A trial is underway in a Florida court that could potentially gift the world a newly-minted billionaire, who would be vaulted straight into the top-20 of the rich list by virtue of ownership of close to USD 70 billion worth of Bitcoins, the original cryptocurrency.
After all, the decentralised ledger, the so-called blockchain, that the person or persons known by that name first proposed in a white paper in 2008 packs the potential to revolutionise how the world does business and moves money by doing away with the need for a third-party entity to supervise transactions.
But poetics aside, the name or identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is also linked with a hefty fortune, as an account linked to it is said to hold close to a million Bitcoins as also other cryptocurrency that were created when the original Bitcoin was hived off — via forks of the initial cryptocurrency — to launch new avatars.
In mainstream media and internet fora, the quest to find Nakamoto has thrown up multiple contenders, neither of whom though has been conclusively proven to be The One.
Significantly, Craig Steven Wright, the computer science specialist who is being sued in the Florida partnership dispute, was revealed in a 2015 article in Wired to be Satoshi Nakamoto, only for the magazine to subsequently disown the claim.
What the Kleiman family is out to establish is that a partnership existed between the two and the duo had worked together on penning the blockchain white paper, thus giving birth to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
The Kleiman family now want Wright to hand over the half of the Bitcoins he would be holding , which are worth in the upwards of USD 60 billion.
Wright is reported to have acknowledged that while Kleiman was a close friend, they had never struck a partnership and, hence, he owes no Bitcoins that he may own to the Kleiman family.
Reports said that Wright is seeking, in this lawsuit, that bitcoin.org take down the 2008 white paper even as he alleges that Cobra is wrongfully controlling the website.
When Satoshi Nakamoto went incommunicado in 2011, he or they left control of the open-source code that undergirds the Bitcoin architecture to software engineer Gavin Andresen, who was among the key figures behind the development of the cryptocurrency.
Wright had declared in 2016 that he would prove he was indeed Satoshi Nakamoto by moving some of the Bitcoin registered under that ID, which would show that he had access to the cryptographic keys to the Nakamoto Bitcoin account.
“We’ve been threatened to take down the Bitcoin white paper by someone who obviously isn’t the inventor of Bitcoin ,” Cobra had told Reuters in an email, pointing to the value that the Nakamoto Bitcoins represented at the time.