A computer scientist who says he’s the inventor of bitcoin won a court dispute over 1.1 million bitcoins at trial, a sum that currently amounts to more than $55 billion.
In the lawsuit between Australia native Craig Wright and his former business partner Dave Kleiman, a Miami jury sided with Wright and freed him of fraud charges he was facing, Reuters reports. At stake was half of the 1.1 million bitcoin fortune.
While Wright won’t share the bitcoin with the late Kleiman’s family, he will have to pay $100 million in intellectual property rights to W&K Information Defense Research LLC, a company the two owned. Wright’s former partner and computer forensics expert Kleiman died in 2013, and the pair alleged that they created bitcoin together.
“This has been a remarkably good outcome and I feel completely vindicated,” Wright said in a video. “There are still more fights. We are going to make everything change: cryptocurrency to digital cash the way it’s meant to be.”
However, Wright claims he’s the real Satoshi Nakamoto, the alias for the man who formed bitcoin. In 2016, Wright said he was Nakamoto and that the name was a pseudonym. The 1.1 million bitcoins Wright won are some of the first of the cryptocurrency to ever be mined, and were mined by Nakamoto. Kleiman’s family said Wright stole the bitcoin that was mined during their partnership.
W&K and Kleiman estate attorneys said their clients are “immensely gratified” to win $100 million regarding the intellectual property rights judgment, and that the Kleiman’s have been given “their fair share of what Dave helped create.”
