During his time working with Lasseter’s Online Casino, Dr Wright claimed that his work there on robust security and logging, along with distribution of logs, led to the creation of an early precursor of the blockchain. It was his time at Lasseter’s that he says “planted the seeds that would later germinate into the idea of Bitcoin”. Similarly, Dr Wright charted his further career development working at Vodafone as being significant to how he would create Bitcoin. He said that, while there, he worked on the creation of secure logging and payment channels, with all system events and transactions being carefully tracked.

However, all the contemporaneous evidence of Dr Wright’s work with Lasseter’s and Vodafone (including in his own CV and profile cited above in [586]) describes it as straightforward IT security work. Based on the documents and the evidence of Dr Wright’s own witnesses (Mr Archbold and Mr Jenkins), his work involved putting together online security features, such as firewalls. It would appear that nothing in his work for either company was out of the ordinary for IT security work which is carried out for many companies every day. Dr Wright strained to characterise working on logging systems (totally normal for IT security) as being somehow a precursor to Bitcoin and suggested a continuing professional thread, ineluctably leading towards the creation of Bitcoin. I find that the reality is that these were simply IT security projects over a few years in the IT security sector, and nothing to do with the creation of a revolutionary cryptocurrency.

Under cross-examination Dr Wright sought to distance himself from his various CVs, all of which painted a picture of him being a competent IT security professional. He blamed this on the fact that they were either written by others or tailored for certain jobs. However, even on his own account the various alternative CVs all concerned work in IT security, computer audits or digital forensics. The overriding point is that he cannot point to reliable contemporaneous documents showing what he claims was his special expertise and interest in digital cash and transaction systems.