The seven-day defamation trial in Oslo, Norway, involving two of the better-known names in cryptocurrency, is on schedule and nearing its conclusion. The defense has already called its final three witnesses, and on the sixth day of the Granath v. Wright trial, the plaintiff began presenting his closing arguments.
The plaintiff in this case is Magnus Granath, better known for his then-anonymous Twitter handle “Hodlonaut.” After being followed and retweeted by celebrities like former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and actor William Shatner due to the success of his Lightning Network Torch Chain campaign in February 2019, Hodlonaut achieved near-celebrity status within the BTC community.
The accused is nChain Chief Scientist Craig S. Wright, who was outed by Wired and Gizmodo magazines in 2015 as the pseudonymous author of the Bitcoin white paper, Satoshi Nakamoto. Since then, Wright has admitted that he is in fact Satoshi Nakamoto and the one who invented Bitcoin. Wright’s claim has been disputed by many within Bitcoin, claiming he is a scammer and not Satoshi Nakamoto.
Many lawsuits have been filed because of this problem. Kleiman v. Wright and Wright v. McCormack are two of the most recent lawsuits that have captured world interest. In the first, Ira Kleiman sued Wright, who was attempting to claim half of the 1.1 million satoshi coins, then worth over $70 billion, alleging that his late brother and Wright’s friend David Kleiman was Wright’s partner in the creation been from bitcoin.
The second is a defamation case similar to this one in which Wright sued a popular blogger Peter McCormack after the latter claimed on social media that Wright was “a liar” and “a fraud”. Wright won in both cases, but questions about his identity remain.
In the current trial in Norway, Granath was previously warned by Wright on Twitter that he would face defamation charges if he didn’t do it…
