Self-Described Bitcoin Creator Denies Friend Helped Mine Fortune
Self-Described Bitcoin Creator Denies Friend Helped Mine Fortune
(Bloomberg) -- The self-described creator of Bitcoin emphatically denied in court that his late friend and fellow computer scientist helped him launch the cryptocurrency.
While Craig Wright acknowledged that the two worked together, the Australian entrepreneur insisted in his testimony this week that they only mined Bitcoin together for test purposes, not for profit. If the jury buys that explanation it could shield Wright from having to split a $73 billion fortune he would control if he’s truly the founder of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
The creator’s identity has been a mystery for years. He’s known to the world only as Satoshi Nakamoto, and it isn’t clear if he was a real person. The lawsuit is premised upon the notion that Wright was at least part of Satoshi Nakamoto, but that belief is not widely shared in the Bitcoin community -- and nothing that’s come out so far in federal court in Miami proves that it’s true.
Instead, the trial has focused on the existence and nature of the partnership between Wright and the deceased Dave Kleiman, whose estate claims it has been cheated out of its share of the immense wealth created by their collaboration.
The Satoshi question may not come to a head unless Kleiman’s estate prevails and tries to collect its half of a cache of 1.1 million Bitcoins thought to be held by the currency’s creator. While the trial has been underway, the world’s largest digital token reached an all-time high of $68,513, and has since dropped to $66,690.
The stakes are still high for Wright if he turns out not to be Satoshi, as he has crypto-related companies that were at one point valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to exhibits shown to the jury.
“Everything in my heart died when Dave died,” Wright told the jury, choking up as he described their relationship.
Even so, it simply isn’t true that the two had teamed up to create or mine, he said while under cross-examination by a lawyer for the Kleiman estate.
Wright was presented with emails showing him in his own words talking about mining Bitcoin with Kleiman. But he said the nature of the “mining” described in the emails is being mischaracterized.
Mining is conventionally thought of as the extraction of new Bitcoin from the network by solving super-complex math problems that require powerful computers. By solving the problems, miners help create blocks of transactions that form Bitcoin’s digital ledger.
Instead, Wright said, the “testing” he and Kleiman did together was a follow-up to reports of Bitcoin’s involvement in illicit finance in 2011, associated with the dark web marketplace known as Silk Road.
“Dave in 2011-2013 helped me build the system that helped me recognize that I wasn’t a complete failure, that I hadn’t brought something evil into the world,” Wright said.
The case against Wright relies heavily on email traffic from after Kleiman’s death, in which the Australian communicates with various associates and Ira Kleiman, Dave’s brother and the representative of his estate. The jury has also heard podcast interviews in which Wright has told interviewers about Kleiman’s involvement with the Satoshi Nakamoto project.
Wright, welling up with emotion, claimed he may have exaggerated Kleiman’s role after his death in part to burnish the legacy of a man he considered to be underappreciated.
“Yes I exaggerated about a loved one to someone I thought was family,” he said.
Wright’s lawyers have pointed out the email traffic between the men during the time period when Bitcoin was created doesn’t mention the project. Kleiman’s brother was asked specifically about the “white paper” that laid out the implementation plan for the peer-to-peer currency -- and whether he’d seen correspondence showing his brother was involved with it.
“I wouldn’t know because I never had access to those emails,” Ira Kleiman said.
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