A new post published on May 4th on Medium details in-depth Craig Wright’s alleged plagiarization of his PhD thesis. Wright was originally awarded his PhD by Charles Sturt University in 2017, many years after the publishing of the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008.
His thesis is titled The Quantification of Information Systems Risk: A Look at Quantitative Responses to Information Security Issues. Community members speculate that if the plagiarism accusations gain ground, they could prompt the academic community to discredit Wright’s PhD degree and even disallow Wright from using the title “Doctor.”
According to the analysis, at least thirty pages of Wright’s thesis contain plagiarized aspects including sentences that are taken verbatim without citations. In many cases, Wright substituted synonyms every few words but for the most part, he did not even change the sentence structure to avoid plagiarism detection tools.
First, this may point to Wright’s recklessness in not bothering to cover his tracks. In almost every case, he did not even bother to change the sentence order. Wright said that these were citations that his copy editor and style editor forgot to include.
However, full charts, diagrams, and ideas seem to be pieced together from several sources without any semblance of synthesizing the information or extrapolating into new or innovative conclusions.
This is not the first time Craig Wright’s integrity has been called into question especially with his trial in which he supplied potentially falsified documents.
His past behaviors may point to the fact that he does not have the ability to come up with original content on his own and may have a habit of taking credit for other people’s innovative ideas.
In January, Bitcoin SV saw a 100% price surge following statements that he had received the Tulip Trust keys for 1 million BTC. After that, the price charted 15% decrease as the validity of these claims was put to the test.
It remains to be seen how further revelations with regards to Wright’s character will play out in his long, drawn out case with the Kleiman Estate for which he has already had to pay a great amount in fees.