High Court allows Craig Wright to sue Bitcoin Core developers

The High Court of London has allowed the self-proclaimed creator of Bitcoin, Craig Wright, to file a suit against the Bitcoin Core developers. This was reported by the law firm Ontier.

The company represents the interests of Tulip Trading Limited (TTL), which is owned by Wright. The defendants named include 16 developers, among them Jonas Schnelli, Peter Wuille, Marco Falke and Peter Todd. Attorneys noted that all of them reside outside the United Kingdom.

According to Ontier partner Paul Ferguson, if lawful ownership of the assets can be demonstrated, the Bitcoin developers are obliged to restore the funds. He contends that they are capable of deploying code that would allow Wright to regain control of the cryptocurrency.

Peter Todd, in a comment to Reuters, said that Wright has not proven his ownership of the cryptocurrency. In his words, Bitcoin is not subject to “arbitrary seizure”.

“If we allow the seizure and transfer of the coins by court order, this would put the cryptocurrency at risk of being stolen as a result of abusing this erroneous precedent”, said Todd.

According to the pre-litigation complaint, on February 5, 2020, unknown hackers hacked Wright’s computer and stole private keys from two TTL addresses. The plaintiff demanded that the developers restore the company’s control over the bitcoins.

The document lists two addresses that Wright had previously claimed. In June 2020, WizSec head Kim Nilsson confirmed that the 80,000 BTC allegedly belonging to the self-proclaimed Bitcoin creator on one of the wallets were stolen from Mt. Gox in March 2011 and have not moved since.

According to Blockchain.com, one of the indicated addresses holds 31,000 BTC, and the second 79,957 BTC. At the time of writing, the total value of the coins stands at $5.6 billion.

Earlier Wright demanded that the sites Bitcoin.org and Bitcoincore.org remove the Bitcoin white paper, accusing them of copyright infringement.

In April 2021, the court allowed the self-proclaimed creator of the first cryptocurrency to sue the owner of the Bitcoin.org site under the pseudonym Cobra.

a2a1bitcoin Developers Press Release 12 May 2021 by ForkLog on Scribd

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