He Went After Crypto Companies. Then Someone Came After Him.
After attending Purdue University and working for a few years as a management consultant, he enrolled at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law. During his first semester, in the fall of 2013, he caught the crypto bug. Joe Delich, a classmate who later worked with Mr. Roche at his law firm, remembers him constantly checking the price of Bitcoin on his laptop during classes. Mr. Roche cashed out before a big price drop, earning about $100,000 in profits. He used the money to pay his tuition.
As a third-year student, Mr. Roche collaborated with a professor on a paper discussing Bitcoin’s virtues as the first currency free from government interference. That led to an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.
“That was the first moment I thought, ‘Oh, wow, maybe I can do something with this,’” he said.
By then, Mr. Roche was a first-year associate at Boies Schiller Flexner, where he was developing a reputation as the kid who understood crypto. When a colleague in Miami approached him a few days after the Journal piece with a Bitcoin-related case, he jumped at the opportunity.
The case pitted a man named Ira Kleiman against Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist who claims to be Bitcoin’s enigmatic creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Mr. Kleiman wanted to sue Dr. Wright for defrauding his brother David, a paraplegic computer forensics expert who had died in his mid-40s, out of billions of dollars of Bitcoin they supposedly mined together in Bitcoin’s early days.
The facts were murky: There was evidence that Dr. Wright and David Kleiman had indeed been friends, and David Kleiman had been known to carry around his neck an encrypted hard drive that might or might not have contained the passwords to Bitcoin wallets. But many people considered Dr. Wright a fraud, calling into question the notion that he had mined early blocks of Bitcoin, much less cheated someone out of them.
Source: The New York Times
