Bitcoin SV Down 22% Since Court Ruled Craig Wright Isn’t Satoshi

Bitcoin SV (BSV) has plummeted 13% over the last day after a UK court ruled that Craig Wright is not pseudonymous Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and did not write the leading cryptocurrency’s whitepaper. Coupled with a broader downturn in the cryptocurrency market, it's been a rough week for the Bitcoin variant.

Also known as Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision, BSV was trading for around $113 on Thursday as the court case between Wright and the Crypto Patent Alliance (COPA) concluded.

BSV saw its largest drop in months after U.K. Judge James Mellor ruled that Wright is not the pseudonymous Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto. Following the ruling, BSV has fallen below $89 as of this writing, marking a 22% drop since the decision was announced.

Launched in November 2018, Bitcoin SV aims to follow Satoshi Nakamoto's original vision for Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It resulted from a hard fork known colloquially as “The Hashwar” from Bitcoin Cash (BCH), itself a hard fork from Bitcoin (BTC) over a dispute about block sizes and scalability.

While BSV’s price dump may shock or please some, it was only in December that BSV was trading at similar levels, so the drop may also be a correction after recent gains. The timing of the plunge alongside the court ruling certainly suggests that it played a factor, however.

“I am disappointed at the outcome, but that was always the risk of taking the fight into the hands of the courts,” Gorilla Pool founder and Bitcoin SV advocate Kurt Wuckert Jr wrote. “Of course, I also lament that a Silicon Valley patent alliance now has a foothold to do to Bitcoin what we all know patent alliances do best, but that will be a fight Bitcoin can start to have at a later time.”

“We respect the High Court judgment concerning Dr. Craig Wright,” the BSV Association said on Thursday. “We value the contributions Dr. Wright has previously made as a leading expert on blockchain technology. Notwithstanding the judgment, our focus remains unchanged—the enterprise-grade evolution of the [BSV Blockchain].”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.