Craig Wright and the COPA ruling: what the High Court found, in its own words

Who Craig Wright is, and what he claimed

Craig Steven Wright was born and raised in Australia and lived there until 2015, when he moved to the United Kingdom. His background is in IT security: the High Court’s judgment records work in the 1990s as a security consultant to the Australian Stock Exchange and a security consultancy he founded, DeMorgan. He claims more than sixteen master’s degrees and two doctorates. From 2015 he was closely associated with nChain, a UK company whose financial backer, the Canadian businessman Calvin Ayre, supported his claim.

That claim, to be Satoshi Nakamoto, became public on 2 May 2016 in what the court later called the “Big Reveal.” In the weeks before, Wright had held private “proof sessions” in which, on his account, he showed possession of private keys tied to early blocks: with Bitcoin Foundation founding director Jon Matonis in mid-March, with former lead developer Gavin Andresen in early April, and with journalists from the BBC and the Economist in late April. On the day itself, Andresen and Matonis published blog posts saying they were convinced, the BBC and Economist ran their stories, and Wright posted a blog entry titled “Jean-Paul Sartre, signing and significance.”

Fortune described him at the time as an Australian entrepreneur and bitcoin backer who had presented his evidence to the BBC, the Economist and GQ, and quoted Matonis saying he was firmly convinced. Two people the community trusted had vouched for him. The court’s judgment refers to what came next as the backlash to his failed blog post.

Why the 2016 “proof” proved nothing

Proving you hold a Bitcoin private key is easy, and that is the point. The verifier picks a fresh message, the claimant signs it with the key, and anyone can check the signature against the public key on their own computer. The judgment records that Wright’s own expert accepted all of this: such a proof takes minutes, needs no internet connection, and puts the key at no risk.

The Sartre blog post did not do that. The court recorded the expert’s agreement that it was “clearly not a genuine proof” of possession of any private key, and that every one of the private sessions, with the journalists, with Matonis and with Andresen, could have been spoofed by straightforward means without any visible warning. Adding his own initials to the message Andresen had chosen, the expert agreed, served no security purpose. After the backlash, requests that Wright sign a fresh message with Satoshi’s known key were met with explanations about missing “key slices.”

That is the whole case in miniature. The proof that would have ended the argument in five minutes was never given, in 2016 or in the eight years of litigation that followed.

What COPA is, and why it went to court

The Crypto Open Patent Alliance describes itself, in words the court quoted, as a non-profit community of people and companies formed to encourage the adoption of cryptocurrency technologies and to remove patents as a barrier. Its members are companies in the Bitcoin industry; the court noted that although individuals may join, none had.

COPA sued Wright in 2021, asking the court to declare that he is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper and does not own its copyright. The reason was practical. Wright had been suing and threatening developers and companies on the footing that, as Satoshi, he owned rights in the white paper, the early software and even the blockchain as a database. The judge later referred to the “extremely unpleasant threats” Wright had made against individual developers. Settling the identity question would knock out the foundation of every one of those claims.

The trial of the identity issue ran from 5 February 2024 to 14 March 2024, twenty-two sitting days, before Mr Justice Mellor in the High Court in London. It was a joint trial: the same finding would decide COPA’s claim and a preliminary issue in Wright’s own case against the Bitcoin Core developers.

14 March 2024: the judge announced the result from the bench

Judges usually reserve judgment and deliver it weeks later. Here, at the end of closing arguments on the trial’s last day, Mr Justice Mellor said he felt able to announce the result, because the evidence was “overwhelming.” He made four declarations: that Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper; that he is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto between 2008 and 2011; that he is not the person who created the Bitcoin system; and that he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software.

COPA issued a statement the same day calling it a win for developers and the open source community. Reporters in the courtroom quoted the judge’s words within hours. The written reasons, the judge said, would follow.

20 May 2024: the written judgment, in the judge’s own words

The written judgment arrived on 20 May 2024. Its summary is blunt. Wright, the judge wrote, “lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly,” and most of the lies concerned documents he had forged to support his claim. Those forgeries were, in the court’s words, “on a grand scale.” Whatever evidence was said to support him was at best questionable or circumstantial and at worst fabricated. The judge added that most of the forgeries had turned out to be clumsy.

The conclusion restates the finding: the case that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto is overwhelming, and the judge had looked for reliable evidence supporting the claim and found none. COPA’s statement gave the document’s length as 1,736 paragraphs including its appendix, much of it devoted to the individual documents.

It is worth being precise about what the court did and did not decide. It decided that Wright is not Satoshi. It did not decide who Satoshi is, and it did not need to. For what the record does establish, see who is Satoshi Nakamoto and the origins dossier.

July 2024: injunctions, a dismissed case and a referral to prosecutors

On 16 July 2024 the judge ruled on what should follow. He granted two injunctions. The first bars Wright and his companies from starting, or procuring anyone else to start, proceedings anywhere in the world that assert he is Satoshi, wrote the white paper, created Bitcoin or owns the associated copyrights and database rights. The second bars him from threatening such proceedings. He declined some of the broader orders COPA sought, which would have restrained Wright from asserting the claim outside court.

He dismissed Wright’s own claim against the Bitcoin Core developers, which Wright did not oppose. And he referred the papers to the Crown Prosecution Service, the body that brings criminal cases in England and Wales, to consider whether Wright should be prosecuted for perjury and forgery, writing that if this case did not warrant a referral it was difficult to envisage one that would. He also referred the evidence of Stefan Matthews, a long-time supporter of Wright’s claim, for consideration of perjury.

December 2024: contempt of court, and a suspended prison sentence

Three months later Wright tested the injunction. On 9 October 2024 he posted on X that he intended to bring a passing-off claim against Bitcoin developers, focusing on misrepresentation rather than his identity so as to sidestep the High Court’s judgment. On 10 October he filed that claim against “BTC Core” and SquareUp Europe Limited, putting its value at more than £911 billion. COPA applied to have him committed for contempt.

On 19 December 2024, after a hearing Wright declined to attend, the judge found all five grounds of contempt proved to the criminal standard, beyond reasonable doubt, adding that there was no doubt whatever about any of them. The next day he imposed twelve months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years. The sentence will be activated if Wright breaches the July order again in that period; the judge said his principal concern was that the order be observed. Wright was also ordered to pay £145,000 toward COPA’s costs within fourteen days.

Because Wright lives outside the jurisdiction, the judge noted, he could avoid the consequences of a sanction by staying abroad, and the suspended sentence was shaped with that in mind. Later proceedings may add to this record; the court documents cited below are the place to check.