Craig Wright
According to the transcript of June 28th’s session of the Kleiman v. Wright court case, self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto Craig Wright claimed that Martti Malmi, an early Bitcoin developer, and Michael Marquardt, also known as Theymos, co-founded Silk Road, Hydra, and a “number of other darker websites.”
Craig Wright is involved in a lawsuit against the brother of now-deceased David Kleiman which started back in February 2018. Ira Kleiman alleges that Wright stole a sum of bitcoins that he mined with his brother during the earliest years of the popular cryptocurrency.
In the transcript from last month, however, Wright made some rather serious statements.
He said that Martti Malmi, an early Bitcoin developer, as well as Michael Marquardt, also known as Theymos, a Bitcoin.org and BitcoinTalk administrator as well as an r/Bitcoin moderator, co-founded the infamous Silk Road dark net market as well as Hydra and “a number of other darker websites.”
This has already caught the attention of Malmi, who seems to have plans to take legal action against Wright over his statement.
Referring to Malmi and Theymos, Wright stated:
Both of them, together with Ross Ulbricht, set up Silk Road, Hydra, and a number of other darker websites. I protested this to them. I set up Bitcoin to be honest money. I set up Bitcoin to fix the problems of every other digital cash that had been, whether it be eGold, or Liberty Reserve Cash, or DG Cash, or Brands Cash, every single one had fallen to crime, and I thought by having an evidentiary trial, I would create the world’s first digital cash that would not be linked to crime.
Going even further, Wright said that Martti Malmi “also started working on a reputation system to allow assassination markets.” He added that they had started working on a system designed to enable people to fund terrorism.
Malmi has denied all of these statements as “made-up accusations.”
In order to understand how serious those statements were, it’s appropriate to provide a little background on the well-known Silk Road case.
Silk Road was an online black market which was best known for being a platform for selling illegal drugs. It allowed online users to browse anonymously without their traffic being monitored.
The website was launched in 2011, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) shut it down in October 2013. The FBI arrested Ross Ulbricht, who Wright also mentioned, for being the pseudonymous founder of the website, “Dread Pirate Roberts.”
Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without parole for his crimes, highlighting the seriousness of the matter.
Meanwhile, Craig Wright is also involved in yet another libel case against popular cryptocurrency podcaster Peter McCormack.