Craig Wright, a computer scientist who claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin, prevailed in a highly publicized trial Monday that will allow him to hold onto a hoard of worth tens of billions of dollars. A Florida jury found that Wright did not owe half of 1.1 million Bitcoin to the family of David Kleiman, Wright’s one-time business partner.
The case was highly technical, with the jury listening to explanations of the intricate workings of cryptocurrencies and the murky origins of how Bitcoin came to be. Jurors took a whole week to deliberate, repeatedly asking questions of lawyers on both sides as well as the judge on how cryptocurrencies work as well as the business relationship between the two men.
The trial’s center is 1.1 million Bitcoin, worth approximately $50 billion based on Monday’s prices. These were among the first to be created through mining and could only be owned by a person or entity involved with the digital currency from its beginning.origins have always been a bit of a mystery, which is why this trial has drawn so much attention from outsiders. In October 2008, during the height of the financial crisis, a person named “Satoshi Nakamoto” published a paper laying out a framework for a digital currency that would not be tied to any legal or sovereign authority. Mining for the money began a few months later.
The name Nakamoto, roughly translated from Japanese to mean at the center of it, was never considered the actual name of Bitcoin creator. Some cryptocurrency communities do not even believe Nakamoto was a single individual.
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