“This was a tremendous victory for our side,” said Andres Rivero of Rivero Mestre LLP,the lead lawyer representing Wright.
At the centre of the trial were 1.1 million bitcoin,worth approximately $US50 billion ($71 billion) based on Monday’s prices. These were among the first bitcoin to be created through mining and could only be owned by a person or entity involved with the digital currency from its beginning — such as bitcoin’s creator,Satoshi Nakamoto.
Now the cryptocurrency community will be looking to see if Wright follows through on his promise to prove he is the owner of the bitcoin in question. Doing so would lend credence to Wright’s claim,first made in 2016,that he is Nakamoto.
The case tried in federal court in Miami was highly technical,with the jury listening to explanations of the intricate workings of cryptocurrencies as well as the murky origins of how bitcoin came to be. Jurors took a full week to deliberate,repeatedly asking questions of lawyers on both sides as well as the judge on how cryptocurrencies work as well as the business relationship between the two men. At one point the jurors signalled to the judge that they were deadlocked.
Bitcoin’s originshave always been a bit of a mystery,which is why this trial has drawn so much attention from outsiders. In October 2008 during the height of the financial crisis,a person named “Satoshi Nakamoto” published a paper laying out a framework for a digital currency that would not be tied to any legal or sovereign authority. Mining for the currency,which involves computers solving mathematical equations,began a few months later.
The name Nakamoto,roughly translated from Japanese to mean “at the centre of,” was never considered to be the real name of bitcoin’s creator. Some in the cryptocurrency community do not even believe Nakamoto was a single individual.