The judge in Dr. Craig Wright’s now-victorious white paper case against BTC developer Cøbra has rejected a bizarre, last-gasp attempt by a Satoshi Nakamoto imposter to have the judgment overturned.
The imposter appeared in July, according to lawyers for Dr. Wright, just days after the U.K. High Court granted default judgment in favor of the plaintiff. They are Benjamin Capital Management Group, a New York-based company. They filed an application to have the judgment overturned on the basis that they are the legal entity responsible for the Satoshi Nakamoto identity, though they do not include any evidence in support of their claim.
The person behind Benjamin Capital Management Group appears to be Peter Benjamin, who had filed a trademark application for Bitcoin with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in 2019, some years after Dr. Wright was outed as Satoshi. That filing was not progressed on the basis that prior trademark applications concerning ‘Bitcoin’ already existed. The latest activity on Benjamin’s 2019 trademark application is a notice from March 2021, where the Office notifies Benjamin that someone was trying to change the contact information on the application without Benjamin’s consent. These attempts appear to have been made by Dr. Thong Quang Ngo Senior, who was banned from using the USPTO as a result.
Not that it matters. With the Cøbra case being all but concluded, there is no legal basis for the court to consider a late appearance by a third party. The court dismissed the application out of hand, saying:
“The basis on which the Application is made is entirely unclear. It is not put forward as an attempted appeal against the Order of HH Judge Hodge but instead a submission made after final judgment by someone who claims to be an affected party but did not intervene earlier in the action.”
The Court saw this for what it was, and had no trouble in rejecting the attempt. This is in contrast to Cøbra’s response, which was to become as engaged as he’s been since the lawsuit began earlier this year:
The whitepaper case just got a lot more interesting: a new person claiming to be “Satoshi Nakamoto” has applied to the court to undo my default judgement.
Rather than dismiss it outright, the court seems interested and has fixed a hearing to hear the appeal.
Thanks “Satoshi”.
— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin) September 6, 2021
It’s ironic that Cøbra, who has often called Dr. Wright a scammer yet has done everything he can to avoid meeting him in court, would jump at the chance to have an obvious fraud save him from Dr. Wright’s default judgment—a circumstance entirely of his own making.
Dr. Wright has already won the lawsuit against Cøbra, so there was never anything that could have saved the pseudonymous defendant at this stage, but it is amusing watching Cøbra grasp at such ridiculous straws when he rejected the simplest and most obvious solution: showing up and answering Dr. Wright’s challenge in Court, where legitimate disputes are settled.
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