A US jury has asked the self-described Bitcoin inventor, Craig Wright, to pay $100 million in damages for allegedly cheating a deceased friend over crypto intellectual property rights.
The Miami jury arrived at the verdict in a week following a three-week trial in a case to determine the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
A brother of Dave Kleiman, a software engineer who passed on in 2013, told the Federal Court that the deceased worked with Wright earlier before his death. The lawsuit claims that the late Kleiman is entitled to 50% of about 1.1 million bitcoin held by Satoshi, worth nearly $28 billion.
Craig Wright claims to be the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto who invented bitcoin despite skepticism from cryptocurrency investors.
Wright says that the verdict is proof that he is the inventor of the primary cryptocurrency. A while ago, Craig told Kleiman’s kin that they both built bitcoin but still failed to grant his rightful share. The intellectual property behind the blockchain technology, now held by Wright, is worth $252 billion.
Source: Bloomberg