Craig Wright Accused of Plagiarizing His Doctoral Thesis

Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist, claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin. Recently, he was accused of plagiarizing much of his doctoral thesis from Charles Sturt University (CSU) in 2017.

An anonymous blogger named PaintedFrog published an analysis dissecting and comparing every point of Wright’s thesis with the allegedly plagiarized content. The thesis entitled ‘The Quantification of Information Systems Risk: A Look at Quantitative Responses to Information Security Issues,’ was analyzed in May 2020.

The plagiarized work contained published articles, books, web pages and slideshows. “Wright didn’t even change the order of the sentences,” explained PaintedFrog.

“Substantial and deliberate plagiarism is present in at least thirty pages of Wright’s thesis, including nearly all of Chapter 6. Wright plagiarized large parts of the content and reworded it to avoid automated detection tools. In most cases, he simply substituted synonyms every few words.”

The blogger explained that many parts were stolen “literally or almost literally.” There was no citation and credit, and errors were copied from the source material without correction, even though Wright signed and included the Certificate of Authorship in the opening pages of the thesis.

“As in previous cases of plagiarism, Wright often introduced errors when copying material, especially when it contained math. (…) Sometimes Wright would even forget to define terms he stole from the source material, or introduce an equation without including the intermediate steps needed to make it make sense.”

Craig Wright accused of plagiarism

It’s not the first time that PaintedFrog has accused Wright of plagiarism. In 2008 the blogger accused

Wright of plagiarizing Northumbria University’s LLM dissertation in International Commercial Law entitled ‘The Impact of Internet Intermediate Liability’, without even mentioning the original author in some cases.

Wright’s Other Justice Cases

Wright filed a lawsuit accusing another cryptocurrency blogger and podcaster, Peter McCormack, for defamation for claiming he was not Satoshi. A court in London rejected Wright’s witness statement on the grounds that it was “simply false in almost all material respects.”

In mid-March, Wright was ordered to pay $43 million in damages as a federal court convicted him of illegally confiscating intellectual property belonging to a joint venture he co-founded.

In June 2021, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin accused Wright of pretending to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and compared him to former US President Donald Trump and challenged his lawyers to sue him.

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