The High Court in London has approved the filing of claims against 16 developers of bitcoin and related cryptocurrencies by the law firm Ontier LLP, representing the interests of Australian entrepreneur Craig Wright.
Wright claims several billion dollars worth of coins in one of the bitcoin wallets. This wallet, in turn, is associated with the hacking of the Mt. Gox exchange, from which 800,000 BTC was stolen in 2014. Wright, however, claims that he bought the coins, but they were also stolen from him. The defendants in the case are Vladimir Van Der Laan, Jonas Schnelli, Peter Wulle, Marco Falke, Samuel Dobson, Michael Ford, Corey Fields, George Dombrowski, Matt Corallo, Peter Todd, Gregory Maxwell, Eric Lombroso, Roger Ver, Amory Sechet and Jason Cox, who are involved in the development of bitcoin, as well as Bitcoin Cash forks, Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin SV.
"Tulip Trading simply became a victim of theft," Wright's lawyers say, trying to force the developers to give him access to the specified wallet.
"Tulip Trading requires individual developers to be allowed to regain access to and control over these bitcoins on the basis that they, the developers, have responsibilities to the owners of the bitcoins under English law as a result of the high powers and degree of control they have over the respective blockchains," writes Ontier LLP. – The fact that someone stole the digitally encrypted private keys of bitcoin from Tulip Trading does not prevent the developers from running the code that will allow the rightful owner to regain control of these bitcoins."
How developers should fulfill Wright's requirement is unclear. The launch of such code would most likely lead to the emergence of an alternative version of the blockchain, since many network participants would not agree with the proposed changes. Complicating the process is the fact that one of the former users of Mt. Gox also makes claims on the bitcoins in the wallet.
Previously, Wright has already brought charges against various entities and developers of Bitcoin Core for publishing a bitcoin white paper on the network, the author of which he allegedly is.