Craig Wright
An unknown person has tampered with some of the Bitcoin addresses that Craig Wright has previously claimed to own in his ongoing legal case against the Kleiman estate.
The person has used the private keys for the addresses to sign a message in which he called Wright a liar and a fraud.
The message in the 145 wallet addresses, containing bitcoins mined during the asset’s early years, was initially brought up earlier today by a cryptocurrency proponent and it reads:
“Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud. He doesn’t have the keys used to sign this message.
The Lightning Network is a significant achievement. However, we need to continue work on improving on-chain capacity. Unfortunately, the solution is not to just change a constant in the code or to allow powerful participants to force out others. We are all Satoshi.”
According to Rein’s Bitcoin Signature Tool, the wallet addresses and signatures indeed signed the message.
What’s particularly compelling about those 145 addresses is that they appear in the list of thousands of others that Craig Wright has claimed to own in his legal case against the estate of his late former partner – Dave Kleiman.
The self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto had to provide proof of ownership for those addresses by mid-April, but he failed to do so.
The legal case, in which both sides are fighting for the ownership of half of 1.1 million bitcoins allegedly mined by Kleiman and Wright in the early days, mostly depends on whether or not Wright can prove he has the keys. The release of the message could seriously rattle his claim that he indeed owns all of those Bitcoin addresses.
It’s also worth noting that this is the second case within a week that an early Bitcoin miner has shown some activity. As CryptoPotato reported recently, 50 bitcoins mined a month after the network launched in 2009 were transferred to an unknown address.
The message also referred to Bitcoin’s off-chain scaling solution created in 2015 – the Lightning Network. Despite the initially slow start, the LN has improved significantly in the past few years. According to recent study compiled by BitMEX Research, the network had illustrated notable growth in various aspects.
However, the person behind the message believes that the LN still has a long way to go, and people should contribute more to the development of the project.
