The court case involving 1.1 million Bitcoin has come to a halt because the jury has been deadlocked for days.
If jurors remain deadlocked, the legal battle between Australian Craig Wright and the estate of his now-deceased friend David Kleiman over legal rights to tens of billions of dollars in Bitcoin generated by Satoshi Nakamoto might result in a mistrial.
Wright claims he invented Bitcoin under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. The dispute began in 2018, when the estate of his colleague Kleiman sued him, claiming the two were partners who conceived and mined Bitcoin together.
The jury was tied by 5 p.m. UTC on Nov. 2 and made the following statement:
“Unfortunately we cannot come to a conclusion and we cannot all agree on a verdict on any of the questions.”
According to court reporter Carolina Bolada of Law360, the jury was still tied as of 10 p.m. UTC and will reconvene tomorrow. Judge Beth Bloom issued an Allen Charge, requiring the jury to keep debating until a decision is reached. “I recommend that you revisit and rethink all of the material in light of the court’s legal directions,” she stated.
However, if the jury is unable to reach a decision, the judge may declare a mistrial. The case has a lot riding on it. Both sides claim that Wright is Satoshi, but they disagree over who owns the 1.1 million BTC that were mined at the moment. That 1.1 million BTC is currently worth $62,568,836,000.
Ira Kleiman, David’s brother, testified in court on behalf of the estate, claiming that Wright had broken an oral agreement with David to mine Bitcoin and develop its technology jointly.
Wright maintains that there was no such collaboration and that Kleiman did nothing more than review the Bitcoin whitepaper because he was not a developer and could not debug the Bitcoin code.
