Satoshi Itches

The second amended complaint is available on Court Listener here. This replaces the amended complaint, which itself replaced the original complaint. So as things stand, this describes what Ira Kleiman is suing Craig Wright for. It was submitted to the court in Florida on January 14th 2019.

A summary of the complaint is that Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman invented bitcoin (using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto) and mined around a million bitcoins, using a company called W&K Info Defense Research LLC. Then Dave died, and Craig stole Dave's bitcoin and some unspecified intellectual property from W&K. Allaegedly W&K stands for Wright and Kleiman.

Much of the evidence that Dave and Craig invented bitcoin appears to come from unverified emails forwarded from Craig to Ira Kleiman (or his father, Louis). Given how easy it is to forge an email, it isn't clear if these are real or not. But Ira also claims that Dave told him directly that he was working on a form of digital money with a "wealthy foreign man". So who knows.

It also appears that Craig Wright was claiming some sort of government grant in Australia to fund his various business, and this was being investigated by the Australian Tax Office, which motivated Craig to claim he had been performing work for W&K, and which justified him claiming payment (in bitcoin) from W&K. Despite all Craig's claims about being related to W&K, he is now disclaiming any involvement with it in this case.

Craig is due to be deposed on April 4th 2019, so it will be fascinating to see what he has to say, assuming we get to read it.