Craig Wright, the man who has spent a large part of the last three years failing to prove he is Bitcoin’s Creator Satoshi Nakamoto, has gone to new lengths in his desperation to prove his case but has, once more, come up short. This time, Wright has registered for copyright to the 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper, which shot the price of Wright’s Bitcoin Cash SV (BSV) coin up over 100%, before the intricacies of the story came out and revealed that his claim is still as watertight as a fishing net.
Craig Wright filed a copyright registration for the Bitcoin whitepaper https://t.co/aIvg2BbmL2 pic.twitter.com/TVdU62TRRv
— Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) May 21, 2019
CoinGeek Sends BSV Flying
The first reports, which were tracked back to CoinGeek, stated that Wright had been “granted copyright” for the Bitcoin whitepaper, sending BSV from $62 to $132 within 45 minutes as the crypto world tried to get its head round the news and what it meant. The CoinGeek report at first seemed unequivocal:
Craig S. Wright has been granted U.S. copyright registrations for the famed original Bitcoin white paper, and most of the original Bitcoin code (version 0.1). Importantly, the registrations issued by the U.S. Copyright Office recognize Wright as the author – under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto – of both the white paper and code.
The report sent shockwaves through the community, helped by outlets re-publishing it without conducting any investigation first. Had they done so they would have found a number of issues with it, including the use of obviously partisan language, such as stating that Wright was “dismayed to see his original Bitcoin design bastardized by protocol developer groups”, not to mention the fact that CoinGeek is owned by co-BSV creator Calvin Ayre.
CoinGeek posts a huge number of pro-BSV and anti-non-BSV content on their site and only ever seeks the views of those associated with their project to bolster their case and reinforce their viewpoint, as they did with this report, but it’s likely that most people didn’t even get that far before re-publishing or tweeting about it.
Wright Has Simply Applied for Registration
The fact that CoinGeek was the source should have rung alarm bells in itself but seemingly didn’t, and it wasn’t until BSV had gone parabolic that the truth of the matter began to emerge. In the U.S. there is a huge difference between registering a copyright and having one granted. Anyone can register for a copyright, but it is largely meaningless until your claim has been granted or rejected. Registering does have some advantages however, which may be of more interest to Wright, at least in the short term:
Your registration will provide prima facie evidence (i.e. satisfy a basic level of proof) of the validity of your copyright. This does not mean that your claim of copyright ownership is guaranteed. However, instead of having to prove that you are the actual copyright owner, the other party will have to prove that you are not.
This is particularly important for Wright, who faces a number of lawsuits contesting his assertion that he is the Bitcoin creator. It is important to realize however that Wright has not been granted anything – he has simply registered his case for being Bitcoin’s creator, which anyone can do, and the need of evidence will only occur if a legal challenge ensues. All he has done is has use the vagaries of U.S. copyright law to require any legal challengers to use more proof against him than he would need to bolster his case, which ties in with our report on his pending case with Peter McCormack in the UK. This wasn’t enough for some supporters however, who still refused to buckle under the weight of evidence:
Copyrights got granted smartypants……
This was not just an application… if you want to fight he is not Satoshi, good luck, because he is.
Not only because an official granted him the copyrighted based on concrete proof, but on the fact that next few months people will
— oudekaas (@oudekaas3) May 21, 2019
In the words of Winston Churchill, “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” Wright and his cronies will do all they can to see that his continues.
