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Earlier this month, a trial began in the UK High Court, the purpose of which is to challenge Wright’s claim to being the creator of Bitcoin. The case was filed by a consortium of crypto firms called the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, which is asking the court to declare that Wright is not Satoshi, thereby limiting his ability to found further litigation on the claim. COPA claims that Wright has fabricated his evidence and repeatedly changed his story as new inconsistencies come to light. It called on the early bitcoiners to help prove it.

Among those who testified were Adam Back, Mike Hearn, Martti Malmi, and Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, each of whom contributed to the early development of Bitcoin in their own way. With the exception of Hearn, who had a polished manner and dressed sharply, the witnesses had the air of technologists: softly spoken and somewhat awkward, but quietly authoritative. Earlier in the trial, Wright had faced a grueling seven-day cross-examination, in which he rejected hundreds of claims of forgery and misrepresentation. The evidence supplied by the bitcoiners, COPA hoped, would help dismantle his story.

The figures called upon by COPA to testify each made a distinct mark on Bitcoin. Back created a precursor technology called Hashcash (although Wright disputes its relevance) and corresponded with Satoshi as the Bitcoin creator drafted the white paper. Satoshi tasked Malmi with curating Bitcoin.org, which hosted educational materials. Hearn was one of the earliest contributors to the Bitcoin codebase. And Wilcox-O’Hearn was among the first to blog about Bitcoin, spreading the gospel. As Bitcoin grew, these early collaborators became themselves revered in crypto circles for their place in Bitcoin lore.

In witness statements submitted to the court ahead of the trial, the bitcoiners provided accounts in support of COPA’s case. Back detailed a 2008 email exchange in which Satoshi appeared to be unfamiliar with a proposal by cryptographer Wei Dai. In his own written evidence, Wright had described Dei’s work as an inspiration for Bitcoin. Malmi contested Wright’s timeline of the correspondence between him and Satoshi and Wright’s description of technical arrangements relating to the Bitcoin.org forum. Separately, he asserted that Satoshi embraced the term “cryptocurrency,” contrary to Wright’s account. In his statement, Hearn recounted a dinner in 2016 at which he posed questions to Wright that he believed Satoshi would be able to answer. Some of Wright’s responses were “in the general area, but garbled;” others were “only slightly better than Star Trek-style technobabble.” Wilcox-O’Hearn simply testified Satoshi never sent him any bitcoin, as Wright has claimed he did.

In the course of Wednesday and Thursday, the bitcoiners took to the witness box to be cross-examined on the contents of their statements by Wright’s legal counsel, Lord Anthony Grabiner and Craig Orr.

Grabiner pressed Hearn on the quality of his recall with respect to the dinner, about which the court had received a contradictory account from one of Wright’s witnesses. Hearn acknowledged a level of haziness, but insisted he remembered “the important parts” in which he asked about Bitcoin. Grabiner proposed that Wright’s responses had been stilted because he was wary of the possibility Hearn had an ulterior motive for his questioning. At the time Hearn worked for a company, R3, that Grabiner claimed could be considered a competitor to nChain, a firm with which Wright was associated. Hearn rejected the claim: “I didn’t know anything about Wright’s work,” he said. “I still don’t.”

Read the full story on WIRED

“‘We’re heading into a f***ing train wreck.’

That’s how Stefan Matthews, a witness for Craig Wright, described the U.K. trial probing the latter’s claims that he invented the first cryptocurrency, bitcoin.

Matthews, the co-founder of tech company nChain – where Wright was chief scientist – had to defend that January message when he took the stand on Monday along with two other witnesses for Wright as the third week of trial kicked off.

Under oath, Matthews said he was referring only to how “uncooperative Craig was in his strategy and plan” for the trial and insisted he didn’t think Wright was a “fake.”

Before Matthews took the stand on Monday, David Bridges, CIO of Qudos Bank, who met Wright in 2006, and Wright’s cousin Max Lynam participated by video link. Both admitted that key events or conversations that convinced them Wright was Satoshi took place years ago and without material proof to back them up.”

Read the full article on CoinDesk

“Over the course of nearly 30 hours of cross-examination, Craig Steven Wright, the Australian man who claims to be Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, has been raked through the coals. The self-described computer scientist, economist, cryptographer, patent writer, author, lawyer, pastor, master of martial arts and mathematician (in other words: fabulist) has been accused of misrepresenting facts, told by the judge to stay on topic and silenced by his own lawyers.

For many onlookers, however, the case has already been made: Wright, by taking the stand, simply discredited himself. There have been too many inconsistencies, too many happenstances and too much misdirection to be believed. The trial is expected to go until mid-March.

For now, CoinDesk has collected some of the most bizarre, asinine and head scratching moments from the case so far.

Wright, who claims to be working towards five PhDs, apparently does not know the very basics of coding. During a cross-examination by Alexander Gunning KC asking about PGP keys and cryptography, Wright was asked about “unsigned integers,” (used essentially to determine whether a string of data will have a + or – prefix), and wasn’t able to. Longtime crypto advocate Michael Parenti noted the unsigned integer function was used over 500 times in the original Bitcoin source code. What was meant to be a routine line of questioning to enter basic facts into the record about the Bitcoin source code may be the single moment remembered for years to come.

It’d be too much to list every inconsistency brought up in the trial — the main strategy of the COPA legal team has been to force Wright to account for the hundreds of indications of forgery and manipulation found by a forensic evidence expert in emails, documents and computer files submitted into evidence.

But to take just two striking examples where he wasn’t exactly “precise” with his language, at one point Wright claimed he did not have a Reddit account and has never used the popular message board site. Well, here’s his account. Wright also said he faked Satoshi’s PGP key, perhaps mistakenly.

Relatedly, Wright denies forging or plagiarizing any of the documents submitted into evidence. He has blamed hacks, faulty internet connections and a grand conspiracy of people trying to “frame” him as a liar for some of the inconsistencies brought — like metadata that shows documents pertaining to the creation of Bitcoin were made using Word 2015.

On the opening day of the case, Judge Mellor acknowledged the allegations of forged documents and told Wright he “should consider himself extremely lucky” to argue his case, given the circumstances.
When asked by Mellor on Wednesday to produce a single document related to early Bitcoin files that doesn’t show signs of tampering, Wright said they would be unavailable. Plus, he argued, it couldn’t possibly be him manipulating the documents, because if it were, he wouldn’t have gotten caught.”

Read the full article on CoinDesk

“The cross-examination of Craig Wright, a computer scientist defending his claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin in court, proceeded fitfully over the course of seven days. In the UK High Court, opposing counsel Jonathan Hough bombarded Wright with examples of what he argued were anomalies that showed Wright had forged or manipulated evidence on which his claim to being the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto depends. He contested them all, weaving a patchwork of justifications whose thread became increasingly difficult to follow.

“This is just another fairy story, isn’t it,” said Hough on Wednesday, losing patience with Wright, from whom he stood opposite in a packed London courtroom. “No, it is not,” Wright replied. It was the ninth hour of a cross-examination that would last more than 30. This type of exchange would repeat over and again: “We’re going round in circles,” said Hough in one instance. “You are simply saying that black is white,” he told Wright, in another.

Wright was being cross-examined as part of a case brought against him by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of crypto and tech firms. Since 2016, Wright has claimed to be Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and filed a raft of intellectual property lawsuits on that basis. To prevent Wright from pursuing further litigation that could intimidate developers into retreating from Bitcoin, COPA is asking the court to declare that he is not Nakamoto.

The ruling will spill over into three related cases, brought by Wright against Bitcoin developers and other parties, the outcome of which will shape the future development of Bitcoin. If the court rules in Wright’s favor, and he subsequently wins his own cases, he would be free to dictate who can work on the Bitcoin codebase and under what terms the system can be used. “In the eyes of the law, [Wright] is asking for ultimate control over the Bitcoin network,” claims a representative of the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that is funding the defense of Bitcoin developers in a separate lawsuit filed by Wright, who asked to remain nameless for fear of legal retaliation.

For every anomaly presented by COPA, Wright supplied an explanation. He claimed, variously, that a printing error had caused a misalignment of pixels that gave the appearance of tampering; the complexity of the IT systems used in the editing and storage of documents was not reflected in the testing conducted by the experts; and that his documents may have been altered by staff members in whose custody they had been left. In instances where Wright agreed that a document was inauthentic, he said he had fallen victim to cybersecurity breaches, had never intended to rely on them to support his claim, or implied that documents had been planted by adversaries to undermine him.

A central feature of Wright’s strategy for deflecting the forgery allegations appeared to be to cast doubt on the credibility of the forensic experts. Prior to the start of the trial, experts put forward by both sides had jointly concluded that many of Wright’s documents bear signs of manipulation. In the witness box, Wright claimed that COPA’s expert is “completely biased.” Presented with the unflattering findings of his own experts, Wright declared them “unskilled” or otherwise unqualified, blaming his previous solicitors for selecting them.

If he had actually set out to forge evidence, Wright insisted, citing his own qualifications in digital forensics, the forgeries would not be nearly so amateurish. “The irony is that if I were to manipulate or fabricate documents, they would be perfect,” he said. On various occasions, Wright cited his own personal testing—which Hough reminded him repeatedly was inadmissible—to explain how documents might end up bearing signs of tampering for innocuous reasons.”

Read the full story on WIRED

“COPA states that [Wright] has never provided any authentic evidence and accuses him of repeatedly altering documents. Wright blames others, including former lawyers and partners, for the forgeries.

COPA’s lawyer, Jonathan Hough, noted at trial that “there are elements of Dr. Wright’s conduct that stray into farce,” such as the alleged use of ChatGPT for the forgeries. COPA claims, for instance, that one text contains a manipulated timestamp, with numbers in visibly different fonts to make it appear to predate the Bitcoin white paper. Wright response was: “If I forged that document, it would be perfect.”

In 2019, Wright stated he created Bitcoin with Dave Kleiman and Hal Finney. The former had sued him in Florida in 2018 over rights to Bitcoin worth more than $5 billion, alleging that Wright had defrauded him in of the currency and intellectual property rights. In 2019, a judge ruled that Kleiman owned half of the Bitcoin he mined with Wright between 2009 and 2013, and ordered him to transfer half of the company’s intellectual property, but it did not address the issue of whether Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto or not. “The story defies common sense and real-life experience,” the judge declared.

Wright, however, believes that this and other sentences against him are actually arguments in favor of his main claim. He also defends himself with the argument that no one else has claimed to be Nakamoto.”

Read the full article on El Pais

“Australian computer scientist Craig Wright unleashed fresh allegations against several members of the crypto community and was in turn accused of offering different versions of the same story in court as his cross-examination in a trial over his claims of having invented Bitcoin (BTC) continued in a U.K. high court.

In a particularly heated exchange following a lunch break, COPA counsel, Bird & Bird LLP’s Jonathan Hough, asked Wright to stop making “irrelevant allegations” and to “answer the question.” Wright had just accused COPA members of turning Bitcoin into a “money-go-up-token scam.”

When Wright protested, presiding Judge James Mellor intervened, saying arguments about the current state of the Bitcoin system were not going to help him make a judgment on the case – which is focused on whether or not Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous author of Bitcoin’s manifesto, called the white paper.

“Counsel is quite right to stop you because it sheds no light whatsoever on the issue I have to decide. Do you understand?” Mellor said, to which Wright replied: “I do.””

Read the full story on CoinDesk