The jury in Craig Wright’s lawsuit remains deadlocked, who owns 1.1M Bitcoin?

If jurors remained deadlocked, the legal battle between Craig Wright and the heirs of his now-deceased partner David Kleiman over constitutional rights to tens of billions of dollars in Bitcoin mined by Satoshi Nakamoto might end in a mistrial.

The dispute began in 2018 when the family of his colleague Kleiman sued him, claiming the two were partners who invented and mined initial Bitcoins together. Wright asserts he developed Bitcoin under the name Satoshi Nakamoto to remain anonymous. 

The jury was tied by 5 p.m. UTC on December 1 and made the statement:

“Unfortunately, we are not near a conclusion, and we cannot all agree on a verdict on any of the questions.”

As of 11 p.m. UTC, the jury is still in the deadlock situation and has decided to come tomorrow, says Carolina Bolada, Law360’s court reporter, through her Tweet.

She further informed that Judge Beth Bloom issued an Allen Charge asking the jury to continue the process to reach a final verdict. Bolada further said that a careful reexamination and reconsideration of all the evidence in the light of the instructions by the court might help the jury to reach a verdict. 

Wright declines partnership with Kleiman over Bitcoin development

However, if the jury is unable to reach a decision, the judge could announce a mistrial.

The case has a lot riding on it. Both sides claim that Wright is Satoshi, but they dispute over who owns the 1.1 million Bitcoin (BTC) that were mined during the initial days of BTC. That 1.1 million BTC is currently worth $62,568,836,000.

Ira, Kleiman’s brother, testified in court in favor of the estate, claiming that Wright had broken an informal agreement with David to mine Bitcoin and develop its technology collaboratively.

However, as TheCoinRise reported, there are many questions on the true face of Wright after a visible glimpse of his bad plagiarism.

Wright maintains to say that there was no such partnership and that Kleiman did nothing more than proofread the Bitcoin whitepaper because he was not a programmer and could not debug the Bitcoin code.