The Bitcoin white paper has recently been reuploaded on Bitcoin.org following Craig Wright’s failed court attempt to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.
Hennadii Stepanov, the maintainer of Bitcoin.org, announced the document’s return by sharing a link to the PDF on platform X.
Previously, Bitcoin.org was forced to limit UK-based access to the white paper. Instead, it displayed a quote from Satoshi Nakamoto: “It takes advantage of the nature of information being easy to spread but hard to stifle.”
In 2021, Wright sued Cobra, the anonymous operator of the website, for copyright infringement, leading to the white paper’s removal. Wright won the case by default since Cobra chose not to defend, resulting in Cobra paying £35,000 ($40,100) in legal fees. In 2019, he filed for U.S. copyright of the Bitcoin white paper.
In 2023, Craig Wright sued 13 Bitcoin Core developers and companies including Blockstream, Coinbase, and Block, for copyright violations related to the white paper and database rights to the Bitcoin blockchain.
However, Wright’s copyright win is now invalid. A detailed ruling from the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) case exposed Wright’s scheme of forgery and deceit. Consequently, Wright’s assets, worth 6.7 million British pounds ($8.4 million), were frozen by a UK court to cover court expenses.
The Bitcoin white paper is now under an MIT open-source licence, allowing anyone to reuse and modify the code for any purpose.