nChain’s chief scientist Dr. Craig Wright has filed a formal libel claim against Bitcoin podcaster Peter McCormack for publicly accusing Wright of fraud.
On April 17, Wright’s legal representatives filed a claim for libel with the UK High Court of Justice, Queen’s Bench Division. Wright is seeking (a) to prevent McCormack from making further fraudulent claims that Wright is not the individual behind the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym and (b) £100k in damages, plus court fees and legal costs.
Wright’s attorneys personally served McCormack with notification of Wright’s claim on Thursday and plan to file their Particulars of Claim with the High Court next week, after which McCormack will have a period in which to prepare his response. Wright’s attorneys are pressing for a tight timetable to ensure the matter proceeds to a hearing on the swiftest possible schedule.
McCormack has been one of the most brazen examples among the Bitcoin Twitterati who publicly deny that Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, who released the original Bitcoin white paper in 2008. For weeks now, McCormack’s Twitter feed has been dominated by slurs against Wright, as well as ill-advised challenges for Wright to take legal action against McCormack in response to these drive-by character assassination attempts.
Wright is convinced that the attacks against him are primarily intended to hobble the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) protocol that Wright supports. Wright maintains that BSV is the real target due to its capacity for massive on-chain scaling, which represents an existential threat to the future of other cryptocurrencies, the flawed design of which prevents them from scaling to meet the needs of a truly global financial platform.
The recent push by Wright’s Twitter trolls to press crypto exchanges to delist BSV appears to support this assertion. Fortunately, while some exchanges have taken the bait, others appear to concur with Toronto-based crypto investors FRNT Financial, who said “such a subjective delisting sets a precedent which has the potential to increase the space’s vulnerability to manipulation.”
Wright will be a featured speaker at the upcoming CoinGeek Conference in Toronto on May 29-30, which welcomes supporters of all cryptocurrencies. Attendees can expect lively debates on the relative merits of their respective technologies in what hopefully will prove to be a troll-free environment in which facts, not libel, will win the day.
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