FT Alphaville was at the beginning of an artist project known as Craig Wright. So we’re bound to end what should (but probably won’t) be his final act.
A British court ruled in March after a month-long trial that Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. The Crypto Open Patent Alliance, an industry group, launched the case in an attempt to stop his legal action against bitcoin developers.
The full judgment (PDF) was published today, running to 231 pages and a 150-page appendix covering many of the forgeries presented to the court. The summary on the first page is a brief setting of the scenes:
Dr. Wright presents himself as an extremely smart person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as smart as he thinks. Both in my written evidence and in the days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am fully satisfied that Dr. Wright lied extensively and repeatedly to the Court. Most of his lies involved documents he forged to support his claims. All his lies and forged documents supported his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Here are a few more highlights.
Wright can’t be Satoshi, Satoshi was cool
Emails and early message board posts associated with Satoshi “give the impression of a calm, informed, cooperative, precise person with little or no arrogance, willing to acknowledge and implement ideas and suggestions from others who expressed an interest in bitcoin,” Judge James Mellor. he says. Meanwhile. . .
Picture painted by Dr. Wright’s point in his evidence was basically that he was solely responsible for the creation of Bitcoin, that he was much smarter than anyone else, that anyone who challenged his claims or his evidence was either not qualified to do so or simply did. I don’t understand what he said. In my judgment, the arrogance he displayed was inconsistent with what Satoshi’s writing suggests. In short, in his writing and attitude, Dr Wright simply does not sound or act like Satoshi.
Trying to claim ownership of bitcoins through the courts is a very un-Satoshi thing to do, the judge concludes. Congratulations, you played yourself, decided not to add.
The judge is done with the cryptographic explosion
Anyone who has spent time among token traders will be familiar with their cult-like insistence that all disagreements stem from ignorance. Justice Mellor doesn’t want to hear it:
I realize that Dr Wright will not agree with my findings and this judgment and, in accordance with the form he has shown on many occasions during his oral evidence regarding expert evidence, he may well argue that I have not understood his technical explanations or other aspects technology.
Blockchain, etc., “is not particularly complex or difficult to understand,” says the judge. But although Wright was given the opportunity to explain himself, he “just engaged in techno-babble”.
Wright’s method was to put a kernel of truth into a popcorn bucket of lies, making it almost “impossible to detect each lie,” the judge concludes. Exposing each falsehood would be a waste of time, as “Wright would simply invent more lies in his attempts to cover up existing lies”.
In the land of the blind. . .
As the judgment says:
It’s clear that Dr. Wright has a well-developed ability to convince people of his technical acumen when he doesn’t quite understand what he’s talking about. In other words, he can tell a good story.
What was forged?
What wasn’t? This is how the attachment begins:
In order to avoid stating essentially the same conclusions 40 times, I can state at the outset that I consider each of the allegations of forgery to be proven.
One of the more colorful examples involves the credit card that Wright said he used to purchase the bitcoin.org domain registration in 2008. Wright provided screenshots — purportedly proof of purchase — from 2018, when the card’s records could no longer be accessed. .
When Wright pointed out the forgery, he said he didn’t remember how he bought the domain name and that the screen shots had been sent to him by a lawyer from a previous lawsuit who had since died. by an anonymous Reddit user.
This didn’t make much sense. Wright said in April 2019 that he could prove the purchase of the domain with credit card records. It appeared that the mysterious Reddit user would not give evidence until two months later.
Asked to explain how the Reddit user had access to his spending information, Wright said the tab in the screenshot was canceled in 2005 to show it was used in 2009 at Lee Rowans Gardenworld.
And so it went on. Wright “was unable to provide any coherent explanation for the forgeries that were discovered, and yet he could not bring himself to admit that he was responsible for them,” the judgment said.
Being on the spectrum is no excuse
Wright says he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2020. Because of the condition, he was sometimes portrayed in court as a vulnerable witness who acted emotionally and impulsively.
The judge didn’t buy it:
Wright proved to be an extremely slippery witness. He included some slight caveat in many of the answers. He rarely gave a full answer, and that was by design – he was putting the “out” for later. He was extremely pedantic at times. At first I was inclined to give him some leeway because of his ASD, but his pedantry was inconsistent. He was pedantic when it suited him and not when it wasn’t.
Wright’s witnesses had some problems
Stefan Matthews, co-founder of blockchain consultancy nChain, was the last Wright witness to be called. nChain employed Wright as a consultant, and its main backer, Canadian businessman Calvin Ayre, once supported Wright’s claim to be Satoshi.
Wright claimed he shared a bitcoin white paper with Matthews in 2008, which the judge rejected. This argument was partially undermined by a WhatsApp message from Matthews to Christen Ager-Hanssen, the former CEO of nChain:
Matthews clearly expressed the opinion that Dr. Wright is a fake. In response to a report describing Dr. Wright as “The Biggest Fake Ever”, Mr Matthews replied: “Shit. WTF is wrong with him. Well, at least we have NCH [nChain] focus, it’s not fake.’
A mock trial staged by Wright’s supporters concluded that he had lied
In September 2023, nChain organized a trial where Wright was cross-examined by a criminal attorney. The judge hired to preside over the sham trial found Wright’s claim to be Satoshi false.
Ayre immediately withdrew his support and emailed Wright call him a moron. Ager-Hanssen posted the email on Twitter. Wright claimed in court that Ager-Hanssen conspired with COPA. The judge called it “another lie”.
[checks notes]
Another witness called by Wright’s team was Robert Jenkins, formerly of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Under cross-examination, Jenkins claimed that in 2009 or 2010, Wright showed him a precursor to bitcoin, called Timecoin. It was a claim that was missing from his witness statement, so it appears that it was intended as a “bombshell”. says the judge.
But when he testified, Jenkins referred to a note that had the word “Timecoin” written on it. When asked, Jenkins said he had written the note during cross-examination “when it was clear to everyone in court that he had not”.
Timecoin cannot travel through time
Wright said he received the lost 2008 Timecoin document via email from “Papa Neem” last September, then discovered an identical copy on an old hard drive five days later. Although Neema is based in Nairobi, Neema’s emails were time-stamped in the UK.
The judge concluded that Timecoin was “created from the Bitcoin white paper after the fact and modified to appear as if it were a precursor work” and that Wright had been sending emails to each other.
Probably not a *master* forger
The “Papa Neema” emails also contained some invoices that Wright claimed were created on various dates over four years, but all spelled “Invoive” rather than “Invoice”.
Care of spelling was not Wright’s forte. In the technical documents, his “inconsistent and misspelled ‘operation code’ was little indication that he was explaining something that was outside his knowledge or experience,” the judge says. Also usually misspelled by Adam Back, the inventor of Hashcash, an early proto-crypto project mentioned in the Bitcoin White Paper, which Wright claimed to have written as Black.
One of Wright’s claims was that if he was falsifying documents would do better with that. The judge didn’t buy it either.
Wright he said in a tweet that he intends to appeal the verdict while also using the opportunity to promote his latest cause:
And as if to solve it:
👍
Further reading
— He’s not Satoshi, he’s a very naughty boy (FTAV)
— Craig Wright has not been officially “recognized” as Satoshi in any way (FTAV)
– Etc.