I’ve been following the COPA vs Craig Wright trial 2024 since the pre-trial hearings in late 2023, and honestly it’s the most entertaining tech legal saga I’ve watched in years. A man claiming to have invented Bitcoin. A coalition of thirty crypto companies saying he absolutely did not. A UK High Court judge who clearly had no time for nonsense. Let me break down what went down.
Wright is the guy who, until recently, led Bitcoin SV (BSV) at nChain. In 2015, WIRED first covered him as a possible creator of Bitcoin, and from there the controversy never stopped. The crypto community kept asking him to do the one thing that would settle it instantly: sign a message with Satoshi Nakamoto’s original private keys. He never did. Instead, he sued people, registered copyright on the Bitcoin whitepaper with the US Copyright Office in 2019 (which anyone can technically do), and earned the nickname "Faketoshi" from most of the community.
The thing I find fascinating about this whole circus is that the simplest possible proof was always available. Satoshi’s wallets have never moved. Sign a transaction from one of them, Craig. That’s it. He never did.
What the COPA vs Craig Wright Trial 2024 Was Actually About
The COPA (Crypto Open Patent Alliance) is a federation of roughly 30 companies from across the cryptocurrency industry, including Coinbase, Block, MicroStrategy, Kraken, Chaincode Labs, and Uniswap. Meta joined in January 2022. COPA says its whole purpose is to lower the risk of patent litigation in crypto and keep open-source development free. Craig Wright showing up with copyright claims on the Bitcoin whitepaper was exactly the kind of threat COPA was built to fight.
In April 2021, COPA filed with a British court asking for a declaration that Dr. Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. By late 2023, the official COPA statement read: "This trial, COPA vs. Wright, is to prove that Dr. Wright’s insistence is not true that he is the author of the Bitcoin Whitepaper and consequently the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto."
The trial also folded in four other active lawsuits involving Wright, all of which hinged on the same identity question. That’s why it was designated a "joint trial." The outcome of this one case would ripple through everything else.
The Forged Documents: LaTeX Files and Backdated Accounts
The key battleground in this trial was documentary evidence. Wright submitted over 107 documents to support his claim of having created Bitcoin, including tax filings with the Australian Taxation Office supposedly dating to pre-2009 Bitcoin work.
My reaction when I first read about the scale of the forgery operation was something close to disbelief. This wasn’t a guy who embellished a few dates. COPA’s forensic experts analyzed 50 documents Wright submitted as proof, and found that 28 of them were fabricated or unreliable. The experts also found that one of his MYOB accounting datasets, supposedly showing Bitcoin-related entries from 2009-2011, was actually created in 2020. Another MYOB dataset was created in 2023 and backdated. These records were meant to prove Wright owned the domain where the Bitcoin whitepaper was first published.
Then there were the LaTeX files. Wright submitted what he claimed was a pre-distribution edit of the Bitcoin whitepaper, hosted on the document editor Overleaf. Judge Mellor himself noted their significance, citing the argument that "the LaTeX files are unique, such that mere possession of them is evidence of authorship of the White Paper." These files ended up being central to the case.
The Verdict: Judge Mellor’s Ruling on May 20, 2024
The six-week trial ran from February through March 2024, with a two-week postponement from the original January start date after Judge Mellor agreed the defense needed more time to process Wright’s additional documents.
On May 20, 2024, Mr Justice Mellor delivered his written judgment. The ruling was not close. Mellor found that Wright "engaged in forgery on a grand scale" to support a false claim, and that his attempts to prove he was Satoshi Nakamoto represented "a most serious abuse of this Court’s process." The judge was, in his words, "entirely satisfied" that Dr. Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.
It didn’t end there. Mellor issued a worldwide anti-suit injunction preventing Wright from initiating or threatening any further proceedings based on his Satoshi claim. He also referred Wright and a supporting witness, Stefan Matthews, to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider prosecution for perjury. Permission to appeal was refused in November 2024.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect the ruling to come with that much force. Courts tend to hedge. This one didn’t.
Meanwhile, Coinbase had already delisted BSV on January 10, 2024, right as the trial preparations were wrapping up. The whole BSV ecosystem was under pressure before a single witness took the stand. nChain had also been through a rough patch after internal emails between BSV backer Calvin Ayre and Wright were leaked by outgoing CEO Christen Ager-Hanssen in September 2023, though they’d since changed their legal team and regrouped.
What This Means for Bitcoin and BSV
If Wright had won, the ramifications for Bitcoin would’ve been real. He held copyright claims on the whitepaper and the original code. A win would’ve handed BSV massive legitimacy and given Wright legal leverage over BTC Core developers. Judge Mellor excluded the technical Bitcoin-versus-BSV arguments from the identity trial, but a vindication on identity would’ve fed directly into those other four pending cases.
Instead, the verdict basically slammed every door shut at once. BSV’s whole narrative rested on Wright being Satoshi. It doesn’t have that narrative anymore.
I find the psychology of it interesting too. This isn’t a case where someone made an honest mistake and got caught. Mellor’s judgment describes a deliberate, years-long document fabrication campaign to deceive a court. The forgeries weren’t sloppy either: Wright updated and created 107 documents in April 2023 alone. That takes effort. It takes planning. And it all got unpicked by forensic analysis anyway.
I write about the intersection of creative industries and tech a fair bit on this site. I think about intellectual property a lot, especially when it comes to creating original work and owning what you make. The Craig Wright case is the extreme version of the same question: who made the thing, and can you prove it? In crypto, the proof is cryptographic by design. Satoshi built the answer into Bitcoin itself. Wright just never used it.
If you’re curious about how intellectual property and identity questions bleed into indie development, my piece on whether indie developers should care about SEO gets into some of the same territory from a different angle.
Conclusion
The COPA vs Craig Wright trial 2024 did exactly what it was supposed to do: it put the Faketoshi question in front of a court, and the court called it. Six weeks of evidence, 107 suspect documents, and one judge who wasn’t buying any of it.
If you’re interested in how creative ownership, IP, and original authorship work outside the courtroom, take a look at P For Pistol, where I’m trying to build something I can actually prove I made.
Source: fetimes.co.kr
