Former Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen regrets writing, “I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented bitcoin.”

The case will go to trial because Wright, who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, said his team was “thrilled“of the judges’decision to overturn the March dismissal. Meanwhile, former bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen revised a 2016 blog post, insisting that it was a “mistake to trust Craig Wright as much as I did.“

Court of Appeals allows Tulip Trading case to go to trial; Gavin Andresen reflects on trusting Craig Wright, and refuses to play the “Who is Satoshi“now.

Bitcoin Developers face £3.5bn legal action from Bitcoin inventor #DrCraigWrighthttps://t.co/5J2141jRxT

ONTIER team lead by Paul Ferguson, Derek Stinson and Oliver Cain.

ONTIER LLP (@ONTIERLLP) February 24, 2021

Craig Wright, the Australian who claims to be the pseudo-creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, won a motion to appeal on February 3, 2023, allowing his company, Tulip Trading Limited (TTL), to sue 16 open-source crypto-currency developers. Three judges overturned a previous dismissal from March 2022. TTL is application about $3 billion in allegedly stolen digital assets and asserts that fiduciary and tort obligations require open-source blockchain developers to code a digital asset recovery tool. The Bitcoinsv case, which forked the Bitcoin Cash network, has already implemented a digital asset recovery tool on its blockchain.

“We are pleased that the judges have given TTL permission to pursue its claim for breach of fiduciary duty and/or duty of care against developers of blockchain-related digital assets, including bitcoin“, Craig Wright said after winning the’appeal.

After the UK court overturned the previous ruling, former Bitcoin core developer Gavin Andresen appealed the decision revised a blog post he wrote in May 2016. The original post detailed Andresen’s meeting with Craig Wright and it stated, “I believe Craig Steven Wright is the person who invented bitcoin.“The post now includes an update from Andresen acknowledging that he believes it was a mistake to trust Wright. “February 2023: I don’t believe in rewriting history, so I’ll leave this post up“, Andresen wrote. “But in the seven years since I wrote it, a lot has happened, and I know now that it was a mistake to trust Craig Wright as much as I did.“

The former Bitcoin core developer added:

I regret that I got caught up in the “who is (or isn’t) Satoshi” game, and I refuse to continue playing that game.

Andresen’s 2016 post received significant criticism when it was first published on the web. Six years ago, the developer also discussed the situation with members of the Reddit community after the post was published. “Craig signed off on a post that I’chose (‘Gavin’s favorite number is eleven. CSW’ as I recall) using the private key from block number 1“, Andresen said at the time. “This signature was copied to a clean USB drive that I brought with me to London, then validated on a brand new laptop with a freshly downloaded copy of Electrum. I was not allowed to keep the message or the laptop ([par] Fear that it would leak before the official announcement). I have no explanation for the funky OpenSSL procedure in his blog post.“

Later, during a Kleiman vs. Wright trial in June 2020, Andresen told the court that during the 2016 signing process, he could have been deceived. “There are places in the private evidence session where I’could have been deceived, where someone could have switched the software that was used or maybe the laptop that was delivered was not a brand new laptop, and it had been tampered with in some way. I was also jet-lagged“, Andresen noted in his deposition. “My doubts stem from the fact that the evidence that was presented to me is very different from the pseudo evidence that was then presented to the world.“

It is unclear why Gavin Andresen decided to revise the post after Wright won the appeal and won the right to sue the developers. Despite Andresen’s update, some BSV fans continue to believe that Wright is the creator of Bitcoin, while other BSV advocates have called for Wright to “demonstrates the same block signature” that he performed in private.