By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
The latest hearing in a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit resulted in Judge Bruce Reinhart recommending 50 percent of Wright’s BTC holdings mined prior to December 31, 2013, be awarded to the estate of Dave Kleiman.
Few weeks ago we wrote of how a Florida federal judge had denied self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor Craig Wright’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit concerning the alleged theft of a huge amount in Bitcoins from a former business partner, deceased Dave Kleiman.
Yesterday it got even better. Florida federal judge Bruce Reinhart proposed that Craig Wright has to turn over 50% of the Bitcoin he mined with his former business associate from 2008 until Kleiman’s death in 2013.
Even though the information hasn’t been official yet, someone supposedly introduced to the situation tweeted:
Bad news BSV.
KLEIMAN AWARDED 50%IP AND BITCOIN MINED BEFORE DEATH
JUDGE REJECTS ALL CSW TESTIMONY
FINDS CSW PERJURED LIED FALSIFIED DOCUMENTS
— Just Cory 🇺🇲 🧔🏽 (@_JustCory_) August 26, 2019
Apparently, this Twitter user was attending the hearing and added that the judge dismissed all Wright’s testimony and found that Craig Wright had “perjured himself,” “lied,” and “falsified documents.”
Judge is being very fair and critical of each sides remarks.
CSW has been referred to as SN and linked to the creation of Bitcoin several times now
— Just Cory 🇺🇲 🧔🏽 (@_JustCory_) August 26, 2019
However if the latter is true, the judge was referring to Wright as he was real Satoshi Nakamoto that presumes he actually believes Wright was involved in Bitcoin creation. And, even though the fine for perjury and can go up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, the judge decided not to give any of that – for now. As per Cointelegraph:
“Judge Bruce Reinhart rejected Wright’s testimony, stating that he had perjured himself by providing the court with falsified documents and recommended that he hand over 50% of the over 1 million bitcoins Kleiman mined with Wright, as well as intellectual property rights associated with Bitcoin’s software.”
Just for a reminder, the case started back in February last year when Wright was sued for allegedly misappropriating billions of dollars’ worth of the crypto estate. Ira Kleiman then sued Wright on behalf of the estate owned by his deceased brother.
The suit said Wright stole Dave’s Bitcoins and his rights to a specific intellectual property linked with the Bitcoin technology. Kleiman asked for the return of 1.1 million Bitcoins mined by the two or its fair current market value. Also, he asked for compensation for extensive IP infringement.
Wright has also filed faked court documents in a lousy effort to show that he held a trust deed with the estate and in June this year, he admitted that he could not comply with a court order to list his early BTC addresses.
He then tried to present some pieces of evidence of the existence of any additional members of one of the plaintiffs, a firm named “W&K Info Defense Research, LLC” (“W&K). He claimed that their existence could prove that the court did not have sufficient evidence. However, he didn’t succeed in this. So, according to the court, “the Defendant has failed to present any credible evidence showing that any of the parties he suggests are members of W&K.”
For now, Reinhart’s order will have to be adopted by the District Judge, Beth Bloom, before becoming final. This also assumes that Wright’s attorneys do not file any exceptions or objections.
Craig Wright’s faithful wingman Calvin Ayre tweeted:
Though #CraigisSatoshi and this will be obvious to all in time (it is already to everyone smart), this is now moot. Real #Bitcoin #BSV is beyond any one person now…it is the worlds top utility platform with its unique in the world massive scaling and Craig did this for sure.
— Calvin Ayre (@CalvinAyre) August 26, 2019
It will now be interesting to see what will be happening next. Some believe that this could be bad for the price of Bitcoin if Kleiman decides to put out all the BTC he gets. However, we should not be worried says Wright at least according to the alleged interview he gave to Modern Consensus, right after the hearing ended.
Among many things, Wright supposedly said that this rule won’t affect BSV (at the time of writing it fell down 4.17% to $128.82, but bear in mind that all coins are in correction including Bitcoin that went down 1.6% to $10.182) but we can only wait and see what sending of 500k of BTC to Ira Kleiman will do to the market.
However, Wright praised himself a bit saying:
“Let’s see what it does to the market. I wouldn’t have tanked the market. I’m nice.”
He also mentioned that it worries him his kids will now know that he has the other $5 billion and that Ira Kleiman now has to pay taxes to inherited $5 billion.
The point is that unless Kleiman has $2 billion in cash, he will have to dump around 2 million BTC to pay the taxes and that could be bad for the market.
However, maybe it’s better than to leave Wright “sitting on his fucking money” that we actually doubt he has.