THE SECOND CHRONOLOGICAL RUN
I am now able to address those aspects of Dr Wright’s positive case which do not depend entirely on documents which are alleged to have been forged. These aspects were succinctly summarised in section II of the written Closing Submission prepared by his Counsel, fully developed in sections III and IV and certain key aspects were developed by Lord Grabiner KC in his oral closing submissions. For ease of reference, I have labelled these key aspects A to J. These correspond to the parts in section III of Dr Wright’s written closing, albeit not precisely, in two respects:
First, I have added additional sections to address points which did not really feature in the summaries in section II, including the writing of the Bitcoin Source Code and the events in 2011 when Dr Wright made his first public comments on Bitcoin. Under each heading I set out in italics the (accurate) summary of the point presented in section II of Dr Wright’s written closing.
Second, certain matters have relevance under adjacent headings.
I address each of these aspects in turn. Although I have given careful consideration to the way these headline aspects were developed in written and oral argument on behalf of Dr Wright, and in Dr Wright’s witness statements, it is not necessary for me to rehearse or address every point relied on. The principal reason for that is because Dr Wright’s lying has been so extensive and pervasive on certain matters it is impossible to discern the dividing line between truth and lies, particularly in relation to events prior to the release of the Bitcoin White Paper but also certain of the events relied upon after that. I therefore focus on a few points of significance. Although I make findings on certain discrete matters in these sections and refer to findings I have made elsewhere (particularly as to forgery of documents), in large part I reserve my overall finding to the end.
For understandable reasons, in sections II, III & IV of their Closing, Counsel for Dr Wright focussed on points which they say support his claim to be Satoshi. It should be noted, however, that they did not focus upon and in many cases, did not even mention, a whole series of matters which indicate Dr Wright is not Satoshi.
Dr Wright’s first witness statement was supposed to contain his evidence in chief on the Identity Issue. It is therefore not surprising that most of the elements A-J feature in that witness statement.
Skills, Knowledge and Experience
‘3. Dr Wright has the required skills, knowledge and qualifications to have created the Bitcoin system and authored the White Paper. These qualifications include: (i) his master’s degree in statistics from the University of Newcastle {e.g. {L1/337}} and his LLM from the University of Northumbria {Wright 1 [56]-[60] {E/1/12-13}}; (ii) his numerous other degrees and qualifications including his PhD in Computer Science and Economics and postgraduate degrees spanning many other disciplines, including statistics, game theory, finance, economics and law {Wright 1 [6] {E/1/3}}; and (iii) his cyber security certifications issued by the SANS Institute, including Global Information Assurance Certificates in forensics analysis, reverse engineering malware and the security of .NET code {{L1/327/1}, {L2/128/1} and {L2/282/1}}. This combination of skills and knowledge is consistent with the creation of a system that combines and applies a wide variety of pre-existing technologies and concepts, including cryptography, digital signatures, hash functions, distributed ledgers and game theory.’
By way of background, I refer to the following sections in the Appendix which contain my findings that the following documents, relevant to these matters, were forged by Dr Wright:
Section 6: Statistics Assessment Homework.
Section 8: LLM Dissertation Proposal 2.
Section 12: False LLM Proposal ‘Proposala.rtf’.