
TL;DR Craig has checked down the back of the couch but can’t find 500,000 BTC.
Literally no one saw this coming.
Earlier this summer, Craig entered into a (non-binding) settlement agreement with the Kleiman estate — selfishly putting a stop to the litigation that everyone was finding so entertaining. The deal was that Craig would forfeit half his intellectual property and half of the bitcoins he and Dave Kleiman mined before 2014, which Craig sneakily kept after Dave died.
This case has more twists and turns than a python on a rollercoaster, but the long and the short of it was that the settlement would see Craig parting with BTC worth around $4.5 billion. That’s a lot of BTC. Probably only someone like Satoshi has that much.
Craig earned a respite from court, since efforts switched from litigation to settlement. Now — amazingly — Craig has, at the last minute and without notice, broken the agreement. His reason is that he can’t find the money.
Incredible. Who could have predicted such a development?!
The case was marked by temper tantrums that threatened to land Craig in jail for contempt, and various pieces of evidence that looked suspiciously like they might have been fabricated. Documents dating from the early years of Dave and Craig’s collaboration, for example, appear to have been written in fonts that were only created at a much later date. Digital signatures seem not to obey the normal laws of cryptography. Craig also came up with just about every excuse under the sun to avoid submitting key evidence or doing what the court demanded, including ‘It will take too long to find that’ and ‘What about Hurricane Dorian?’
The judge wasn’t too impressed with any of it, anyway. Now he’s also likely to be rather upset that, at the eleventh hour, Craig hasn’t been able to find the half-a-million bitcoins he said he would. It was a non-binding agreement, so it won’t land him in jail, but we can’t imagine the judge will give him a pat on the back for stringing things out any further.
Now that Craig has inexplicably failed to find the bitcoins that he definitely does own, because he is Satoshi for sure — we know this because he has said it several times — the trial is back on. It will start again in March 2020, which gives Craig a nice long time over Christmas to stick his head in the sand and pretend that he is smarter than the entire legal profession and crypto sector combined. (He is smarter than Calvin Ayre, though, who still believes in his BFF.)
The silver lining is that this whole saga is going to go on for months longer. Maybe years. Craig is going to keep lots of cryptographers and journalists in business, demonstrating how his evidence has been forged, and writing articles about how naughty he has been.
And although Craig’s inexorable and entirely self-inflicted slide into obscurity is kind of pathetic, it’s also really fun to watch.
So thank you, Craig. We appreciate the effort.
Article by Moonhub
