The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, is the biggest mystery in the crypto world. There is much speculation as to who is behind the first and most valuable crypto. The most famous is Australian academic Dr. Craig Wright. But after years of litigation, a British High Court judge has ruled that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.

The lawsuit was brought by a conglomerate of cryptocurrency companies called the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), which continued to claim that Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto and sought a ruling that would prevent them from using this perception to expand their influence in the field.

Guardian.

The Guardian report included a quote from attorney Jonathan Huff KC, who represented COPA. He argued that the claim that Wright created Bitcoin and wrote its white paper was "a bold-faced lie, an elaborate false narrative supported by industrial-scale forgeries." He added that "there are elements of Dr. Wright's conduct that get lost in the farce."

The group argued that Wright's corroborating evidence included provable forged documents, retroactive edits, and even traces of ChatGPT use, even though ChatGPT was not released until several years later.

The judge overwhelmingly agreed and, unusually, returned a verdict shortly after the conclusion of the trial. According to the trial report, Judge Mellor stated, "I am prepared to say this: Dr. Wright is not the inventor of Bitcoin," and "Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin White Paper, nor the person who adopted the name Satoshi Nakamoto."

Wright has spent years claiming to have invented bitcoin, fighting lawsuits across different jurisdictions. One well-known example is defending a fraud lawsuit filed in 2018 by the estate of American computer scientist Dave Kleiman. Kleiman died in 2013, and some have even suggested that he himself was Nakamoto. Wright lost the case and was ordered to pay $100 million in damages.

More than a decade has passed since Satoshi Nakamoto last posted a publicly known message on the Bitcointalk forum. There was no hint in that message that he was going anywhere. Is he dead? Or is "Satoshi Nakamoto" a group that has since disbanded?

Satoshi Nakamoto left behind a dormant wallet estimated to contain as much as 1.1 million bitcoins. This is equivalent to about $75 billion at the current price of bitcoin. If Wright had been Satoshi Nakamoto, his case would have been greatly strengthened by access to these early coins. He did not do so.

We may never know who the real person or persons behind Bitcoin are, but if Judge Mellor's ruling is final, the "Faketoshi" saga has come to an end.