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Self-Proclaimed Bitcoin Creator Craig Wright won a major U.S. court case Monday, allowing him to keep about $50 billion in Bitcoin. However, he’s ordered to pay $100 million in damages over claims that he cheated a deceased friend over intellectual property for the leading cryptocurrency.
Jury Rules in Favor of Craig Wright
On Monday, Craig Wright won a Miami civil case against the family of his late business partner and computer forensics expert, David Kleiman. The prosecution argued that Kleiman was a co-creator of bitcoin, alongside Wright, entitling him to half of the 1.1 million bitcoin mined and held by Satoshi, currently worth around $54 billion.
A federal jury sided with Wright and declined to award any of the bitcoin to Kleiman’s estate.
“This was a tremendous victory for our side,” said Andres Rivero of Rivero Mestre LLP, the lead lawyer representing Wright.
However, Wright was ordered to pay $100 million in compensatory damages over a breach in intellectual property rights related to W&K Info Defense Research LLC, a joint venture between the two men.
“We are immensely gratified that our client, W&K Information Defense Research LLC, has won $100,000,000 reflecting that Craig Wright wrongfully took bitcoin-related assets from W&K,” said counsel for W&K.
The jury found that Dave Kleiman played no role behind the creation of Bitcoin but Wright had wrongfully exercised control over the property of W&K.
Kleiman vs Wright
In 2018, the estate of Dave Kleiman brought a lawsuit against Craig Wright arguing that the latter breached a business partnership between the two men that involved inventing the Bitcoin blockchain. The estate claimed that the two men were Satoshi Nakamoto and mined about 1 million Bitcoin during the early years of the network but that Wright reappropriated the mined BTC for himself after Kleiman's death in 2013.
The estate wanted around $170 billion in damages far beyond what the Bitcoins' are worth because it included intellectual property tied to the network as well as punitive damages.