The Bitcoin whitepaper has been reuploaded to the Bitcoin.org website following Craig Wright’s failed attempt to prove in court that he’s the protocol’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
The website was ordered to take down the PDF in 2021 after Wright successfully sued Cøbra, the anonymous group running the site, over copyright infringement. However, Wright’s copyright victory no longer holds weight as his Satoshi claims, and therefore any claims he wrote the whitepaper, have been spectacularly proven wrong.
Bitcoin.org maintainer Hennadii Stepanov announced the Bitcoin whitepaper’s return by sharing a link to the pdf on X (formerly Twitter).
When Wright sued Cøbra, the group was required to attend court hearings that would jeopardize its anonymity. Cøbra subsequently refused to attend these hearings and Wright won his case by default. This resulted in Cøbra paying £35,000 ($40,100) of Wright’s legal fees.
Bitcoin.org had to stop serving the Bitcoin whitepaper to UK-based users, and instead displayed this quote from Satoshi: “It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle.”
Despite this, numerous publishers decided to share the Bitcoin whitepaper together in an act of protest. The crypto arm of Jack Doresy’s Square hosted the paper, as did a number of governments including the US, Estonia, and Colombia.
Wright’s own Bitcoin Satoshi Vision whitepaper, which he claimed to be the real thing, was loaded with errors.
One user compiled a list of over 100 websites hosting the Bitcoin whitepaper just as Craig Wright was threatening to sue anyone who published it. They told Protos it was their way of “fighting back against Wright’s nonsense.”
A High Court in the UK eventually ruled that Wright wasn’t Satoshi in March 2024. One judge concluded that Craig Wright lied “extensively,” engaged in “technobabble,” and isn’t “nearly as clever as he thinks he is.”
