A US court has ordered self-professed BitcoinBitcoin inventor Craig Wright to pay legal costs totaling $165,500 in connection with a billion-dollar lawsuit that has dragged on for two years. The judge removed some of the costs but still left Wright with a sizable bill, according to court documents.

The lawsuit against Wright was first launched in February 2018. Wright is being sued by the estate of Dave Kleiman, Wright's former business partner, for allegedly defrauding the Kleiman family of their rightful claim to 1.1 million Bitcoin, worth $5.5 billion, following Dave Kleiman’s death in April 2013.

The legal fees Wright was ordered to pay today were incurred during the litigation of two motions regarding the production of documents on Wright's alleged Bitcoin holdings. The Kleiman estate's lawyers originally asked for a total of $658,581.78, mostly for wages, with some expenses included. The judge found that the lawyers were charging excessive rates and had billed for hours without specifying what they were working on—striking these expenses.

The funds are locked up. Image: Shutterstock.

Confirmed: Craig Wright doesn’t have keys to $8 billion of Bitcoin

Craig Wright’s lawyer confirmed to Decrypt today that Wright does not possess—nor even claim to possess—the private keys that can be used to spend $8 billion of Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto mined in Bitcoin’s early days. Wright filed a statement in the Southern District of Florida late Tuesday asserting that he had received information to unlock an encrypted file of thousands of public Bitcoin addresses that he claims to own. Wright had previously said, under oath, that an “encrypted file” exis...

NewsBusiness
4 min read
Tim Copeland

The court case, which has drawn considerable attention from the cryptocurrency industry, took an unexpected turn earlier this year when it initially appeared that Wright had claimed to gain the keys to access his massive Bitcoin stash—which he says is locked up in a blind trust. However, Wright's lawyer later confirmed to Decrypt that Wright had not received the keys, just a list of Bitcoin addresses.

But, considering the latest action from the court, he could have done with that Bitcoin turning up.

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