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'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.
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! --
At least all these institutions attacking him believe he is. Makes me more confident in Bitcoin Cash, that's for sure.
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.
WE ARE ALL SATOSHI NAKAMOTO
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.
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 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
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.
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
https://www.theverge.com/2018/...
Anonymous reliable and trustworthy real soon now right, just need the right kind of faith?
Is he suing for $10 billion in bitcoin, or $10 billion in real money?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
If a million bitcoins were transferred, then wouldn't that show up in the block chain?
If they weren't transferred, then doesn't he still have them?
Can the estate digitally sign something that at least proves original ownership?
What exactly is he claiming was taken?
Hey, you look like you know how to stealthily buy up land cheap, use eminent domain to acquire what the land owners refused to sell, rip up the Earth and extract coal out of it using cheap labor while throwing the safety of your workers to the wind.
Here, have some more money, you deserve it as a reward for all you've done for yourself.
</s>
These Slashdot articles are always filled with people who've never taken an economics class. Don't try to make stuff up, read a book.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Not really. Once they have the transport mechanism in place, the stuff literally falls from the sky for free.
Good Lord, why would Satoshi out himself? Did you see the Aussie Taxman raid Wright the next day (on "purely coincidental matters")?
Anybody smart enough to invent Bitcoin is smart enough to shut the hell up for now. If Wright is Satoshi, he's a hypergenius to have convinced most people he's not. Yes, a superposition of being Satoshi.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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
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
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.