Craig Wright Shrugs Off Plagiarism Accusations

Nchain chief scientist Craig Wright is a prolific blockchain researcher, with dozens of papers and patents to his name. He’s also a controversial and outspoken figure who has ruffled numerous figures in the crypto space. Some of these opponents have taken it upon themselves to scrutinize his work, and claim to have found incidents of plagiary.

Also read: Nchain to Offer Smart Contract Patents Exclusively to the Bitcoin Cash Community

Craig Wright Accused of Not Citing His Sources

Nchain, led by Jimmy Nguyen and chief scientist Craig Wright, is a blockchain-based research company that is famous for the number of patents it has filed. Only this week, news.Bitcoin.com reported on Nchain’s first approved patent by the European Patent Office, for blockchain-enforced smart contracts. The originality of some of Dr Wright’s work has been called into question, however, with a couple of detractors raising concerns.

“The Fallacy of Selfish Mining: A Mathematical Critique”, published in July 2017, is one of Craig Wright’s better known papers. It was another blockchain chief scientist, Bitcoin Unlimited’s Peter Rizun, known Wright antagonist, who spotted the alleged plagiarism. The gambling system heavily referenced in White’s paper makes no mention of the paper it apparently draws its inspiration from, “A strong limit theorem on gambling systems” published by Wen Liu and Jinting Wang in 2003.

Craig Wright Goes on the Offensive

In response to the accusations of plagiary, Craig Wright asserted via Twitter that it was the job of the “professional academic editing company” who vets his work to check sources and citations. Since Wright failed to mention Wen Liu and Jinting Wang’s paper, however, the editing team would not have known to acknowledge this. Plagiary is not uncommon in the crypto space, with whitepapers by the likes of Tron and Dadi also subject to copy+paste claims.

Craig Wright has also been called out by Omni blockchain’s developer over one of the features in Nchain’s recently awarded patent. The Omni dev claims that one of Wright’s proposals for embedding data in public keys was first used by Counterparty and Omni as far back as 2013. Wright remains defiant though, and has invoked the Streisand Effect, claiming that his critics’ scrutiny helps his work reach a far wider audience than it would have otherwise have received.

Do you think Craig Wright is guilty of plagiary, or are his detractors being unfair? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and Twitter.

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