Wright Not Recognized as Satoshi

According to mainstream media reports, Australian computer scientist Craig Wright has been granted a copyright registration by the US Copyright Office for most of Bitcoin’s original source code as well as the Bitcoin White Paper – under the name of Satoshi Nakamoto.

Wright’s Claims Denied

According to Wright’s spokesperson, the registrations granted by the agency recognized Wright as the author of both the code and the white paper – under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto.

The spokesperson also said that the US Copyright Office was the first government agency to recognize Craig Wright’s claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin.

However, this claim has been refuted strongly. The US Copyright Office did not recognize authors of any work. The agency granted copyright registrations as a standard procedure; it did not conduct investigations into the identities of the people who were registering for a copyright.

The Copyright Office clarified: when a piece of work is registered under an alias, the agency does not carry out an investigation into whether there is a confirmed connection between the pseudonymous author and the claimant.

The agency also stated that if more than one person made a claim to have a copyright over the same piece of work, the office would register all claims. And if it is glaringly obvious that a claim is false, then the Copyright Office can cancel the registration application.

Added to all of this, the registration of a copyright does not give any protection to the intellectual property of Bitcoin as an invention. For that, a person would need to apply for a patent. A copyright only protects the expression of a piece of creative work.

Impact on Bitcoin SV

Whatever the claims, or denials be, the fact that Wright’s claims for copyright were granted had led to a massive increase in the price of Bitcoin SV, the version of Bitcoin the Australian computer scientist is promoting. SV stands for Satoshi’s Vision.

In fact, on Tuesday, May 21, the price of the altcoin went up by over 125% in a space of 75 minutes. It was trading at $61.76 per token when the news broke. In just over an hour, that price shot up to $139.31.

At the time of writing, however, the price of the cryptocurrency has continued its decline, and is currently trading at $96.54 per token, which is still more than a 56% increase in its price.