. The digital currency was developed in 2008, and the creator’s identity has been the subject of much discussion.
Satoshi Nakamoto, who Craig claims to be, wrote a nine-page white paper describing his ideas as the US market began to recover from the global financial crisis.
However, despite the fact that the Miami court tacitly identified Wright as the Bitcoin creator by awarding him the rights to $54 billion in cache coins, there is still no concrete evidence that Wright is the genuine Satoshi Nakamoto.
It’s worth noting that if Wright hadn’t won the lawsuit, he would have had to pay the entire sum to Kleiman’s estate, but the Australian computer scientist was confident. He’d also stated that if he won the case, he’d donate most of his bitcoin riches to charity.
