Craig Wright, controversial bitcoin entrepreneur who claims to Satoshi Nakamoto is in hot water again after two successive allegations were levelled against him, one for plagiarising his PhD thesis and another for providing fake Bitcoin addresses to the court.
Wright has a history of making broad claims but eventually when it comes to publicly showing proof of his lofty claims, he often fails to provide any substantial proof. He has often landed in hot water because of that. To read a detailed record of his claims and previous issues, please read our extensive featured article here.
The latest accusations against the Craig Wright are as follows:
Craig Wright is once again accused of plagiarising a thesis. This time it is the one that he done during his time at the Charles Sturt University (CSU) back in 2017. Previously, Wright was also accused of plagiarising his 2018 law degree dissertation that he obtained from the Northumbria university an accuser on the web. The same anonymous accuser going by the alias PaintedFrog has showed that his thesis “The Quantification of Information Systems Risk: A Look at Quantitative Responses to Information Security Issues,” also has similar plagiarism issues.
According to the accusation:
Huge swaths of content and reworded it to avoid automated detection tools. In most cases, he simply substituted synonyms every few words
Substituting words with their synonyms to avoid online plagiarism scans like TurnitIn and others doesn’t absolve a person of plagiarising other people’s works. This may not be true for every other general content but scholarly articles with this kind of approach are generally viewed in the same category as plagiarised works and fall under the category of intellectual dishonesty, especially if the original researcher is not referenced in the document. The comparison shows obvious efforts to do this because small mistakes of the original publisher have also been copied and presented into the paper without any reference at all.
According the university’s own policy, following this line of approach is one of the alternate definitions for plagiarism itself. Therefore, the accusation is strong and the university might look into it in the near future because it represents the academic credentials of the university itself. While no software has the ability to detect this plagiarism-beating approach yet, his thesis can still be cancelled if the allegations are strong enough.
To mount Wright’s troubles, the The Kleiman estate has filed references in court to sanction him because he provided false evidence once asked by the court including a list of Bitcoin addresses that the estate alleges are fake. This is going to go to court so it will be difficult to predict what the judges will decide, but if proven to be true, Wright may be punished for submitting fake evidence which will go into his permanent record.
The Kleiman estate is primarily composed of Ira Kleiman, brother of Wright’s partner David Kleiman. The Estate on top of this also has an ongoing case against him regarding billions of dollars worth of crypto that both Kleiman and Wright mined in a partnership. Kleiman is claiming it as part of his deceased brother’s estate while Wright is claiming that they don’t belong to him at all. The trial is expected to start in July but with the Coronavirus pandemic, it could possibly be delayed.
While the court case and the university administration are probably looking into the fresh allegations, it can easily be seen that the Wright’s antics may not have done him much good and he might lose a doctorate or get reprimanded by the court or both.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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