Craig Wright’s Bitcoin-Related Document Exposed as Fabricated

29. “Noncooperative finite games” (Reliance Document) {ID_000396} / {L3/203/1}

544. This document purports to be precursor work to the Bitcoin White Paper relating to network theory and mentioning “bitcoin”. It is dated to 10 September 2008.

(a) COPA’s Reasons for Alleging Forgery

545. The document has been backdated. [PM27 [38]].

546. The document was created within 3 minutes after {ID_000395}, another “Lynn Wright document” bearing independent indicia of tampering. [PM27 [17.a.]].

547. The document was created in the same user session as {ID_000371}, another “Lynn Wright document” which contains common content as well as independent indicia of tampering.

548. Along with {ID_000371}, this document was created by copying content from an intermediate document deriving from a publicly available source document. [PM27 [18- 25]].

549. The document contains a redundant reference section listing sources which do not relate to the main body content of the document. [PM27 [20]].

550. The document contains hidden, embedded text of previous editing history, including comments which have since been deleted from the document. Among the embedded text is a series of comments dating from 22 October 2008. However, that was some 6 weeks in the future at the purported Created and Last Modified date in the internal metadata of the file. [PM27 [26-30]].

551. The document has an edit time of 1 minute, but the content within the document would have taken longer to create, indicating that the content was imported from a donor source [PM27 [13-15]]. No donor source document has been disclosed.

552. The document was conducted by an unlikely sequence of saves between two authors in two minutes. [PM27 [5-6]].

553. The document editing period overlaps with other similar documents in Dr Wright’s disclosure. [PM27 [32]].

(b) COPA’s Reasons for Inferring Dr Wright’s Knowledge / Responsibility

554. Dr Wright is recorded as an author within the metadata of this document.

55. Dr Wright has positively asserted that this is a document on which he primarily relies as supporting his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

556. In his evidence in these proceedings, Dr Wright relies on purported work of the type referred to in this document as “foundational” for Bitcoin. [Wright1 [53-54]].

557. The effect of the tampering is therefore to make the document appear to be supportive of Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto (suggesting work by Dr Wright on a subject of interest to him, but with reference to Bitcoin), contrary to fact.

558. In these proceedings (and previously), Dr Wright has claimed that his development of Bitcoin was influenced by work on networks as referred to in at least the references section of this document. It is to be inferred that this forgery was done to support that aspect of his claim. [Wright1 [54]].

559. Dr Wright has not disclosed the donor document or intermediate source document from which the content of {ID_000396} has been generated.

560. In his first witness statement in these proceedings, Dr Wright lists this document as a document to which he has been referred when preparing his evidence.

(c) Dr Wright’s Explanations and COPA’s Rebuttal

61. In Appendix B to Wright11, Dr Wright sought to explain away the embedded text in the metadata containing a date / time reference for 22 October 2008 by saying that, while the document was created in September 2008, it could have been accessed in December 2008. He suggested that a user on a shared computing environment could have accessed the document, causing that reference to be inserted, but not interacted with the document (even to save it), thus accounting for the last saved timestamp remaining at 10 September 2008. See {CSW/2/40}.

562. In Appendix B to Wright11, Dr Wright sought to explain the anomalous edit time of just one minute by claiming that the document was produced by extremely quick cut-andpaste operations. See {CSW/2/42}.

563. In the relevant section of Appendix B, Dr Wright did not address the fact that this document featured a list of references at the end despite the text not actually referring to any of the reference works. That list of references originated in a paper by Olfati-Saber, from which Dr Wright copied when creating another of his documents: {ID/000371}: see PM27 [18-24].

564. COPA submitted that Dr Wright’s explanation should be rejected as dishonest for the following reasons:

564.1. Dr Wright’s explanation for the presence of the date / time reference is contradicted by the clear expert evidence of Mr Madden, which is that such a reference could not be inserted without the document being interacted with by a user, which would in turn result in updating of the metadata timestamps of the document. The presence of the anachronistic reference shows that the document has been forged by backdating. See Madden4, [158]; Madden / Placks joint statement 2 at [8]; {Day16/35:19} to {Day16/38;11}; {Day16/125:7} to {Day16/125:18}.

564.2. On Dr Wright’s account, he created this document within just one minute by cutting and pasting sections from other (unidentified and apparently undisclosed) documents. It is implausible that he would produce a genuine research paper in this way. It is also highly unlikely that he would remember this method of creation 15 years on without having access to, and being able to identify, the underlying documents.

564.3. Dr Wright has failed to give any account for his addition to this document of a references section consisting entirely of works not referenced in the body of the text. The fact that this section matches a section from another of his document, which in turn copied from a published work, supports COPA’s case that this is another forgery produced in haste.

(d) Conclusion

565. The points made by and on behalf of Dr Wright do not begin to provide a viable alternative explanation to the detailed points made by COPA. Once again, I find this document was plainly forged by Dr Wright.