Craig Wright Loses Defamation Case, and BSV Blockchain?

BSV's blockchain has suffered a 51% attack at the same time as Craig Wright loses a defamation case.

Craig Wright Loses Defamation Case, and BSV Blockchain?
Photo by Aleksi Räisä / Unsplash

This week was a rough one for Craig Wright, the man who claims to be the mysterious pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamato who started all of this by publishing the Bitcoin whitepaper and building the Bitcoin blockchain. Wright’s claims have been dismissed by much of the internet, cryptography experts, and major players early in the cryptocurrency movement. Wright hasn’t just accepted this though, he’s been very litigious.

Just a few days ago, a Norwegian court ruled in Twitter user Hodlonaut’s favor in a defamation case Wright brought forward. The judge ruled that “Granath had sufficient factual grounds to claim that Wright had lied and cheated in his attempt to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto.”

BSV Gets Snagged

Losing in court is usually enough to ruin someone’s week, but that was only part of it for Wright. At roughly the same time he was losing this defamation case and being forced to pay $450k of Hodlonaut’s legal fees, Wright’s Bitcoin fork, Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) was undergoing a 51% attack. An unknown miner took over some 64% of the hash rate, peaking around 80%, effectively giving them control of the blockchain. The miner then began to ignore blocks that involved transactions and pushed through empty blocks, creating inoperable periods for BSV where nothing could be done.

This happened last year too when a miner accumulated 78% of the blockchain’s hash rate, resulting in 100 blocks being reorganized and wiping out 570k transactions.

BSV has taken a beating this year, and based on the steam of bad news it makes sense, but what hasn’t? From the peak, BSV is down about 90%.