COPA’s case as to Dr Wright’s skills, knowledge and experience
In cross-examination, Counsel for COPA put to Dr Wright that his working history was as ‘the IT security services guy’ {Day5/177:1} - {Day5/178:1}, and in submissions Counsel acknowledged that Dr Wright had taken great umbrage at this. These points were based on the following submissions, themselves based on passages in Wright1, his 2007 CV at {L2/102/4} and his 2015 LinkedIn profile at {L11/130/16}.
Counsel submitted that however competent Dr Wright may have been at IT security, he was not a visionary working at the cutting edge of designing digital payment systems. I summarised Dr Wright’s employment prior to 2009 earlier (see [26]-[32] above).
COPA submitted that Dr Wright’s claims of creating early versions of the Bitcoin system in timestamp servers for Lasseter’s were not supported by any documents or by the evidence of Mr Archbold. I agree.
As COPA submitted, Dr Wright’s actual activities from 2007 to early 2009 did not give him a lot of time to work on developing a revolutionary new means of exchange and speculation. He had a full-time job for almost the entire time. He was working on his LLM (including assignments and a 90-page dissertation), an MStat course and a third master’s degree. He was working towards a series of IT security qualifications. He posted 269 blog articles in 2008 alone. He prepared several chapters for a book on IT compliance, as well as working on other books. With David Kleiman and Shyaam Sundhar, he completed a long paper on overwriting hard drive data, which he said in a blog “ate 18 months of my life” {see {Day6/35:25} - {Day6/38:11}}.
Despite his life and his professional and academic interests being extensively documented in the blog posts and papers referred to above, there is no evidence of him doing any work or study on digital cash or even digital payment systems over this period.
Thus, COPA’s case provides some circumstantial evidence to suggest that Dr Wright is not Satoshi.
Investment in the evolution of digital cash systems
‘4. Dr Wright has been deeply invested in the evolution of digital cash systems since the early 1990s. Examples include: his work at OzEmail, which involved the development of a payment protocol called “Millicent” that “used digital signatures” and an analogous scripting language to Bitcoin {Day 5/166/9 to 168/2}; and his work at DeMorgan, which involved extensive research and development in digital cash. The latter included project ‘BlackNet’, which Dr Wright described as “an encrypted internet based on crypto credits” that “morphed into Bitcoin and Metanet” {Day 5/171/17 to 173/11}.
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 4: the BlackNet Abstract.
Section 5: the ‘Project BlackNet Paper’.