Craig Wright tries to sue… Bitcoin?!

On 16 Feb (2020) The Cointelegraph reported about yet another threat with legal action coming from the never-ending saga … I mean the attack on Bitcoin that Craig Wright is trying to exercise.

If you don’t know his name, I’d assume you literally just heard about Bitcoin yesterday, so in one short sentence, this is the guy who for years now has been trying to convince the world that he is Satoshi Nakamoto while failing to prove it on a number of occasions. At first he rejected the idea that he is Satoshi or even involved with Satoshi to begin with, then he decided to “come clean” and in a series of public appearances on TV declared that he was in fact Satoshi, claiming that he owns the private keys to the Genesis block and will use them to prove his identity but as he tried to do that, it became clear he was lying. This earned him the nickname Faketoshi. Since then he’s been using his time to secure thousands of patents and trade marks involving the blockchain tech and since 2018 when he forked the Bitcoin protocol to create his own BSV coin (which he claims to be the “original bitcoin”) he’s been on a mission to destroy the current dominant chain – that of BTC.

In this latest report, Cointelegraph quotes him saying:

“As the creator of Bitcoin, I maintain the sui generis rights to any copy of the database created from Genesis in January 2009. I shall not be relinquishing the ownership. I will be licensing it, and have already engaged in a process.”

In other words, the guy wants to collect payments for any of the other projects that use the Bitcoin protocol… but there’s one key issue I take with this claim.

Bitcoin was originally designed to be open-source protocol, meaning anyone could use the code, change it and create a fork as they like. In addition to that, the name Bitcoin is not patented and is not considered a brand (as I was kindly reminded by Wright’s fanbase on many occasions during my lengthy debates with them).

If Wright is trying to claim sole ownership of Bitcoin, he is going against the very nature of the cryptocurrency which is one of decentralisation, open to everyone and free to use.

If there’s any doubt about this guy being Satoshi, let’s just look at the logic in his actions.

Satoshi published a white paper about a decentralised network, free from the control of any one entity. Craig Wright makes a claim that this is his own invention and that those who use it have to pay him. Kinda contradicts the very core value of the Satoshi vision, doesn’t it?

You can find the complete article from Cointelegraph here.