Slashdot Mirror
'Satoshi' Craig Wright Is Being Sued For $10 Billion For Stealing His Partner's Bitcoin (coindesk.com)
Craig Wright, the nChain chief scientist who previously claimed to be the pseudonymous bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, is being sued for a whopping $10 billion for stealing $5 billion in bitcoin from a former business partner. CoinDesk reports: The lawsuit is being brought by Ira Kleiman on behalf of the estate of his brother, Dave, who has been linked to the earliest days of bitcoin. Kleiman, a forensic computer investigator and author, passed away in 2013 following a battle with MRSA. At the heart of the new lawsuit, according to a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on Feb. 14, is an alleged hoard of more than 1.1 million bitcoins, which Ira Kleiman's lawyers say is worth in excess of $10 billion. He is being represented by Boies Schiller Flexner LLP.
Wright, court records show, has been accused of allegedly conducting "a scheme against Dave's estate to seize Dave's bitcoins and his rights to certain intellectual property associated with the Bitcoin technology." "As part of this plan, Craig forged a series of contracts that purported to transfer Dave's assets to Craig and/or companies controlled by him. Craig backdated these contracts and forged Dave's signature on them," attorneys for the plaintiff wrote. Included alongside the complaint are a number of additional filings, including the business registration for a firm called W&K Info Defense Research LLC, in which Kleiman and Wright were business partners. In addition to the roughly 1.1 million bitcoins, Ira Kleiman is also seeking compensation for the intellectual property his lawyers claim arose from the partnership between his deceased brother and Wright.
Wright, court records show, has been accused of allegedly conducting "a scheme against Dave's estate to seize Dave's bitcoins and his rights to certain intellectual property associated with the Bitcoin technology." "As part of this plan, Craig forged a series of contracts that purported to transfer Dave's assets to Craig and/or companies controlled by him. Craig backdated these contracts and forged Dave's signature on them," attorneys for the plaintiff wrote. Included alongside the complaint are a number of additional filings, including the business registration for a firm called W&K Info Defense Research LLC, in which Kleiman and Wright were business partners. In addition to the roughly 1.1 million bitcoins, Ira Kleiman is also seeking compensation for the intellectual property his lawyers claim arose from the partnership between his deceased brother and Wright.
There's currently about 17 million bitcoins in existence. So if just one of these early players has 1.1 million of them, how many in total are hoarded by the founders while the suckers who were late to the party bid up the value on a small handful of coins.
I AM SATOSHI NAKAMOTO
I'm surprised theft was right at the origin of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is so wholesome!
If you started trying to sell that much, the price would crash. There is likely only about 20 billion dollars of real money in all of crypto.
Bullshit. There's $75 quintillion worth of platinum, gold, and other precious metals in the asteroid belt just waiting for us.
The key problem here is one factor, valuation.
It has no intrinsic value.
It only has inferred value.
The value depends on the market, if and when such a market is in existence.
It's worth at least one-percent of a wooden vessel cargo pallet of tulips.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Bit off topic but sad to hear MRSA was the killer.
At least all these institutions attacking him believe he is. Makes me more confident in Bitcoin Cash, that's for sure.
^
spoken like someone who doesn't understand what money is
The whole of the bitcoin "value" is based on speculation and tulip "farms". If you could get a court ordered "price" for your coins then you can expect a lot of "abandoned" coins to come out of the woodwork. It's time to put bitcoin to sleep, and save the planet by stopping all the electric usage coming from it.
This is utter bullshit.
Everybody knows that bitcoin is some alien grad student's attempt to study our capitalistic system by hacking into our internet and posting glaringly flawed manifesto to study our reaction to it.
spoken like someone who doesn't understand what money is
Money is power backed by the organization which grants you resources. Bitcoin is a mathematical expression of the powerless pretending that they have both power and resources.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"'My name is Craig; I inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Satoshi, just as you will inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate Satoshi either. His name was Ulbricht. The real Satoshi has been retired 15 years and living like a king in Second Life.' Then he explained the name is the important thing to inspire the necessary fear. You see, no one would ever surrender to the Dread Pirate Craig."
Is there a mistake in the title, or are we doing the same annoying thing with bitcoins that we do with legos? I'm going to assume that it's a mistake, since the summary says "bitcoins" in multiple places.
How many times are people going to make the same old two arguments:
No intrinsic value
but people pay for them so they have value
but but but but but...
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. People will keep paying for them and some people will make a ton of money while others will lose money. It's just like the stock market - it doesn't matter if the company is actually valuable if the stock price does things that earn you money.
And...this is gen 1 (or maybe 1.5). Blockchain by itself is viable for quite a few things. It will be interesting to see what Gen 2 does.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
You haven't explained why the early adopters should not get a pay day if what they've adopted (e.g., Bitcoin, Apple shares, etc.) turns out to be profitable to society at large; they become rich because society is rewarding them for their prescience—society is saying "Hey, it looks like you might be pretty good at choosing how society's resources should be allocated, so here is some more purchasing power; please, use it to make some new bets for society."
Under capitalism, your "vote" grows when you make choices that are profitable for society, and your "vote" shrinks when you make choices that are not profitable for society.
you will find a lawyer earning a fee by trying to get some of it ...
There's about $35,000 worth of gold and platinum in the asteroid belt, as soon as we figure out how to get it down here.
I don't know why people keep saying there's no intrinsic value.
There's quite a bit of value in being able to send BTC anywhere in the world without first getting an intermediary's permission.
There's value in no one being able to take your BTC without either getting your permission or obtaining the private key. A court judgment can seize you bank account, but not your BTC.
I wonder if there is a way to authenticate documents and calculate some kind of hash that makes it impossible to back date ....
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Are there some figures missing there?
This is such an absurd lawsuit. I would throw all these idiots in jail for wasting the court's time with this garbage. We have abusive parents, violent offenders of all kinds, traffickers, etc. Why do we even waste our time with this nonsense? Allow these bitcoins to be lost to the ether and move along. This just goes to show you that cryptocurrency is nothing more than smoke in mirrors. For example, if you had the cure for cancer written in a text document, and it was worth say $1 trillion dollars to the market and two people discovered it would they get $500 billion each...nope. It would become public domain, and if they didn't disclose it for a very reasonable sum then they would probably be ostracized by society...a miserable existence. Tolerance for this type of tomfoolery will not go unnoticed.
At least you can plant tulip bulbs and grow pretty flowers.
hyperbole, n.:
Nope, not after the amount in the asteroid belt crashes the market.
Plus, the shipping charges are really high...
Just because they used valid mathematics in the design doesn't mean it wasn't a Ponzi scheme all along.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
A court judgment can seize you bank account, but not your BTC.
How much BTC do you have to give to Bubba so he doesn't engage in relations with you in prison, after you tell the court you wont turn over your BTC?
To paraphrase Stalin - How many divisions does Satoshi have?
The US dollar is legal tender because it's backed by various local police forces and the USAF, among others. But wait, for the privilege of not being able to dispute fraudulent transactions I'll gladly give up my credit card points. Because if I do want to make an entirely anonymous transaction, which I never ever do purely rhetorical here, there's nothing like bespoke pieces of paper with no ledger or record or heh paper trail. Oh wait, I just got a few from the ATM.
Crypto is the best way of separating libernerdians from their dollars since Star Wars.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
Anonymous reliable and trustworthy real soon now right, just need the right kind of faith?
Ex-communist sees no problems with unrestrained capitalism, news at 11.
Is he suing for $10 billion in bitcoin, or $10 billion in real money?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As part of this plan, Craig forged a series of contracts that purported to transfer Dave's assets to Craig and/or companies controlled by him. Craig backdated these contracts and forged Dave's signature on them
Why didn't he use a smart contract? Oh...
If a million bitcoins were transferred, then wouldn't that show up in the block chain?
If they weren't transferred, then doesn't he still have them?
Can the estate digitally sign something that at least proves original ownership?
What exactly is he claiming was taken?
Brought to you by (((Anonymous Coward)))
HTH HAND
If Satoshi wanted to come out and announce himself, he would prove it. It would be very simple to do, at least for someone with basic cryptography skills. The real Satoshi would be able to cryptographically sign a message with his own Bitcoin private key.
This imposter does not have Satoshi's Bitcoin private key. He has never made any attempt to prove he is who he claims to be. He is definitely not Satoshi.
These Slashdot articles are always filled with people who've never taken an economics class. Don't try to make stuff up, read a book.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Money is power backed by the organization which grants you resources.
Like the US government, which now has a trillion dollar yearly deficit, and almost T$20 accumulated public debt, right?
Not really. Once they have the transport mechanism in place, the stuff literally falls from the sky for free.
I fart Satoshi Nakamoto.
These are the same blood sucking shyster scum who represented SCO.
If they happen to win then the plaintiff will be lucky to see $0.05 on the dollar.
Any case they take is forever tainted.
Perhaps "Money, Whence it came from Where it went" by J.K.Galbraith
But in the specific case of cryptocurrency, it might be a good idea to start with "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, written by the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay
Both are actually fun reads.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Money is (mostly) IOUs and you/we/they need to keep the money supply increasing in step with the size of the economy or REALLY bad things happen.
But yes, You/We/They do need to be concerned about how many IOUs are written (and who ends up with them). Too many can be just as bad as too few. Sometimes worse.
None of which has much to do with cryptocurrencies which would seem to have less intrinsic value than S&H Green Stamps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Apparently, you can still redeem your Grandmother's Green Stamps.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Yeah, we all know what your stupid fucking ((())) mean. Why don't you just say 'filthy jew' or whatever, it's not like your comment will get removed or can get moderated any lower.
This is hardly new though. That Picasso has little value as a wall covering or as fuel on your fire, but courts don't have difficulty assigning a value of millions to it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
just like "real" money. it is all make believe.
A scam? In Florida? But that's UNPOSSIBLE!!!!!
Neither Wright nor Kleiman owned any of the bitcoins claimed in the lawsuit:
http://blog.wizsec.jp/2018/02/kleiman-v-craig-wright-bitcoins.html
Money is (mostly) IOUs
Recent research into cashless societies find this to be the case. We expect that cashless societies would be barter economies, but when people really looked into them, they found that they were mostly IOU economies. Small enough communities that everyone remembers the debts owed by others, and hold those others accountable to paying them.
Shifting to money just removes the mental burden of keeping track of the many IOUs, and is a necessity to create larger communities.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I am shocked, shocked that the creator of a fake pyramid scheme currency would defraud his brother.
{your bitcoin winnings sir}
Thank you.
There's lots and lots of organizations which grant me resources in exchange for money. I need to count my income in USD. I need to pay taxes, fees, and anything else I owe a US government in USD. If I get into a court case, and the judge awards damages, it will almost certainly be a matter of one person being required to pay USD to another. As a result, organizations around here tend to run on USD, even when there's no requirement to. Since the USD is a very important part of the US economy, the US government has a strong interest in keeping it stable.
A store could open up here and only sell things for Euros. It's perfectly legal. I'm pretty sure it's a bad idea, but the US government really doesn't care.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Apparently wright forged his business partner's signature by using a known handwritten font (named OTTO)... and it looks nothing like the real signature.
I'm repeatedly surprised how clearly intelligent people become stupid criminals.
Are there some figures missing there?
Nope. They just subtracted costs.