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A lawsuit filed by the family of the late David Kleinman could reveal the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym of the creator of bitcoin.
The dispute in question is over the possession of one million bitcoins, equivalent to $64 billion as of today, which allegedly belong to the creator of the cryptocurrency.
A court in Florida will have to define whether David Kleinman owned the multi-million dollar asset along with 51-year-old Australian programmer Craig Wright, who is the subject of the lawsuit, and with whom Kleinman would have mined a million bitcoins.
Although since 2016 Wright has claimed to be the real Satoshi Nakamoto, many experts in the cryptocurrency world have dismissed the veracity of the claim. The lawsuit by Kleinman’s family could prove crucial in confirming whether Wright is indeed the creator of the largest cryptocurrency on the market.
13 years after the publication of the document revealing the concept of a decentralized currency in the name of Satoshi Nakamoto, the identity of the mysterious creator of bitcoin remains hidden. The mystery surrounding Nakamoto’s persona is such that it is not known whether the pseudonym corresponds to one person or several.
Until 2010 Satoshi Nakamoto communicated with emerging cryptographers, had an email address and published notes clarifying how the cryptocurrency would work. After 2010, the world never heard from the mysterious bitcoin creator again.
“We believe the evidence will show that there was a partnership to create and mine over a million bitcoins,” said Vel Freedman, attorney for the Kleinman family.
According to the defense, the trial will not only prove that Wright is indeed the creator of bitcoin, but also that he breached his partnership with Kleinman and never acknowledged his corresponding value of the partnership.
Mr. Wright’s lawyers deny that there was ever a partnership to mine bitcoin between Kleinman and Wright.
For the bitcoin community, there is only one piece of evidence that could really determine the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto: the private key that controls the account where the creator of the cryptocurrency deposited the first million mined bitcoins.
Anyone transferring even a small fraction of bitcoin through Nakamoto’s account would prove to be the creator of the cryptocurrency.
All bitcoin transactions are published on the blockchain; there are two threads that control the transactions, the public key and the private key. Anyone can send bitcoins through the public key, or the destination address, which is similar to a bank account, but only the person who controls the account will have the private key and will be the owner.
According to the plaintiffs, in 2008 – the year the bitcoin paper was published – Wright approached Klein for help in the conception of bitcoin, the launch of the cryptocurrency and the mining of the first million tokens.
In the early days of bitcoin, not much importance was attached to Nakamoto’s identity, as at the time the cryptocurrency was virtually unknown and only had tangible value to a few people in the IT world. Today, Bitcoin is a globally in-demand asset that trades above $60,000 and has a market capitalization of over $1 trillion.
Economist, writer and liberal. With a focus on finance, the war on drugs, history, and geopolitics // Economista, escritor y liberal. Con enfoque en finanzas, guerra contra las drogas, historia y geopolítica