The Bitcoin white paper has been reuploaded to the Bitcoin.org website following Craig Wright’s failed court attempt to prove himself as Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of the protocol. Hennadii Stepanov, the maintainer of the Bitcoin.org website, announced the return of the white paper by sharing a link to the PDF on platform X. Due to legal restrictions, access to the white paper was previously limited for users in the UK, with a quote from Satoshi Nakamoto displayed instead.
In 2021, Wright successfully sued Cobra, the anonymous group behind the website, for copyright infringement, resulting in the removal of the white paper PDF. Cobra, the website’s owner, chose not to defend the case, leading to £35,000 ($40,100) of Wright’s legal fees being paid. Wright had filed for US copyright registration for the white paper in 2019.
In 2023, Wright filed copyright violation lawsuits against 13 Bitcoin Core developers and several companies, including Blockstream, Coinbase, and Block, regarding the white paper, its file format, and the database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain. The Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund responded, highlighting the trend of abusive lawsuits against prominent Bitcoin contributors and the negative impact on development.
However, Wright’s copyright victory is no longer valid as his claims of being Satoshi Nakamoto and the author of the white paper have been definitively disproven. This ruling came in response to a case brought against Wright by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a coalition of companies aiming to prevent Wright from asserting ownership over Bitcoin’s core intellectual property. COPA accused Wright of engaging in a complex scheme of forgery and deceit to support his claim.
As a result, Craig Wright’s assets, valued at £6.7 million ($8.4 million), have been frozen to prevent him from evading court expenses. The Bitcoin white paper is now subject to an MIT open-source license, allowing anyone to reuse and modify the code for any purpose.