Craig Wright suing developers to forcibly give him access to internet coins
The &#x27;coins&#x27; are really not the important part of the story here.<p>Bitcoin is open source cryptographic software developed by volunteers under the MIT license.  Wright-- via a web of shady shell corporations-- has sued a dozen current and former Bitcoin contributors (including myself) demanding that they introduce a backdoor to allow him to bypass the authentication and take possession of coins without providing a digital signature, or-- if that fails to work-- pay him around $6 billion dollars in damages.<p>The assets he&#x27;s seeking to obtain are very obviously not his (though he argues we lack standing to challenge his assertion), but that isn&#x27;t the most important consideration: More critically, the remedy he seeks is simply not possible.  The defendants have no more power than anyone else, including Wright, to publish an incompatible version of Bitcoin-- but any such incompatible version will just form a separate currency, and no one-- not any developer, not any court, not any human power-- can force other people to adopt this alternative version or consider it to be &quot;bitcoin&quot;.  Wright has already created one such alternative version &quot;BSV&quot;, which essentially no one uses and it trades for less than 0.004% of bitcoin&#x27;s value.<p>Wright is well aware that the remedy he seeks is an impossibility and that he has no real prospect of success.  Given that he can&#x27;t be successful, you may wonder what goals are (1) Profit: He&#x27;s been selling these &quot;inaccessible&quot; coins at a deep discount to at least one mark, it doesn&#x27;t matter that his case will be unsuccessful so long as he can find people who think it might be successful willing to buy a share in the winnings. (2) Wright is attempting to intimidate and disqualify the worlds foremost experts in Bitcoin technology from providing evidence another lawsuit about his fradulent claims of being Satoshi.  (3) Wright intends to use the legal fees to financially ruin parties who have refused to aid his fraudulent schemes, particularly because the UK uses a loser-pays where the loser of each motion pays the other sides legal costs and Wright racks up astronomical costs. Wright has already bankrupted a journalist that discussed his fraudulent claims of being Satoshi with a defamation lawsuit, even though Wright hasn&#x27;t won against him (the case is ongoing).<p>Wright effectively argues that anyone who has ever built software using bitcoin is a fiduciary which owes him a duty of care which extends even as far as compensating him at their own expenses for losses created as a result of his own negligence.  His position is that this is even the case even though they offered the software under a license stipulating &quot;IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN
THE SOFTWARE.&quot;, even though their work was uncompensated, and even though they had no relationship with him or his entities.<p>He also contends that the liability continues forever and, in fact, I stopped working on Bitcoin completely several years ago long before his supposed loss occurred. (Several other defendants also stopped working on Bitcoin years ago)<p>Wright is attempting to improve his odds in the case by making a proxy entity which he created &quot;Bitcoin Association for BSV&quot; the primary defendant, already it&#x27;s attempting to undermine our effort to challenge the jurisdiction of the UK courts by agreeing to the jurisdiction (normally one defendant agreeing is enough to settle the matter).  Wright has used the trick of suing his sockpuppet to get a bespoke civil judgement in the past.<p>This lawsuit has implications far outside the realm of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency:<p>The case highlights apparent flaws in our legal system where a well funded party with no prospect of actually winning their case can submit flagrant lies and forgeries with near impunity and cause finical ruin for their targets with an obviously meritless case.  This is particularly stark for volunteer free software developers, where even modest legal costs easily overwhelm the indirect gains of publishing free code and related pro-social activities.<p>Obviously free software more or less can&#x27;t exist if the clear text of the license is ignored and volunteer developers are going to be hit with massive liability (or massive legal fees) for software they created without direct compensation.<p>The case also has substantial civil rights implications-- Wright asks governments to use their power over the defendants to compel both labor on his behalf and speech:  He seeks to force us to develop backdoor code to bypass Bitcoin&#x27;s transaction authentication and he seeks to force us to publish it (and presumably endorse it). He also seeks to suppress speech: he is asking the government force the defendants to remove and refrain from future publication of non-backdoored source code.