UK Justice James Mellor minced no words slamming Dr. Craig Wright, a computer scientist who has tried to prove he is Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.

Wright has claimed for years to be Nakamoto, taking his claims to court in an effort to be legally recognized as Bitcoin’s creator and reap the financial rewards that would come with the recognition. Justice Mellor’s ruling came in the civil trial brought by Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) aimed at disproving Wright is Nakamoto and crippling his ability to continue suing crypto companies.

“Thus, Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person,” Justice Mellor wrote. “However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. 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. 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.

“Many of Dr Wright’s lies contained a grain of truth (which is sometimes said to be the mark of an accomplished liar), but there were many which did not and were outright lies,” Justice Mellor added. “As soon as one lie was exposed, Dr Wright resorted to further lies and evasions. The final destination frequently turned out to be either Dr Wright blaming some other (often unidentified) person for his predicament or what can only be described as technobabble delivered by him in the witness box.”

Interestingly, after hearing the mountain of evidence submitted in the trial, Justice Mellor has his own opinion on the age-old question of whether Nakamoto is a single individual or if the pseudonym was used by a group of people.

Satoshi Nakamoto was and remains a pseudonym,” he wrote. “Although this is not of any significant weight in my overall conclusion, my personal view, having heard all the evidence in this Trial, is that it is likely that a number of people contributed to the creation of Bitcoin, albeit that there may well have been one central individual. It would therefore be accurate to refer to Satoshi as he/she/they to reflect the possibilities, but unwieldy. I will therefore refer to Satoshi simply as ‘he’, but it is a shorthand for he/she/they.”

Needless to say, Wright has already indicated he intends to appeal the ruling.

I fully intend to appeal the decision of the court on the matter of the identity issue. I would like to acknowledge and thank all my supporters for their unwavering encouragement and support. In the meantime, I shall continue to work closely with the Teranode team to achieve scaling beyond three million transactions per second. At present, Teranode is achieving one million tps and we are ensuring that the cloud-based server configurations function correctly in a way that does not impact scaling. However, even at a lower level of transaction processing, Teranode is far more efficient than the existing node structure and will lead to cost savings as well as a path to scalability.

^Posted by LB on behalf of CSW.

— Dr. Craig S Wright (@Dr_CSWright) | May 20, 2024