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07th Dec 2021

Man who claims to have invented Bitcoin wins claim to one million Bitcoin

Kieran Galpin

Bitcoin

‘This was a tremendous victory for our side’

The man who claims he invented Bitcoin, one of the largest cryptocurrency’s, has won his legal fight worth tens of billions of dollars.

Australian computer scientist Craig Wright has been wrapped up in a huge legal battle against the family of his dead business partner David Kleiman.

Kleiman’s family took Wright to court for half of their alleged shared assets, which totals 1.1million Bitcoins.

Wright claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the person (or persons) slated to have developed Bitcoin, authored the Bitcoin white paper and created Bitcoin’s original reference implementation.

While many have claimed to be Nakamoto, categorical evidence is scarce and has left the title all about untouched.

Kleiman’s family allege that both Wright and his former partner developed Bitcoin together – meaning they are entitled to half of the assets believed to total $71bn Australian dollars.

However a Florida jury gave the case to Wright, which means he keeps all of the assets but the jury granted Kleiman’s family $142m worth of intellectual property rights in honour of the shared partnership.

This is one of the first instances where cryptocurrencies have played a part in a court setting, and so, all jurors needed some base knowledge on the subject.

“This was a tremendous victory for our side,” said Andres Rivero, who represented Wright.

While the court proceedings are finally over, there is still no indication of Nakamoto’s true identity. Though the wider crypto-community refute Wright’s claim, citing that the creation is too sophisticated for one designer, Wright continues to insist he was alone in Bitcoin’s creation.

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