It may not matter if Craig Wright created Bitcoin. The real question is whether the nearly 4,000 patents he controls or has pending will force computer programmers around the world to stop using open-source software as they now do—or pay up.

InIn the fall of 2012, long before most of the world had heard of Craig Wright, the Australian computer scientist quietly submitted his first patent pertaining to the newly created bitcoin, then worth $10. The following year, a nearly unknown exchange called Coinbase raised $5 million “to make Bitcoin easy to use for the average consumer.” The year after that, in 2014, the co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine, Vitalik Buterin, published a paper describing a new kind of blockchain, called Ethereum, crediting bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, for his breakthroughs in cryptography.

While the nascent crypto industry looked only as far as the permissive license appended to bitcoin’s computer code, which effectively let anybody use the software under copyright law, Wright was seeking patent protection for new ways to exploit the technology. By the time he was identified by two news organizations as a candidate for actually being Satoshi Nakamoto in December 2015, Wright had personally applied for two patents and was the chief scientist of a Switzerland-based company called nChain that had filed for three more.

Until recently, a passionate debate has been focused on whether or not Wright, 52, is Nakamoto, whose bitcoin wallets...

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