In early February 2023, the UK Court of Appeal overturned a High Court ruling from March 2022 in the case of Craig Wright’s Tulip Trading Limited (TTL) against 16 cryptocurrency developers. The prosecution of the case will be heard as Wright, who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, stated that his team was “delighted” that the judges’ decision to reverse the verdict was accepted by the judges. Following the overturn, former Bitcoin lead developer Gavin Andresen revisited a 2016 blog post and admitted that it was a “mistake” to trust Craig Wright as much as he had.
Appeals Court Grants Go-Ahead For Tulip Trade Case; Gavin Andresen Reflects On Trusting Craig Wright, Refuses To Join ‘Who Is Satoshi’ Speculation
Craig Wright, the Australian who claims to have created Bitcoin pseudonymously under the name Satoshi Nakamoto, gained a motion for appeal on February 3, 2023, allowing his firm, Tulip Trading Limited (TTL), to take legal action against 16 Bitcoin open source developers. TTL stands for Time to Live. It is alleged that in 2013, approximately $3 billion worth of stolen digital assets were assigned to these developers. They are required to develop digital asset recovery software for fiat and digital assets and claims. The Bitcoin SV (BSV) network that forked from Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has already implemented a digital asset recovery software on its chain.
“We are delighted that the judges have granted permission for TTL to pursue its breach of fiduciary duty and/or duty of care claim against developers of blockchain-linked digital assets, including Bitcoin,” Wright stated after winning the appeal.
After the UK court overturned the previous ruling, former Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen revised a post to his blog from May 2016. The original post details Andresen’s meeting with Craig Wright, stating: “I believe that Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented Bitcoin.” The update to the post now includes Andresen admitting that he thought it was wrong to trust Wright. “February 2023 – I don’t believe in rewriting history so I’m leaving this post,” Andresen wrote. “But in the seven years since I wrote it, a lot has happened, and I know now that it was a mistake to trust Craig Wright as much as I did.”
The former Bitcoin core developer added:
I’m sorry, I got sucked into the ‘who’s’ (or isn’t) Satoshi game and I won’t play this game any more.
When Andresen’s post was published online in 2016, it received a lot of criticism. Six years ago, the developer shared the scenario with the members of the Reddit community. “Craig signed a message that I chose (‘Gavin’s favorite number is eleven. CSW’ if I remember correctly) using the private key from block number 1,” Andresen wrote at the time. “That signature was copied onto the clear USB stick that I carried with me to London, and then it was verified on a brand-new laptop with a freshly downloaded copy of Electrum. I was not allowed to keep the message or the laptop [prior to] the official announcement. I don’t have a proof of the OpenSSL process that you used in your blog post.”
Later, during the Kleiman v. Wright trial in June 2020, Andresen told the court that he might have been deceived during the 2016 signing session. “There are places in the private session where I might have been tricked, where someone could have altered the software being used or where the laptop that was delivered wasn’t brand new and had been tampered with. Jet lag was another factor that I experienced,” Andresen said in his statement. “My doubts that arise from the fact that the evidence presented to me may be different from the purported evidence later presented to this world.”
It is unclear why Andresen chose to review the post after Wright was granted the ability to appeal and can sue the developers. Despite Andresen’s update, some BSV supporters believe that Wright is the creator of Bitcoin, although there are numerous BSV proponents demanding
