Another court case fails to unlock the mystery of bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto

theguardian.com:

Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? The mysterious inventor of bitcoin is a renowned figure in the world of cryptocurrency but his true identity is unknown.

However, the British blogger Peter McCormack was certain about one thing: the answer isn’t Craig Wright.

For years Wright, an Australian computer scientist, has claimed that he is Satoshi, the pseudonymous author of the 2008 white paper behind bitcoin.

Wright’s assertion that he is the inventor of the digital asset – he first sought to prove that he is Satoshi in 2016, months after his name first emerged – has led to a series of legal tussles, some of which are continuing.

One of them came to a pyrrhic conclusion in London this week, when McCormack was found to have caused serious harm to Wright’s reputation by repeatedly claiming that he is a fraud and is not Satoshi.

But Wright, 52, won nominal damages of £1 after a high court judge ruled that he had given “deliberately false evidence” to support his libel claim.

For cost reasons, McCormack did not offer a defence of truth – where the defendant in the case attempts to show that the allegations are substantially true – as Mr Justice Chamberlain ruled that one claim made in a video discussion on YouTube was defamatory, while a series of tweets repeating the fraud claims were ruled to have caused serious harm to Wright’s reputation.

“Because he [Wright] advanced a deliberately false case and put forward deliberately false evidence until days before trial, he will recover only nominal damages,” wrote the judge.

McCormack’s defence, shifted to a much narrower footing, was that the video and the tweets did not cause serious harm to Wright’s reputation. Wright claimed that his reputation had been seriously harmed by the tweets because he