- Craig Wright will sue Coinbase and potentially other exchanges over listing Bitcoin
- Wright confirmed in an interview that “the biggest legal case in human history” will drop later this year
- The Australian man said last year that the case had been “3 years in the planning”
Craig Wright will sue Coinbase and probably other major exchanges later this year over their listing of Bitcoin. Wright, who claims that his Bitcoin fork BSV is the real incarnation of the Bitcoin whitepaper, yesterday promised “the biggest legal case in human history” with reference to Bitcoin being “passed off” as the real thing by exchanges, a proposition his legal backer Calvin Ayre said was a “good bet”. Wright has a long-standing hatred for Coinbase, and it is clear that his goal is to force them and others to either license BSV or force Bitcoin to change its name or both.
Wright Promises “Biggest Legal Case in Human History”
Wright was speaking yesterday to David Porter, Chief Operating Officer at GlobalBoost, when the subject of Bitcoin and BSV came up, a conversation that saw Wright up the stakes in his legal battle to force BSV on the world:
…they’re passing off, and you’ll see that later this year. I’ll give you a little hint, it’s probably going to be the biggest legal case in human history globally. This one’s going to make British American Tobacco look small.
It’s not clear which of the various lawsuits British American Tobacco has been involved in that Wright is referring to, but in 2015 the company was forced to pay out more than $15 billion to Canadian smokers in a landmark class action case. A BSV supporter then tweeted the supposition that Wright was going to sue Coinbase over the use of the Bitcoin name, which Calvin Ayre, who funds all of Craig Wright’s cases, agreed with:
Ya, good bet
— Calvin Ayre (@CalvinAyre) March 9, 2022
This agreement from Ayre more or less confirms that the case is going ahead, and soon.
Coinbase Case Has Been Building
There is plenty of evidence that Wright has been building towards a lawsuit against major exchanges, particularly Coinbase. In November last year he told his BSV community that the wheels were already in fact in motion:
There is a way out for Coinbase. If they negotiate a licence, list bitcoin (BSV)…They get to exist. If not, we obliterate them. Material event, why? The suit against Coinbase will exceed the market value at the ATH, that of all directors and officers and still not be paid.
This was followed by a pronouncement of death the following day:
Just remember… I am only just beginning. If you think anyone who opposes me and my ORIGINAL protocol survives this, that any company that claims BTC is bitcoin does not go down in flames…2022 will be the harvest year. My scythe is sharp. When this goes to court, it will cost them their existence. Let them know they have a choice. Let them know that the window of opportunity is about to close. Let them know the noose is already about their neck.
Wright’s claims are centered around his supposition that Bitcoin as it exists now has been so removed from the original vision in the whitepaper with the introduction of Segwit, the Lightning Network, and Taproot that it can no longer be called ‘Bitcoin’.
BSV on the other hand has none of these features and scales only by increasing block size, with the result that BSV miners are mining 2GB blocks and higher. This has led to the number of nodes able to service the protocol crashing from the hundreds when the protocol launched in 2018 to just over a dozen now, with successive 51% attacks occurring on the network last year. These shortcomings, and more, have been discussed the popular podcast series Dr Bitcoin – The Man Who Wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto, which recently passed 10,000 listens across podcast platforms.
Case Will Take Years to Play Out
Wright’s plans to sue Coinbase and other exchanges for listing Bitcoin were hinted at in another interview he gave last week where he said that, “You’ll see some extra stuff coming this year that’s going to rock the foundations of the crypto industry, which is a big con job in itself”.
Wright also promised in the same November 2021 rant that he was going to fund a class action lawsuit against Coinbase if they don’t seek a license to host BSV, including against “every investor, every director, every single corporate officer”, adding that, “Just the action will drop them to under 50 usd a share”. This would represent a 90% drop from its current price, something that BSV holders will be all too familiar with.
Of course, a case of this size would take years to play out, meaning that Bitcoin holders are safe for some time to come yet…and possibly forever.
