Alleged bitcoin creator ordered to pay $5b to family of deceased Jewish partner

An Australian businessman who claimed to have invented bitcoin has been ordered by a US court to pay billions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency to the family of his former business partner.

A US district court in Florida ruled on Tuesday that Craig Wright must give the family of American programmer Dave Kleiman, who died in 2013, half of his accumulated bitcoins, which are potentially worth up to $5 billion.

Kleiman’s family sued Wright in 2018, alleging that the two men jointly owned roughly 1.1 million bitcoins and a company and that upon Kleiman’s death, Wright backdated contracts to transfer the ownership of the currency and intellectual property to himself.

Wright claimed in 2016 that he was the inventor of bitcoin, but stepped back from that claim after skepticism arose.

“During his testimony, Dr. Wright’s demeanor did not impress me as someone who was telling the truth. When it was favorable to him, Dr. Wright appeared to have an excellent memory and a scrupulous attention to detail. Otherwise, Dr. Wright was belligerent and evasive,” Judge Bruce Reinhart said in his judgment, cited by The Guardian.

The lawsuit did not claim that Kleiman or Wright were the actual inventors of bitcoin, but instead alleges that the two were heavily involved with the cryptocurrency in its infancy. Early adopters of bitcoin were able to acquire large quantities through a process known as mining long before its value rose a dollar. For example, an extremely early transaction made on the bitcoin network was when someone paid 10,000 bitcoins for a Domino’s pizza.

Bitcoin is currently valued at more than $10,000, down from a height of $20,000 in 2017.