Craig Wright wins in U.S. appeals court over multi-billion-dollar Bitcoin dispute

Craig Wright, claiming to be Bitcoin’s creator, won a notable victory in a U.S. Appeals Court, sparking renewed discussions in the cryptocurrency community.

Craig Wright, who claims to have created Bitcoin, recently won a big court case in the U.S. Appeals Court. The case was regarding Bitcoin that he and the late David Kleiman mined together over ten years ago. The court decided that Wright and Kleiman were not in a legal partnership.

Now led by David’s brother Ira, the Kleiman family could not disprove the original court’s ruling, and also had difficulty proving that Wright was obfuscating attempts at carrying out the legal process, and thus charges were dismissed.

The ruling confirms a decision made by a jury in Florida in 2021, in which the jury decided if the Kleiman family had the right to half of the Bitcoin (BTC) fortune, worth up to $36 billion per Wright’s request for punitive damages.

The court ruled that Wright’s lawyers erred in digging in to the Kleiman brothers’ relationship, but that it ultimately did not alter the jury’s decision making process.

The appeal did not have to do with the $100 million Wright was told to pay to a company started by Kleiman, which is still an ongoing dispute.

Wright is also suing crypto developers in the U.K. due to not adding a Bitcoin backdoor for his company, Tulip Trading. Wright requested this to retrieve crypto he says he lost access to.

In 2022, a judge in Norway said it was okay to call Wright a “fraud” and “scammer” for saying he is Satoshi Nakamoto, a pseudonym for the creator of Bitcoin. Wright is still in the process of appealing this decision.