Ripple veteran David Schwartz has downplayed the significance of what seems to be the most audacious legal action in the history of crypto that could overshadow the past efforts of Australian computer scientist Craig Wright. According to Wright, the core legal arguments are comically bad.
As reported by U.Today, the lawsuit seeks to grant legal ownership of a staggering 39,069 dormant Bitcoin wallets to an anonymous plaintiff.
At current prices, the wallets are worth roughly $293 billion, which is more than the total net worth of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
"Lost and found" claim
The extremely bizarre lawsuit was filed by a New York man going by the pseudonym "Noah Doe" alongside two corporate entities.
It zeroes in on self-custodied Bitcoin wallets that have shown no on-chain activity for at least five years.
The complaint says that Doe was able to develop a custom algorithmic method to isolate the wallets that have been abandoned.
The plaintiff loaded the wallet data onto USB drives and turned them over to the police as lost property.
The plaintiff's team then started sending out abandonment notices to various wallets.
More than 400 owners moved their funds to indicate they were not abandoned. However, well over 39,000 wallets remained completely silent. This prompted Doe to sue to claim full legal ownership.
"Comically bad" logic
Ripple’s Schwartz, however, is not impressed by this sheer audacity, claiming that there are massive legal flaws in the plaintiff's logic.
"There are many significant legal problems with the suit," Schwartz stated. "For one thing, there's no basis for the court to have jurisdiction. The logic that the property was found in the state of NY is comically bad".
Galaxy Research Head Alex Thorn, whose team has been closely following the lawsuit, is also skeptical. He recently pointed to the sheer absurdity of using local lost-and-found statutes to claim globally distributed BTC holdings.
It would be "extraordinary" for a New York court to hand three anonymous parties legal title to roughly $293 billion worth of BTC. Of course, this massive stash also includes the coins that are associated with Satoshi Nakamoto.
Schwartz has stressed that the core Bitcoin network would never comply with such a demand (even though this might apply to alternative forks). "It is very unlikely that the bitcoin network itself would ever do so," Schwartz concluded. "But BSV, and other past and future forks that might honor court orders at layer one, could".
Dan Burgin
