An Australian computer scientist who falsely claimed to be the creator of bitcoin has been given a one-year suspended prison sentence after the high court in London ruled he was in contempt because he would not stop suing people.

Mr Justice Mellor had already found that Craig Wright, 54, repeatedly lied about his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym used by the person or people who launched bitcoin – the cryptocurrency that was first mined in 2009 and recently soared in value to £79,000.

On Thursday Wright was sentenced for five counts of contempt of court. Sentencing him to 12 months in jail, suspended for two years and to pay £145,000 in costs within a fortnight, the court also struck out his enormous claim.

At the Royal Mint plant, piles of circuit boards are being fed into the new facility.

First, they are heated to remove their various components. Then the array of detached coils, capacitors, pins and transistors are sieved, sorted, sliced and diced as they move along a conveyor belt. Anything with gold in it is set aside.

âoeWhat we're doing here is urban mining,â says head of sustainability Inga Doak. âoeWe're taking a waste product that's being produced by society and we're mining the gold from that waste product and starting to see the value in that finite resource.â

The gold-laden pieces go to an on-site chemical plant. Theyâ(TM)re tipped into a chemical solution which leaches the gold out into the liquid. This is then filtered, leaving a powder behind. It looks pretty nondescript but this is actually pure gold â" it just needs to be heated in a furnace to be transformed into a gleaming nugget.

âoeTraditional gold recovery processes are very energy intensive and use very toxic chemicals that can only be used once, or they go to high energy smelters and they're basically burnt,â says Leighton John, the Royal Mint's operations director. âoeThe groundbreaking thing for us is the fact that this chemistry is used at room temperature, at very low energy, itâ(TM)s recyclable and pulls gold really quickly.â

Reported elsewhere is an allegation that PayPal had not closed the alleged scammer's account eight months after a concerned user reported it.

(From the BBC article:)