An Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the creator of bitcoin has been given a one-year suspended prison sentence after the high court in London ruled he was in contempt because he would not stop suing people.
Mr Justice Mellor had already found that Craig Wright, 54, repeatedly lied about his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the person or people who launched bitcoin – the cryptocurrency that was first mined in 2009 and recently soared in value to £79,000.
Wright had claimed intellectual property rights associated with bitcoin, but that was demolished when the high court found he lied about his role, deploying often clumsy forgeries “on a grand scale” and “technobabble”. The real Nakamoto is likely to be a billionaire because they are thought to own 1 million bitcoins.
Wright was then ordered to stop taking legal actions against bitcoin developers, but defied that court order in October when he brought suits against cryptocurrency developers amounting to more than £900bn in respect of his claimed intellectual property rights related to bitcoin.
He also repeated his claim that he was Nakamoto, said Jonathan Hough KC, counsel for the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (Copa), a non-profit group including cryptocurrency firms which brought the action against Wright.
On Thursday Wright was sentenced for five counts of contempt of court. Sentencing him to 12 months in jail, suspended for two years and to pay £145,000 in costs within a fortnight, the court also struck out his enormous claim.
Hough told the court that Wright’s legal threats had “terrorised” people, putting “developers and bloggers through … years of personal hell” and that the new claims were intended to “cause maximum possible distress”.
His latest legal actions were a “desperate publicity stunt to keep his cultish supporters engaged”, Hough said. He added that Wright had sought to resist by alleging judicial bias and had even claimed he was the victim of the British aristocracy because of the appearance of the word “Lord” in the court judgments against him. The judge found Wright’s contempt was proven “beyond reasonable doubt”.
Wright, who appeared by video link from somewhere in Asia – he refused to say where – said he would appeal. He had refused to abide by an order to attend in person during a hearing on Wednesday when he said that he could only do so if he was paid £240,000 to cover his costs and lost earnings.
The court room was packed with onlookers including a man in a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: “This is just an elaborate fiction.”
In a high court judgment handed down in May, Mellor said that Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person, “however, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is”. He said he was an “extremely slippery witness”.
“In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the court extensively and repeatedly,” the judge said. “Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.”
