“In the latest update in the trial of COPA vs Craig Wright, a significant development arose regarding Wright’s claim as Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin. During the trial on Monday, as part of a mandatory disclosure, Wright’s solicitors provided the court with potentially forged documents. The disclosure was part of evidence presented by Wright’s former solicitors from Ontier Law, whom Wright had previously dismissed.

On Monday afternoon, Wright’s lawyers revealed further documents, suggesting another potential fraud attempt by Wright. These documents, screenshots of the Mind Your Own Business software, were scrutinized on Friday. COPA’s representative, Jonathan Hough, examined them for financial record inaccuracies, focusing on alleged backdated documents. Hough challenged Wright’s assertion that a MYOB update caused these inaccuracies, accusing Wright of presenting a “pack of lies”.”

Read the full story at Forbes

“Emails shared by Craig Wright’s wife as evidence in the ongoing trial probing whether he’d invented bitcoin (BTC) are “not genuine,” Wright’s former lawyers said in court, as the fourth week of the legal proceedings kicked off Monday in London.

The emails between Wright and his former representatives at Ontier became part of the trial after the self-proclaimed bitcoin inventor referenced them while he was under cross-examination last week. The emails were then shared by Wright’s wife Ramona Watts with his current counsel at London law firm Shoosmiths, who in turn reached out to Ontier to confirm their accuracy.

Wright claimed Ontier had access to the Australian accounting platform MYOB in 2019, and that he had the emails to prove it. Those emails that Wright’s wife then shared with Shoosmiths were doctored, according to Ontier.

Shoosmiths disclosed the emails and Ontier’s response in court on Monday. The documents are now set to be analyzed by lawyers for both Wright and the plaintiff, the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA).”

Read the full story at CoinDesk

“In London’s Rolls Building, within the Royal Courts of Justice, the trial of COPA vs Craig Wright continues, aiming to establish whether or not Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Further developments and testimonies have emerged throughout the trial’s third week, challenging Wright’s claims.

One of the key aspects of the trial this week was the presentation of animations based on edit logs that Wright had included in his disclosures. The animations were created by developers using the logs.

The footage shows modifications to the bitcoin whitepaper being made, suggesting that such alterations could be interpreted as consistent with backdating or fabricating the document. This visual representation demonstrated the full extent of the edits. Gunning asked Wright, “If you were forging the whitepaper, that is how you would do it, isn’t it?” Wright replied, “Yes,”.

Wright stated that the edits were a demonstration for his representatives at Shoosmiths, his law firm. The animation showed a red flash when Wright was on a call with his lawyers at Shoosmiths while making the edits.”

Read the full story at Forbes

“The trial to prove whether or not Wright is the anonymous creator of the bitcoin white paper completed its third week. COPA wants to prove that Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto is a lie afforded by “industrial style forgeries,” and the bitcoin developers lawyer Alexander Gunning is helping them.

On Friday, Gunning showed that Wright made edits to the bitcoin whitepaper in his “LaTeX files,” which Wright agreed was accurate. Wright said the edits were simply a demonstration for his representatives at Shoosmiths (his law firm).

“You were not showing this to anyone, we know the times you were showing this to Shoosmiths, you were doing it for yourself,” Gunning said.

“What you are doing is tweaking parameters.. to get them to fit ” the layout of the bitcoin whitepaper, Gunning added. The file was uploaded as recently as November 2023, Gunning said.

Gunning ended his questioning by asking: “Your claim to be Satoshi Nakomoto is a fraudulent claim isn’t it?” which Wright disputed.”

Read the full story at CoinDesk

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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