Craig Wright now claims Bitcoin is his intellectual property ๐จ This article is 5 years old...
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Craig Wright now claims Bitcoin is his intellectual property
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Updated: Feb. 18, 2020 at 4:39 pm UTC
Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate. Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
Craig Wright claimed that Bitcoin is his intellectual property and that all of those that infringed on it (i.e. Bitcoin Core developers) are about to be legally prosecuted. The self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto outlined other equally ridiculous ideas in his blog post, including that all nodes and miners in the Bitcoin network are his personal agents.
Wright puts Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash developers on notice
Craig Wright is back in the news again, but this time it isn’t connected to his ongoing trial with Ira Kleiman. Instead, the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto is making headlines for his blog post, in which he threatened to sue the developers of Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash.
In a Feb. 13 post on his website, Wright discussed, in length, his “original vision” for Bitcoin and how its forks have strayed from it. According to the post, as the “sole creator” of Bitcoin, he owns the full rights to the Bitcoin registry. That means that the software can be forked and alternative versions of it created as long as the underlying database is left intact, he explained.
Wright then went on to say that both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, which he called Bitcoin Core (Core) and Bitcoin ABC (ABC), have sought to use his database without permission.
This, he said, is about to come to an end.
“Those involved with the copied systems that are passing themselves off as Bitcoin, namely BTC or CoreCoin and BCH or BCash, are hereby put on notice,” he said in the post. “Please trust me when I say that Iโm far nicer before the lawyers get involved.”
Bitcoin’s decentralization claim is “cherry-picked out of context”
In a bid to provide backing to his ridiculous claim over the ownership of Bitcoin, Wright said that Bitcoin’s centralization is oversold. According to him, the abstract of the Bitcoin whitepaper, the one he claims to have written, is “cherry-picked out of context” and often leads to a false viewโone that Bitcoin is a completely decentralized system with no point of ownership.
What Bitcoin is, he alleges, is a distributed registry whose property rights belong solely to him. Code, if you were to believe Wright, isn’t the law after all.
Throughout the blog post, Wright kept implying that the only ownership over the network was his. The nChain scientist quoted section 15 of the U.K. Databases Regulations of 1997, which said that the maker of a database is the first owner of a database, not its subsequent members. As such, he explained, miners and nodes have no rights.
“Nodes and miners are thus subcontracting in accordance with the initially constructed set of rules that I created. That is, they are following a set of rules and acting as my agents,” he wrote.
We are yet to see whether Wright goes ahead with the lawsuits against Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin
Cash developers. Having previously seen several of his lawsuits dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction, Wright seemed to have explored this issue in depth. He noted in the blog post that as senior partners in the Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash “partnerships” reside within Europe and the U.K., which presents the opportunity to incorporate them in the lawsuit without any “jurisdictional challenges.
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Bitcoin, a decentralized currency that defies the sway of central banks or administrators, transacts electronically, circumventing intermediaries via a peer-to-peer network.
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Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency created via a fork of the Bitcoin network.
Craig Steven Wright, commonly referred to as CSW, is an Australian computer scientist and business professional who has been at the center of controversy within the cryptocurrency community.