Of regrets
A con artist has filed multiple lawsuits in the UK against the current and former (increasingly, as more quit) developers of Bitcoin demanding billions of dollars, part in retaliation for their failure to back up his obviously false claims of being Bitcoin&#x27;s creator and in part as part of an insane plot to steal billions of dollars in Bitcoin.  Unfortunately, his efforts are financed by at least one (and possibly multiple) persons with far more wealth than morals who have been promised a share of the spoils.<p>The poster of the linked article, Wladimir Van der Laan, was one of the most active developers of Bitcoin since 2011. I&#x27;m also another early bitcoin developer, now former, and another one of this conman&#x27;s legal attack targets.<p>A key point about vexatious litigation, especially in places like the UK which lack protections against SLAPPs, is that the attacker doesn&#x27;t need to win the lawsuit to achieve his goals:  He can cause his victims millions of dollars in legal costs, phenomenal impositions on their time and privacy, and great psychological stress-- losing nothing himself but what he paid for his attorneys.  Winning or not is more or less incidental, as the culprit here said quite explicitly online before commencing his lawsuits (saying that the intent was to destroy his targets and their families financially and psychologically).  That fact that none of us were in the UK or had any dealings in the UK doesn&#x27;t matter because open source software is available everywhere.<p>For that reason its important that it be possible to discharge frivolous litigation as quickly and efficiently as possible.  As open source developers the cost&#x2F;benefit of publishing our work can be pretty dicey to begin with, so it&#x27;s important that the licenses we use not gratuitously open up avenues for litigation from the users since there are no revenues to pay for such things as a cost of doing business.<p>In his first lawsuit, he alleged to own billions of dollars in Bitcoin (coins which are already well known to have belonged to the MTGox exchange) and that in 2020-- coincidentally just as his obligations to repay his lenders were coming due-- thieves entered into his home to install a &quot;wifi pineapple&quot; to hack his computers and steal the keys and that when he discovered this &quot;hack&quot; he wipes his computers to clear the compromise, conveniently making sure there would be no evidence of the &quot;hack&quot; or ever owning the coins to begin with. The coins in question have not moved.  He then filed a lawsuit against a dozen former and current developers arguing that as developers they have a fiduciary responsibility to introduce a backdoor into the bitcoin cryptosystem to &quot;recover&quot; &quot;his&quot; coins.  In three years there has been no comment or apparent action by the police over this theft which, if it were real, would likely be the highest value heist in recorded history.<p>The case seemed obviously baseless to us, owing to obvious falsehood of his claims, the impossibility of his request (people would not adopt this backdoored version, even if anyone was willing to make themself complicit in his attempted theft by writing it for him), the pointlessness of it (he just pay someone to write it (or do it himself, if he could program) and half the defendants had long since stopped working on Bitcoin), the fact that even the police don&#x27;t have a positive duty to save anyone from harm, and the unambiguous disclaimer of liabilities in our software license -- without which we never would have published it in the first place.<p>And keep in mind that he&#x27;s already been found by judges in several countries to have perjured himself, submitted faked evidence, etc. in other cases (as shown in this collage of rulings against Wright, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;FoMUonbXkAEbJbL?format=jpg&amp;name=large" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pbs.twimg.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;FoMUonbXkAEbJbL?format=jpg&amp;name=...</a> )<p>The trial court agreed ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bailii.org&#x2F;ew&#x2F;cases&#x2F;EWHC&#x2F;Ch&#x2F;2022&#x2F;667.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bailii.org&#x2F;ew&#x2F;cases&#x2F;EWHC&#x2F;Ch&#x2F;2022&#x2F;667.html</a> ), ruling that his case didn&#x27;t have more than a fanciful chance of success. But he appealed and the decision was reversed ( <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nt4tn.net&#x2F;scammer-craig-wright&#x2F;Tulip_v_Van_Der_Laan_CA-2022-001050_1062_2184_Final_Judgment_03-02-2023.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nt4tn.net&#x2F;scammer-craig-wright&#x2F;Tulip_v_Van_Der_Laan_...</a> ).  He&#x27;s now gloating on slack and twitter that he&#x27;s already &quot;won&quot; because we&#x27;ll be &#x27;ruined&#x27; by having to pay the 7-figure cost of his successful appeal and by publishing whatever dirt he can extract from our private data obtained in discovery.<p>(The second lawsuit, which has yet to come before a court alleges that the targets are violating &quot;his&quot; copyright by distributing the Bitcoin &quot;block format&quot; and bitcoin documentation, nevermind the fact that Bitcoin has been released under the MIT expat license since day one, and that this bozo&#x27;s claims of being Bitcoin&#x27;s creator are totally discredited and obviously false.   He&#x27;s also filed additional lawsuits against community members and journalists for expressing the view that his claims of having created Bitcoin are false).<p>Regardless of what you think about Bitcoin, the enforceability of the disclaimer of liability is critical to all of open source and the court&#x27;s unwillingness to summarily dismiss an effort to compel the authorship and publication of a backdoor in a cryptographic security scheme from a supposed user who hopes to benefit from the backdoor should be a concern to all open source developers.