Verdict in Craig Wright Civil Trial: $100M Award for Plaintiff; No Punitive Damages

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  • Wright’s defense team declared vic­to­ry, as their client avoid­ed the worst outcomes
  • The jury was ini­tial­ly unable to reach agree­ment last week but were instruct­ed by the judge to keep trying

Jurors in the Flori­da tri­al of Craig Wright, an Aus­tralian com­put­er sci­en­tist who claims to have invent­ed Bit­coin, were dead­locked as recent­ly as last Wednes­day, after sev­er­al days of delib­er­a­tions. The judge in the case, US Dis­trict Judge Beth Bloom, issued what’s known as an Allen charge, instruct­ing them to “care­ful­ly reex­am­ine and recon­sid­er all the evi­dence” in an attempt to reach an agree­ment. Now they have.

On Mon­day, the jury found Wright liable on one of the plaintiff’s claims, that of con­ver­sion — unau­tho­rized pos­ses­sion of per­son­al prop­er­ty,  in this case intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty — and award­ed $100 mil­lion in dam­ages, accord­ing to court doc­u­ments. Notably, no bit­coin was direct­ly ordered to be paid.

Wright could have been found liable for a range of behav­ior includ­ing fraud, theft, breach of fidu­cia­ry duty, with dam­ages poten­tial­ly reach­ing into the bil­lions, there­fore he and his legal team see the out­come as a victory. 

“This has been a remark­ably good out­come — I feel com­plete­ly vin­di­cat­ed,” Wright told his sup­port­ers in a record­ed video mes­sage.

The jury reject­ed plain­tiff Ira Kleiman’s claim that his deceased broth­er David was a busi­ness part­ner of Wright’s, and decid­ed that Wright would owe noth­ing to the David Kleiman estate. Instead, the sole mon­e­tary award went to W&K Info Defense Research LLC, a com­pa­ny for which Ira Kleiman is now the only reg­is­tered direc­tor, but that was once a joint ven­ture between Wright, his wife at the time Lynn Wright, and David Kleiman.

In a sep­a­rate legal maneu­ver, the own­er­ship of the com­pa­ny is an ongo­ing mat­ter of dis­pute, and Lynn Wright con­tends that Ira Kleiman was “not autho­rized to act on behalf of W&K Info Defense.”

Lawyers for Ira Kleiman, see the jury award as a win for their client, even if it falls far short of what they claimed:

Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin stash

The iden­ti­ty of Satoshi Nakamo­to was not a sub­ject of this case. It was sim­ply assumed that Wright had access to Satoshi’s 1.1 mil­lion bit­coins, which could have been award­ed as dam­ages. The jury elect­ed not to award any bit­coins, opt­ing instead to levy mon­ey dam­ages in dollars.

For Ira Kleiman to col­lect on the $100 mil­lion from Wright due to W&K Info Defense Research, he will first have to resolve the dis­pute over the company’s own­er­ship. If he does retain con­trol, and suc­cess­ful­ly turns the jury award into a defin­i­tive mon­ey judg­ment that Wright must pay, the ques­tion remains, where will the mon­ey come from?

Ear­li­er in the tri­al, the ini­tial judge, Judge Rein­hart, found that Wright sub­mit­ted forged doc­u­ments and offered per­jured tes­ti­mo­ny relat­ed to the pro­duc­tion of a list of bit­coin address­es under his (sup­pos­ed­ly Satoshi’s) control.

Wright has so far failed to prove that he is in pos­ses­sion of, or has access to, the pri­vate keys need­ed to move those ear­ly Satoshi-mined bit­coins. Absent such proof, he is unlike­ly to per­suade skep­tics that he is in fact Satoshi.

Wright dis­putes the con­sen­sus view of what bit­coin even is. In 2018, Wright’s pre­ferred bit­coin, BSV, which stands for “Bit­coin Satoshi’s Vision”, forked from the Bit­coin Cash (BCH) blockchain, which itself forked from the orig­i­nal BTC chain in 2017.

Spec­u­la­tors evi­dent­ly view the tri­al out­come as ben­e­fi­cial for the prospects of the bit­coin fork — BSV has surged 34% in the past 24 hours and now as a mar­ket cap of just under $3 bil­lion. That remains a far cry from the mar­ket cap of BCH at about $9 bil­lion, much less the BTC mar­ket cap of $962 billion.


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  • Macauley Peter­son

    Macauley has been an edi­tor and con­tent cre­ator in the pro­fes­sion­al chess world for 14 years. In 2020 he grad­u­at­ed from Bucerius Law School (Ham­burg, Ger­many) with a Mas­ter in Law and Busi­ness, where he researched sta­ble­coins, decen­tral­ized finance and cen­tral bank dig­i­tal cur­ren­cies. He also holds an MA in Film Stud­ies and his film cred­its include Asso­ciate Pro­duc­er of the 2016 fea­ture doc­u­men­tary, “Mag­nus” about World Chess Cham­pi­on Mag­nus Carlsen.



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