LONDON (Reuters) -An Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed he invented bitcoin was sentenced for contempt of court on Thursday for bringing a 911 billion-pound ($1.2 trillion) lawsuit against Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block in Britain.
Craig Wright had long claimed to have been the author of a 2008 white paper, the foundational text of bitcoin, published under the pseudonym “Satoshi Nakamoto.”
But a judge at London’s High Court found in May that Wright had repeatedly lied and forged documents to support his false claim, after the trial of a case brought by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) to stop Wright suing bitcoin developers.
COPA argued that Wright’s recent lawsuit against Block and others breached an injunction preventing Wright from bringing litigation on the basis of his claim to be Satoshi or that he owned intellectual property rights over bitcoin.
The group’s lawyer Jonathan Hough told the court that Wright’s latest lawsuit was “a desperate publicity stunt to keep his cultish supporters engaged.”
Judge James Mellor ruled on Thursday that Wright was in contempt of court, following a hearing on Wednesday which Wright did not attend.
Wright attended his sentencing hearing remotely but refused to say which country he was currently in when asked by Mellor.
The judge imposed a sentence of one year in prison, suspended for two years, for what he said was a “flagrant breach” of the court’s order. Mellor also threw out Wright’s lawsuit against Block and others.
Wright, who said he would appeal against the finding that he was in contempt of court, was refused permission last month to appeal against Mellor’s ruling that he did not invent bitcoin.
(Reporting by Sam Tobin; Editing by Jonathan Oatis and Mark)
