Court Rules Craig Wright Definitely Isn't Satoshi Nakamoto

INTRODUCTION

1. This Appendix is largely based on content taken from Appendix A to COPA’s Closing Skeleton Argument which was COPA’s Consolidated Schedule of Dr Wright’s Forgeries. As will be seen, there is often considerable background and detail which is needed to understand (a) COPA’s allegation of forgery, (b) Dr Wright’s initial explanation, which often changed or morphed into (c) Dr Wright’s revised explanation, often given orally in cross-examination (d) COPA’s rebuttal and (e) why I uphold COPA’s allegation of forgery.

(i) Overall Conclusions

2. To avoid setting out essentially the same conclusions 40 times, I can state at the outset that I find each of the allegations of forgery proved.

3. In terms of the mechanics (i.e. the reasons given by COPA for alleging forgery), the evidence of Mr Madden was compelling and often supported by Dr Wright’s own experts, Dr Placks and Mr Lynch. Likewise, the evidence of Mr Rosendahl was compelling in relation to the LATEX documents. Dr Wright’s assertions to the contrary were unsupported by any expert evidence, were statements made by a thoroughly unreliable witness and, in large part, carry very little or no weight.

4. In terms of Dr Wright’s responsibility for each of the forgeries, in addition to the specific matters listed in each section, COPA also relied on some general reasons which I set out here:

4.1. Given the extent of the forgery of documents which Dr Wright has disclosed and of documents on which he has relied for his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, COPA invited the inference that Dr Wright was responsible for each of the forgeries or (alternatively) that he at least knew of the forgeries.

4.2. Given the lack of any plausible explanation why any other person would have committed forgeries as set out in this Appendix, COPA also invited the inference that Dr Wright was responsible for each of the forgeries.

4.3. Since 2016, Dr Wright has been very actively promoting his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto and has been devoting considerable effort to that claim. It is likely that documents personal to him which bear signs of having been altered since that time to give support to his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto were altered by him, at his direction or at least with his knowledge. The fact that numerous documents have been altered with this apparent purpose since 2016 is consistent with him creating an evidential trail to provide false support to his dishonest claim.

4.4. Each of the documents addressed here has been disclosed by Dr Wright and assigned an ID_ number within Dr Wright’s own disclosure. When giving disclosure of these documents, Dr Wright did not inform COPA that any of them had been or may have been tampered with.

4.5. Following receipt of Dr Wright’s disclosure, COPA wrote to Dr Wright to inform him that it was likely to raise allegations of forgery in respect of his disclosure and to request access to the devices or forensic images from which the documents were obtained. Dr Wright refused COPA’s request to allow for inspection of the devices or forensic images from which the documents were obtained, despite the evident value of such inspection (as later attested by the experts of both parties in forensic document examination).

4.6. The characteristics and indications of tampering relied upon in this Appendix are varied and appear across many different documents which were (and/or purport to be) created at a variety of times and which address a wide variety of different aspects of Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto. Although the documents are in that sense varied, they have common features in that: (i) there are various common elements to the indications of tampering and the techniques used to alter their content, when Dr Wright’s disclosure is taken as a whole; (ii) they were produced by Dr Wright and were in his custody and control; and (iii) that in each case, the effect of the tampering is to make the documents appear to support Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, contrary to fact.

4.7. Following, and in evident response to, the service of the first report of Mr Madden, Dr Wright acted as follows:

4.7.1. He sought to disclaim responsibility for the documents previously designated by him as Reliance Documents, including through his provision of extended chain of custody information (information he had previously refused to supply even in more basic form) in which for the first time he suggested that the documents had been handled by many unidentified further persons. He thus sought to distance himself from documents only once their veracity had been called into question.

4.7.2. He provided implausible explanations for alteration and tampering with documents and raised factual allegations previously said by him to be irrelevant. These were new explanations which were the more implausible because Dr Wright had had the relevant documents for many years and had disclosed and/or deployed many of them in previous proceedings without previously giving these explanations. Furthermore, it is inconsistent with Dr Wright’s own account of his technical skill in IT security that he had failed to identify document alterations or reasons for documents to be unreliable before the service of the Madden Report.

4.7.3. He sought to replace and/or supplement his original Primary Reliance Documents with versions he has supposedly “discovered” in hard drives which he claimed to be preferable versions. Given his involvement in previous litigation concerning his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and given that he had to nominate primary reliance documents in both the McCormack and Granath cases, it is implausible that he would only now have discovered accessible documents of key importance to that claim.

4.8. Up to and during trial, Dr Wright continued his pattern of behaviour in providing implausible excuses for clear signs of document alteration and in many cases of distancing himself from documents only after they have been discredited. His excuses and explanations have been without support in independent expert evidence and at odds with the independent expert evidence.

4.9. COPA submitted that this conduct is indicative of Dr Wright seeking to react to COPA’s discovery of forged documents for which he was responsible or of which he at least had knowledge.

5. Furthermore, as indicated below, a number of the documents were nominated by Dr Wright as Reliance Documents (i.e. documents on which he primarily relies for his claim to be Satoshi).

6. A number of Dr Wright’s Reliance Documents were in his ‘Additional Documents’, the subject of the application at the PTR:

6.1. These are documents which Dr Wright personally claimed to have looked for and discovered in the period from September 2023 in circumstances set out in his fifth and sixth witness statements in these proceedings.

6.2. These are documents to which he attached particular importance, including advancing arguments at the PTR hearing that they were essential to a fair resolution of the Identity Issue.

6.3. In each case, these documents were produced by Dr Wright following service of Mr Madden’s first report, in circumstances consistent with these new documents having been created in response to Mr Madden’s findings.

6.4. In all cases but one, these documents were disclosed in file formats containing little or no internal metadata, such as plaintext LATEX files and RTF documents (rather than MS Word documents). Dr Wright’s original disclosure contained no such document. COPA invited the inference that, having had sight of the first report of Mr Madden, Dr Wright then chose to rely on documents that presented a lower surface area for forensic analysis.

6.5. In each case, these are documents which Dr Wright claims to have had in his possession since 2007. Further, the majority of the documents come from the BDO Drive (BDOPC.raw). Dr Wright claims that BDOPC.raw was a drive image captured on 31 October 2007 and that it was protected by encryption (see his chain of custody information at Exhibit HLF1, p45ff). His attempts to explain signs of alteration in that drive image were implausible.

7. I find without hesitation that Dr Wright was responsible for each of the forgeries. It seems highly likely that he carried out the forgeries himself, but if any other person was involved, they must have been acting under his detailed direction. Furthermore, I find it is undoubtedly the case that Dr Wright created each forged document with a view to its deployment in support of his dishonest claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

8. The evidence in support of each allegation is dealt with in each individual section. In those sections where it proved necessary to state a more detailed conclusion(s), that/those have been stated. However, in sections 7, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22 and 33 below, I did not find it necessary to set out a conclusion and each of those sections should be read in the light of these overall findings, especially those in [2]-[3] and [7].

(ii) Organisation of this Appendix

9. COPA’s Consolidated Schedule was arranged in four parts, each part corresponding to forgeries pleaded at different stages of this action. For the purposes of this Judgment, I am released from that procedural constraint, and it is more logical to address the allegedly forged documents according to the date which they purport to bear.

10. Whilst I have taken, for the most part, a chronological approach, there are three sections I propose to deal with first, which I introduce here.

11. In the numbered sections 2-40 below I have addressed the allegations of forgery in respect of either individual documents or closely linked documents, even though there is some interplay between the discrete sections. One of the disadvantages of that rather ‘siloed’ approach is that one does not get the full flavour of the extent to which Dr Wright twisted and turned in his explanations.

12. For that reason, I have drawn together in section 1 the saga stemming from Dr Wright’s original claims to have acquired the bitcoin.org domain in 2008 which morphs into a series of other forgeries. The full details of the individual forgeries are set out in the later sections of this Appendix which are identified below. To avoid repetition, I have not set out the full detail here, just sufficient detail to show how one forgery led to another. If the content of this section 1 appears complex and convoluted, that is because it is.

13. Then it is necessary to introduce the two main classes of the New Reliance Documents: BDOPC.raw and the LaTeX documents. These were the subject of Dr Wright’s application at the PTR (a) for permission to rely on these documents and (b) to adjourn the Trial. Documents from both sources were emphasised as being critical to a fair trial.

14. In section 2 below, I deal with BDOPC.raw, which Dr Wright presented as a time capsule dating from 31 October 2007. BDOPC.raw contains all the new Reliance Documents which are not LaTeX files. There are four particular documents derived from BDOPC.raw which are dealt with in their own sections in the (roughly) chronological run, but, as will be seen, each of those depends on the general findings I have made regarding BDOPC.raw.

15. In section 3, I address the other source of the New Reliance Documents – the LaTeX documents stored in Dr Wright’s Overleaf account. There are a number of particular LaTeX documents with their own sections later and, again, those must be read in the light of the general findings I make regarding Dr Wright’s Overleaf account and the LaTeX documents contained in it.

16. Following sections 1-3, I revert to my rough chronological approach, addressing various documents, the majority of which are said to represent precursor work to the Bitcoin White Paper which appeared in Dr Wright’s original disclosure.

17. I draw particular attention to section 40 concerning the MYOB Ontier Email. As I find below, this document exhibits many of the characteristics of Dr Wright’s forgeries. It was a particularly outrageous forgery since the forged email was created in the middle of trial for the purpose of trying to explain away other allegations of forgery (which concern the MYOB Screenshots) which I address in section 36 below.