Craig Wright Must Pay $100 Million While Avoiding $170B BTC Lawsuit

Craig Wright must pay $100 million to a company he founded with the deceased computer scientist Dave Kleiman as a Florida federal jury said it could not reach a conclusion in the case. In today’s crypto latest news, we are taking a closer look at the decision.

The Florida judge gave a split decision this week. Craig Wright who claims to be the BTC inventor Satoshi Nakamoto is off the hook for a multi-million dollar payment to the Dave Kleiman estate that argued the men created BTC together. But wright will have to pay $100 million to the company that both of them founded after the jury in Florida found the nChain chief scientist liable for conversion and defined as when one converts another’s property to his own use, is what Law.com described as a fancy way of staying the steals.

After his resounding trial WINs in the Kleiman case today, a word from #CraigWright (#SatoshiNakamoto) to his supporters#Satoshi #Bitcoin #CraigWrightisSatoshi pic.twitter.com/oS6UbglGN8

— Jimmy Nguyen (@JimmyWinSV) December 6, 2021

In 2018, the estate of Dave Kleiman brought another lawsuit against Craig Wright as an Australian IT professional argued that Wright breached the business partnership between the two men and that they involved inventing Bitcoin together. The estate said that the two men who act as Satoshi mined about 1 million BTC during the early days of the network but Wright reappropriated the mined BTC for himself after Kleiman died in 2013. The estate wanted around $170 billion in damages but it seems that that won’t’ be happening. The jury signaled that it had trouble agreeing on the verdict but concluded that Wright wasn’t responsible for the counts except for conversion. According to the Law360 news site, Wright said he was relieved by the credit and he called it not a bad one.

The Kleiman estate was pleased and released a statement:

 “We are immensely gratified that our client, W&K Information Defense Research LLC, has been awarded $100 million reflecting that Craig Wright wrongfully took bitcoin-related assets from W&K.”

Wright said he will not appeal and if true this will bring an end to the long legal chapter that failed to produce more clear answers about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Craig Wright must pay the $100M but said that the verdict meant he was the sole creator of Bitcoin but no one was willing to provide private keys belonging to Nakamoto that will prove his claims.

The verdict raised some questions but mostly about how Wright plans to pay the $100 million if he wasn’t an early BTC miner. He turned his back on BTC a while back to promote rival chains that are “closer to the original conception.” He advocated for the 2017 chain split which created Bitcoin Cash and then started a rebellion against BCH which created Bitcoin SV. The price of BSV has a market cap of $2.5 billion but increased about 10% on the news.