In Florida, a trial where the family of a deceased man is suing his former business patterner for control over their partnership assets could result in bitcoin’s creator being unmasked.
The assets that the family is trying to obtain are a cache of about one million bitcoins, worth around $64 billion today. The bitcoins belong to the crypto currency’s creator, who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Satoshi Nakamoto has been an enigma in the financial world for over a decade, with experts not knowing if he was one person or several. The even bigger question is why Nakamoto hasn’t touched their fortune of bitcoins.
The family claims that David Kleiman, their deceased relative, and Craig Wright, his business partner, were Nakamoto together. Therefore they are entitled to half of the fortune, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Kleiman died on April 26, 2013.
Bitcoin has become a trillion-dollar market and extremely popular as millions of people have invested, including several athletes who opted to take part of their salary in the cryptocurrency.
Now the lawsuit will possibly unmask who Nakamoto is, ending a mystery that has long perplexed financial experts.
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The lawsuit
Wright is a 51-year-old Australian programmer living in London and has been known for arguing since 2016 that he created bitcoin.
However, most of the bitcoin community has dismissed his claim since he retracted it following criticism. He only recently has re-sparked the point that he is Nakamoto.
Kleiman’s family argues that the two men worked on and mined bitcoin together, which, if true, would mean Kleiman’s family is owed half a million bitcoins.
Vel Freedman, a lawyer representing the Kleiman family, shared that their clients have proof of the partnership between the two men.
“We believe the evidence will show there was a partnership to create and mine over one million bitcoin,” Freedman said, the Journal reported.
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Wright’s legal team says that it will show he was the sole creator of bitcoin and that Kleiman was never involved.
“We believe the court will find there’s nothing to indicate or record that they were in a partnership,” Andrés Rivero, a lawyer for Wright, said, the Journal reported.
However, despite both parties saying that they have evidence proving their involvement in creating bitcoin, bitcoiners say there is only one thing that would prove who Nakamoto is, the private key.
The private key controls the account where Nakamoto stored the one million bitcoins and would prove who the mystery creator is.
