On Monday (August 26), just after Dr. Craig S. Wright, the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto, left the Florida courtroom in which he had just lost the lawsuit brought against him by Ira Kleiman, he gave a phone interview to Modern Consensus, highlights of which are presented in this article.
Over a year ago, Ira Kleiman, the brother of Wright’s late business partner, Dave Kleiman, sued Wright on behalf of the Kleiman estate for 50% of the 1.1 million bitcoins allegedly mined by Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman between 2009 and 2011.
On Monday, at a hearing at U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart recommended that the Kleiman estate be awarded 50 percent of the bitcoin that Wright held prior to 31 December 2013. According to the report by Modern Consensus, the court also awarded to the Kleiman family “intellectual property associated with the Bitcoin software, but none associated with Bitcoin Cash or Craig Wright’s back-to-basics Bitcoin Satoshi Vision.”
In the interview with Modern Consensus, Wright made several interesting comments about the significance of the court’s ruling:
- Wright says that although the judge did not accept that he is Satoshi, he accepted that the partnership is Satoshi:
The judge won’t rule on whether I’m Satoshi. But the partnership is. So when Dave Kleiman passed, the partneship transferred to Ira.”
- He believes that because the judge wants him to give around 500,000 BTC to Ira Kleiman, the BTC markets could “tank” if Ira Kleiman has to sell some of these coins to pay the Florida estate tax on this inheritance:
… the judge ordered me to send just under 500,000 BTC over to Ira. Let’s see what it does to the market. I wouldn’t have tanked the market. I’m nice.
And the biggest whale ever has to dump because he has to pay tax. It’s not a transfer. Florida has an estate tax. Trust me.
- He is worried that his kids finding out the he owns about $5 billion in Bitcoin could affect their lives in not a good way:
It’s f***ing scary. Now the kids are going to know that we have the other $5 billion. And it really sucks. Imagine that (laughs). I had planned to live a long time and hopefully they wouldn’t know until they were older and we were gone. It could affect their whole lives.
Featured Image Credit: Photo via Pixabay.com
