- Two UK legal cases brought by Craig Wright to try and prove his claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto may collapse as the he has not yet paid the hefty security costs
- Wright owes almost a million dollars as security for two cases he has filed
- Wright previously relied on Calvin Ayre for funding but this pool now seems to have dried up
Two British legal cases that will go some way to formally determining the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto could be on the ropes due to the plaintiff failing to pay the first tranche of security costs totaling almost $1 million. Craig Wright, who has launched multiple lawsuits in the UK against crypto exchanges, developers, and more, owes the figure to ensure that, were he to lose, the defendants would receive their legal costs. Wright has previously relied on his sugar daddy, Calvin Ayre, for his lawsuit costs, but a falling out between the pair has led to the man who once boasted about having more money than the country of Rwanda having to pay for his own lawsuits, which so far is not going well.
Wright’s Chances Going Downhill
Wright has several cases going through the British courts, all predicated on him being Satoshi Nakamoto, a claim he has made unsuccessfully since 2016. Underpinning Wright’s entire plan is the premise that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and in June the judge overseeing several of them agreed that the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) vs Craig Wright trial would determine the ‘identity’ issue on behalf of all the other cases.
Wright has been celebrating this as if it is a victory, but things have gone downhill since; Wright was sacked from nChain along with CEO Christen Ager-Hanssen after the latter revealed that a mock trial had gone disastrously, with Wright unable to back up his Satoshi stories against a barrister asking tough questions. This was accompanied by Ager-Hanssen denouncing Wright as a fraud in the wake of their joint dismissal over his Satoshi claims, having seen forged evidence firsthand.
900-page Forgery Report
Last week, the judge in the COPA case allowed the claimants to add forgery and document manipulation to their list of charges they aim to prove in court against Wright, stating that it had acquired a 900-page report debunking all of the evidence Wright had offered in the case. Wright’s camp tried to have this thrown out but the judge agreed it was already effectively part of the trial, but asked COPA to pick its top 50 forgeries over the 400+ it had detected.
With things looking bleak for Wright, the demand for money will have come at the worst time, for several reasons. In an order filed yesterday, Wright was told that, having been late to pay already, he had a week to stump up the first half of the £650,000 ($793,000) he owes for the Pineapple Hack case or it will be kicked. Similarly, he has until the 18th to pay £488,000 ($595,000) as security for another case that will be beholden to the identity issue verdict.
One of the defendants, Bitcoin developer Greg Maxwell, claimed on Reddit that Wright had sent the defendants “suspiciously poor photographs of cheques made out from his joint account…but when we checked with the court he hadn’t actually completed the payment.”
Wright’s Ability to Pay Up in the Ayre
In the past, this wouldn’t have been a problem for Wright, seeing as he could have just asked Calvin Ayre to cut him a cheque. However, Ager-Hanssen’s revelations also included an email from Ayre to Wright saying how he was done with Wright’s court cases and would no longer fund them, suggesting that Wright has had to find funding on his own.
This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, however, given that Wright boasted in May 2018 to the people of Rwanda, “I’ve got more money than you’re country,” and is known for his multiple luxury cars and expensive properties.
Wright previously relied on Ayre’s gullibility in believing his stories over trusts containing hundreds of thousands of bitcoin, but he may find it harder to convince any would-be financiers over these already debunked trusts.
However, Wright recently claimed in the epilogue to the Kleiman v. Wright case that he had no assets to his name in his efforts to exculpate himself from the $143 million he owes W&K Info Defense. While Ayre acknowledged the legitimacy of the email to Wright, in which he all but called Wright out as a lost cause, he has since claimed that he has arranged funding for all Wright’s remaining cases. The truth of this statement is still unverifiable, although we will likely know for sure within a week.
