Users in the United Kingdom are still only able to see the Bitcoin white paper on the Bitcoin.org website with limited access due to regulatory restrictions.
Following Craig Wright’s failed legal attempt to establish his identity as the pseudonymous architect of the Bitcoin protocol, Satoshi Nakamoto, the white paper has been released again to the Bitcoin.org website.
The creator of Bitcoin.org, Hennadii Stepanov, shared a link to the white paper PDF on platform X to announce the publication of the paper again. Bitcoin.org was compelled to limit access to the Bitcoin white paper for people located in the United Kingdom due to regulatory restrictions.
Rather, a moving statement by Satoshi Nakamoto was presented, which said, “It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle.” Wright filed a successful copyright infringement lawsuit against Cobra, the mysterious organisation in charge of the website, in 2021, and the website was forced to take down the white paper PDF.
Wright won by default after the website’s pseudonymous owner, Cobra, chose not to mount a defense. This resulted in Cobra paying £35,000 ($40,100) of Wright’s legal fees. Wright filed for United States copyright registration for the Bitcoin white paper in 2019.
Wright filed a lawsuit against 13 Bitcoin Core developers and a collection of businesses in 2023, alleging copyright violations pertaining to the Bitcoin white paper, its file format, and database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain. The organisations in question included Blockstream, Coinbase, and Block. In response, the Bitcoin Legal Defence Fund brought attention to the pattern of malicious lawsuits filed against well-known Bitcoin contributors
. The defence fund claims that the time, stress, costs, and legal dangers involved in these lawsuits prevent development. Wright’s copyright victory is now nullified, though, as his assertions that he wrote the white paper and was Satoshi Nakamoto have been conclusively refuted.
The comprehensive decision concerned a lawsuit filed against Wright by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), an association of well-known businesses aiming to stop Wright from claiming intellectual property rights over Bitcoin. According to COPA, Wright had created a complex web of lies and forgeries to create evidence that supported his identity as Nakamoto.
Craig Wright’s assets, valued at 6.7 million British pounds ($8.4 million), were placed under freeze following the approval of a plan by a United Kingdom court to stop him from avoiding paying court costs. The MIT open-source licence now governs the Bitcoin white paper, enabling anybody to reuse and alter the code for any reason.