Dr Bitcoin's pyrrhic libel victory

Among the losers in this week's pyrrhic libel case involving the man who claims to be 'Satoshi Nakamoto', the inventor of bitcoin, may be the magistracy of England and Wales. Dr Craig Wright (pictured above), the computer scientist who was this week awarded £1 in damages, had told the court of how a blogger's slurs on his character had forced him to abandon his application for the bench. 'I will still apply to be a magistrate once this case is over and my reputation is cleared up,' he told Mr Justice Chamberlain in the High Court in May. 

That ambition is now unlikely to be realised. Although the court this week found that Wright had indeed been repeatedly defamed, it also found that he had provided deliberately false evidence, specifically about allegedly withdrawn invitations to academic conferences. This, the judge concluded, would have been maintained in trial if the defence had not served up evidence refuting it - including, Hollywood-style, an offer to fly in a last-minute witness from Paris. 

The judgment observes: 'Dr Wright's response to this evidence was to change his case and withdraw significant parts of his earlier evidence, while seeking to explain the errors were inadvertent. I have rejected that explanation as untrue.'

Elsewhere, the words 'vague and unimpressive', 'flatly inconsistent with his earlier case' 'straightforwardly false in almost every material respect' leap out from the judgment.

More embarrassingly still, the High Court judgment reproduces the observations of two US judges in a previous case involving Wright. These include the observations that 'Dr Wright's demeanor did not impress me as someone who was telling the truth' and that Wright had been 'evasive... and became defensive when confronted with previous inconsistencies'. 

While Wright pointed out that in the US litigation he had been successful before the jury, Chamberlain said this 'does not detract from the potential relevance to Dr Wright's credibility of these reasoned judges in a respected common law jurisdiction'. 

Neither was the judge impressed by the claim that the libels had thwarted Wright's judicial ambitions, noting that there was 'no evidence that an application for appointment as a magistrate would be likely to be refused because of unsubstantiated allegations made on Twitter'. The cold, reasoned, findings of a High Court judge are another matter. 

Ironically these self-inflicted injuries by Wright may not have been necessary. The judgment found that each of the publications complained about had caused serious harm to his reputation, which had been 'lowered in the eyes of at least one influential individual'. However the 'deliberately false case' on serious harm... along with the fact that the libellous tweets had been in response to Wright's 'goading' made it 'unconscionable that Dr Wright should receive any more than nominal damages'. Hence the £1 award.

Of course the matter does not rest there. The judge invited submissions on the question of injunctive relief - sought by Wright - and costs. (At a case management conference a cost master described Wright's costs budget as 'the biggest budget that I have ever seen personally in any category of work'.) Meanwhile, Wright's solicitors, London specialist firm Ontier, said it is considering appealing 'the interpretation of Dr Wright’s evidence'.

And, while the judge ruled that asserting that there are reasonable grounds to question whether Wright had fraudulently claimed to be 'Satoshi Nakamoto' had been defamatory at common law, his ruling is unlikely to settle an extraordinarily bitter controversy. That will await further cases in Wright's odyssey through the courts. ('This is not the first litigation in which Dr Wright has been involved,' Chamberlain noted with classic judicial understatement.) 

Possibly uniquely among people following the controversy, this writer has no opinion either way. I will merely observe that the question of 'Satoshi's' identity would probably better decided by an expert panel of disinterested cryptographers - if such can be found - than a court of law. Wright has every right - even a duty, on behalf of his family - to tackle online poison. But, as Rebekah Vardy discovered in a more publicised case last week, a libel action in the High Court is an ordeal from which few reputations emerge entirely unscathed. No one doubts the brilliance of the polymath that is Dr Craig Wright, but, based on his performance in court in May, as a magistrate he would make a very good computer scientist.