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27/05/24
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Bitcoin Core’s Website Manager Announces Return of Bitcoin Whitepaper
On May 23, Hennadii Stepanov, who maintains Bitcoin Core’s domain Bitcoin.org, revealed that the Bitcoin white paper is back on the website. This comes after a court ruled that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the protocol.
Stepanov shared a link to the Bitcoin.pdf file on X. Legal constraints prompted restricted access to the white paper for users based in the United Kingdom. During the period of restrictions, people only saw Satoshi Nakamoto’s quote: “It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle”.
Three years ago, Wright filed a lawsuit against a group in charge of the website (Cobra), based on allegations of copyright infringement. The court then asked the group to remove the white paper from the website.
However, Cobra did not put up a defense, making Wright a default winner. Cobra paid £35k of Wright’s legal fees. Last year, Wright filed a lawsuit against thirteen Bitcoin Core developers as well as a group of firms based on allegations of copyright violations associated with the Bitcoin white paper, its file format and database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain.
The response of the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund noted that there have been abusive lawsuits against well-known Bitcoin contributors, deterring development because of legal risks, expenses, stress and more.
The court determined that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto and not the author of the white paper, invalidating his copyright claims. This was due to the Crypto Open Patent Alliance’s (COPA) lawsuit against Wright, asking the court not to allow Wright to assert ownership over Bitcoin’s core intellectual property.
According to COPA, Wright was involved in a complicated scheme of deceit and forgery towards fabricating evidence to back his claim of being Nakamoto. A court in the UK approved a plan not to allow Wright to evade court expenses, so the authorities froze his assets valued at £6.7 million.
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