Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. Most recently, he was accused of plagiarizing a large part of his doctoral thesis from Charles Sturt University (CSU) in 2017.
An anonymous blogger named PaintedFrog published an analysis dissecting each point of Wright’s thesis and comparing it to the allegedly plagiarized content. The dissertation entitled “The Quantification of Information Systems Risk: A Look at Quantitative Responses to Information Security Issues” was analyzed in May 2020.
The plagiarized works included published articles, books, websites and slide shows. “Wright didn’t even change the order of the sentences,” PaintedFrog explained.
“Substantial and intentional plagiarism is present on at least thirty pages of Wright’s dissertation, including almost all of Chapter 6. Wright plagiarized large portions of the content and reworded it to bypass automatic detection tools. In most cases, he simply replaced synonyms every few words.”
The blogger explained that many parts were “literally or almost literally” stolen. There was no citation or attribution, and errors were copied from the source material without correction, although Wright had signed the certificate of authorship and pasted it on the first few pages of the dissertation.
“As in previous cases of plagiarism, Wright frequently made mistakes when copying material, especially when it contained mathematics. (…) Sometimes Wright even forgot to define terms he stole from the source material, or introduced an equation without including the intermediate steps needed to make it meaningful.”
Craig Wright accused of plagiarism
This isn’t the first time PaintedFrog has accused Wright of plagiarism. In 2008, the blogger accused
Wright to plagiarize Northumbria University’s LLM dissertation in International Commercial Law entitled “The Impact of Internet Intermediate Liability” without even citing the original author in some cases.
Wright’s Other Justice Cases
Wright filed a lawsuit accusing another cryptocurrency blogger and podcaster, Peter McCormack, of defamation for claiming he is not Satoshi. A court in London dismissed Wright’s testimony on the grounds that it was “simply false on almost all material counts”.
In mid-March, Wright was ordered to pay $43 million in damages when a federal court found him guilty of illegally seizing intellectual property from a joint venture he co-founded.
In June 2021, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin accused Wright of impersonating Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, compared him to former US President Donald Trump, and urged his attorneys to sue him.
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