Craig Wright’s lawsuit heads to trial after Federal court denied motion for summary judgement

• Kleiman v. Wright case made headlines over two years ago when Ira Kleiman initiated the lawsuit.
• Craig Wright, the self-proclaimed inventor of Bitcoin, was sued over an alleged stash of 1.1 million Bitcoin.  

Dave Kleiman was a computer forensics expert and was allegedly involved in the creation of Bitcoin. Craig Steven Wright, which claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the actual inventor of the cryptocurrency, also claims Kleiman was involved in his creation. Although Dave passed away in 2013, a science website called Gizmodo shed some light on Dave’s life and his link to Bitcoin two years after his passing.   

In February 2018, Ira Kleiman, the brother of Dave, initiated a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida on behalf of the Kleiman estate against Wright. According to Ira, Craig perpetrated a scheme against Dave’s estate to seize Bitcoin owned by Dave and his rights to certain intellectual property. 

Craig has allegedly forged a series of contracts to transfer Dave’s assets to Craig’s companies. The lawsuit concerns a dispute over the ownership of those Bitcoins and the intellectual property.

The complaint states: 

Craig Wright had mined a lot of [b]itcoins . . . Craig had gotten

approximately 1.1 million [b]itcoins. There was a point in time,

when he had . . . around 10% of all the [b]itcoins out there. Mr

Kleiman would have had a similar amount. However, Mr Kleiman

passed away during that time.

It also alleges that David Kleiman worked with Wright on Bitcoin, mining the digital currency and developing Blockchain-related intellectual property. Dave and Craig met in an online cryptography forum back in 2003, and they continued communicating via email.

More bad news for Craig Wright

In the latest string of the court battle, Wright’s motion for summary judgment was just denied. A summary judgment basically refers to a judgment entered by a court without a full trial. This means that Kleiman v. Wright is heading to trial.

Craig Wright and his lawyers have been trying to get out of the lawsuit for over two years. Based on the evidence presented, Craig Wright did describe himself as Satoshi on several occasions noting that Dave was also part of Satoshi, ‘the nice version of Satoshi.’ However, these statements are not proof that Craig Wright is actually Satoshi. 

The judge has found that Wright and Kleiman did, in fact, share some Bitcoin’s private keys and has rejected all six arguments made by Craig to go for summary judgment. The trial is now set for January 2021.

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