Craig Wright Says Bitcoin Devs 'Misled the Public' in New $1 Billion Lawsuit

Craig Wright launched a new legal battle claiming that Bitcoin developers have deviated from the original vision of the project and insisting that Bitcoin SV is the real Bitcoin.

The claim is seeking from the defendants the difference in market valuation between the two coins, over $1.18 billion.

If Wright’s name sounds familiar, that’s because he previously claimed to be the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto himself, getting tied up into a legal battle that he ultimately lost.

The recently filed UK High Court claim states that the defendants have “altered the original Bitcoin protocol” through the introduction of the SegWit and Taproot upgrades which “fundamentally deviates” from the original vision set out by Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator Bitcoin. As a result he believes that the defendants created “confusion within the market” and “misled the public into believing that BTC retains the attributes of the original Bitcoin.”

Named in the lawsuit is Bitcoin Core, the developers of Bitcoin node software, and Jack Dorsey’s Square Up Europe Limited, a payment service that funded a Bitcoin Lightning Network company.

Wright is seeking the difference in market value between Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV), claiming the latter is the real Bitcoin. When the form was filed, Bitcoin was trading at $62,000 (£48,000) while BSV sat at just $65 (£50), in turn the claim seeks a total of $1.18 billion (£911 million) from the defendants.

This reflects the “financial impact of misrepresentation and resulting market loss,” the claim states.

It is true that SegWit and Taproot fundamentally changed Bitcoin. When SegWit launched in 2017 to fix a host of bugs and increase the network’s efficiency, it was highly contentious. So much so that it led to the hard fork that gave rise to Bitcoin SV, short for Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision.

Then in 2021, Taproot improved privacy and data efficiency while reducing transaction costs on the network, again leading to a hard fork. This time the result of that fork was Bitcoin Cash.

Wright maintains that changes altered Bitcoin enough that it’s now misleading to still call it “Bitcoin.” Instead, he argues, Bitcoin SV deserves the mononym Bitcoin.

“The claim shows a complete misunderstanding of the decentralized ethos lying at the heart of Bitcoin,” Lanny Tuchmayer, lawyer and director of operations at Bergel Magence LLP, told Decrypt. “Any changes to the protocol are considered through community consensus, while his notion of exclusive intellectual property rights is in complete conflict with the open-source nature of the project itself.”

This isn’t the first lawsuit that Wright has brought forward regarding Bitcoin.

Up until recently, Wright had been embroiled in a legal battle with Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a Jack Dorsey-backed organization as well as a group of Bitcoin Core developers. The point of contention in that case was Wright’s claim to be the creator of Bitcoin and therefore the holder of the copyright to the Bitcoin whitepaper.

Earlier this year, a UK court ruled that Wright did not invent Bitcoin and is not Satoshi Nakamoto. He was then ordered to publicly declare he did not create Bitcoin.

“Considering the previous court decisions and growing skepticism over the legitimacy of his claims,” Tuchmayer added, “I very much doubt he can succeed this time.”

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

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