Craig Wright Drops Appeal Against Hodlonaut in Norway

Craig Wright has dropped his appeal against Norwegian bitcoiner Hodlonaut, ending a nearly five-year-long legal battle over a series of social media posts in which Hodlonaut called Wright a “scammer” and a “fraud” for claiming to be the inventor of Bitcoin.

A Norwegian judge sided with Hodlonaut after a 2022 trial in Oslo, concluding that he had “sufficient factual grounds to claim that Wright had lied and cheated in his attempt to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.” Hodlonaut brought the case against Wright to preempt him from moving forward with a defamation case about the same social media posts in the U.K., where laws are heavily tipped in favor of the plaintiff, and monetary damages can be enormous.

The infamously litigious Wright appealed the court’s decision. But, according to Hodlonaut, Wright has now dropped that appeal.

“Just got off the phone with my Norwegian lawyer. CRAIG WRIGHT DROPPED THE APPEAL IN NORWAY!,” Hodlonaut wrote in a social media post, adding, “I’m very happy!”

Wright’s decision to back down comes just a month after he lost a separate court case in the U.K. that severely hobbled his ability to claim Satoshi’s throne. The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) sued Wright in 2021 in order to prove that he was not, in fact, the inventor of Bitcoin and to stop him from being able to claim copyright of the Bitcoin whitepaper or sue Bitcoin developers or others under the guise of being Satoshi.

In March, U.K. Judge James Mellor found in favor of COPA, stating that Wright “is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper…is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto….is not the person who created the Bitcoin System…[and] is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software.”

The famously bellicose Wright has been largely quiet in the wake of Judge Mellor’s decision, as has his billionaire benefactor Calvin Ayre. The day after the COPA trial ended, Ayre posted a farewell message on X, saying that the message would be his “last” before taking off on “an adventure I have planned for the last year.”

Despite the conclusion of Wright’s appeal in Norway, other litigation involving Wright – including another defamation case against Hodlonaut in the U.K. – remains pending.

Representatives for Wright did not respond to CoinDesk’s request for comment.