Craig Wright offers settlement to Bitcoin developers

The crypto world is rife with scammers, including the Colorado pastor I wrote about on Monday who spent the proceeds from a token hustle on home renovations because “the Lord told us to.” But one of these scoundrels looms above the others for the sheer perversity of his lies—namely his claim to be Bitcoin’s founder, Satoshi Nakamoto—and for the misery he has inflicted on others with a decade of spurious lawsuits.

Longtime crypto watchers know who I am talking about: Craig Wright. Ordinarily, I make a point of not writing about Wright because part of his con game is to persuade the media to cover his antics, and then use the coverage to advance the claim he is Satoshi. He is not. That’s been clear since at least 2015 when Wright failed to produce a piece of evidence he claimed to possess in the form of Satoshi’s private key. Since then, Wright has been discredited many times over—including over his propensity for forgery and academic plagiarism—yet still he persists with his stupid lawsuits.

This would be funny but for the people he has harmed. This includes exploiting the U.K.’s dreadful libel laws to nearly ruin Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack until an appeals court tossed a ruling to pay Wright’s legal costs because, well, he is a liar who is not Satoshi. Most recently, Wright has turned to another bogus legal strategy in the form of claiming he owns intellectual property related to Bitcoin and then suing developers who help maintain the open-source code.

The IP claims are nonsense, of course, but Wright nonetheless got some traction in court until Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey stepped in to help the Bitcoin developers mount a defense. That’s when things got decidedly more fun. In October, a U.K. judge agreed to let the developers to press claims of their own that Wright had put forged documents before the court to support his fabrications. The judge set a date for this month to look more closely at the forgery allegations.

Now, lo and behold, Wright is suddenly holding out a settlement offer to the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, which is allied with the defendants. Such a deal is out of character for a charlatan like Wright, and, as several lawyers have pointed out, the only reason he would offer one is that he fears he is in deep trouble. And he is. It is a serious matter to lie to a judge and much worse to file forged documents as evidence. Wright and his lawyers should be very worried.

The question now is whether the developers will agree to the settlement. So far, it looks like they won’t. On Wednesday, they took to social media to declare “hard pass” in part because Wright’s proposed deal included yet more dishonesty. This means the court inquiry into his forgery is set to go forward, setting the table for one of crypto’s worst liars and bullies to face justice.

Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts

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