In Wright1, Dr Wright claimed to have started writing the White Paper by hand, between March 2007 and May 2008. He then claimed to have started the drafting process using voice recognition software known as Dragon. There was no mention in Wright1 of the use of LaTeX, despite its central importance to the account he gave later. He said that the initial draft of the White Paper was more extensive than necessary and in 2007 he shared preliminary drafts with family and trusted contacts. As COPA pointed out, prior to raising LaTeX in this case in October 2023, neither in this action or in any of the other proceedings I mentioned above did Dr Wright ever claim that the Bitcoin White Paper was produced with LaTeX.

In Wright4, after being forced to respond to the RFI request, Dr Wright listed the individuals with whom he says he shared drafts in his own name. There were 21 people on that list, of whom five are witnesses in this case and two are the subject of hearsay notices. Only two of the 21 have ever corroborated Dr Wright’s account in this respect –Mr Matthews and his uncle Don Lynam. None of the 21 has ever produced a copy of the draft that Dr Wright allegedly shared, and Dr Wright himself has never produced an email or other document evidencing such sharing.

From March 2008 to May 2008 Dr Wright said that the draft started to look like the version that is now publicly known. Dr Wright also gave an account in the Kleiman proceedings of writing the White Paper which he has avowed for these proceedings, through his then solicitors, Ontier {letter of 7 March 2022, {M/1/240}}. Although Dr Wright has provided many drafts of the White Paper in his disclosure, in Wright4 he said that he is unable to identify the order of production of the drafts, since he never used a versioning system. As listed above, I have found a series of White Paper drafts (and alleged precursor documents), including reliance documents, to have been forged by Dr Wright, including versions which give Dr Wright’s details as author. I also note that further purported drafts of the Bitcoin White Paper were analysed by Mr Madden {see generally Appendix PM3 to Madden 1 {H/20/1}}. In their original 50 allegations of forgery, COPA pleaded that {ID_000254}, {ID_000536}, {ID_000537}, {ID_000538}, {ID_003732}, {ID_004010} and {ID_004011} were forgeries, all being purported drafts of the Bitcoin White Paper. As is clear from the Appendix, {ID_000254}, {ID_000536} and {ID_004011} were in the top 20 forgeries which COPA were allowed to pursue at trial.

Dr Wright claimed that between March and May 2008 he shared a draft with Mr Kleiman, who was at the time “his closest friend”, over email, Skype and online forums. According to Dr Wright, Mr Kleiman provided edits to the draft. There are several versions of the email by which Dr Wright supposedly sought Mr Kleiman’s help in editing the draft (“the Kleiman email”). The version pleaded in the Particulars of Claim, {ID_001318}, I have found to be a forgery in section 22 of the Appendix. Another version, {ID_000465}, I have found to be a forgery in section 23. One of the versions of this email was among the trove of documents leaked to Wired and Gizmodo in late 2015 {see the Gizmodo article of 9 December 2015 {L11/213/4}}.

Dr Wright said that, in around July 2008, he tried to communicate with Tuomas Aura, a computer science professor, but his efforts to contact him remained unanswered. Then in August 2008 he said he reached out to Wei Dei and Adam Back under the Satoshi pseudonym. He said he sent them a link to upload.ae where he had uploaded the draft. Both of these individuals have their work cited in the White Paper and are known to have been in correspondence with Satoshi which referred to the upload.ae link.

Dr Wright has suggested that he (as Satoshi) knew of Wei Dai’s work well before August 2008, but the previously unpublished emails of Dr Back show that the real Satoshi did not. Furthermore, Dr Wright has given false and inconsistent accounts of Dr Back’s reaction to Satoshi’s early communications and about whether Satoshi used Dr Back’s Hashcash as the model for the proof-of-work system in Bitcoin (as detailed below). In addition, Dr Wright has given false accounts about the upload.ae site.

In Wright1, Dr Wright insisted that, when he (as Satoshi) approached Dr Back with his Bitcoin concept, Dr Back was “quite dismissive” and “stated that digital cash had been attempted before and was bound to fail”. That evidence was shown to be false by Dr Back’s statement, which exhibited his previously-unpublished emails with Satoshi. Those emails showed that Dr Back was supportive, and showed Satoshi expressing gratitude. Dr Wright first tried to deny the plain meaning of the emails, and then pivoted to say: “he hasn’t included all of the emails, and he also hasn’t included the extensive communications that himself and I had on Twitter and direct messages”. Dr Wright did not produce any of those “extensive communications”. Dr Back’s evidence was that he provided all of the emails he had with Satoshi {Back, [9] {C/9/3}} and Dr Wright’s Counsel did not challenge him on that evidence.

When it was put to Dr Wright that he was inventing the supposed additional communications with Dr Back, he launched a remarkable attack upon Dr Back {Day6/68:6} - {Day6/69:20}:

“Q. He says in his witness statement of these emails, that was the extent of it, and that he's provided a copy of his email correspondence.

A. This morning, yesterday and the day before, he also promoted to people that Bitcoin will go up in price and that if you buy now you'll get rich. He has never promoted an actual solution. The only thing that he does every single day on his feeds and promotion is to tell people to buy into a Ponzi, "if you buy BTC, it will go to the moon and you will get rich", that is a quote from one of his things. Technically, that's actually a breach of the financial services legislation, and telling people to buy into a risky asset is not only highly irresponsible, but also criminal. So, where he is saying these things, the only thing he says is about "get rich quick, buy into this, it has to go to a million".

Q. Dr Wright, how was that an answer to any of my questions?

A. Well, if you're going to be dishonest in selling to people and getting people to buy into a highly speculative asset ... he told people online –

Q. Pause there. Pause there. None of this is an answer to any of my questions, is it?

A. Actually, yes, it is –

Q. These are just allegations against people you don't like, aren't they, Dr Wright?

A. No, actually, on his Twitter, where he said, "Sell your house, take out a mortgage, put all the money into Bitcoin because you can't lose it" –"

The above exchange is a good example of how Dr Wright sought to divert from questions and did so making baseless and disgraceful allegations against others. Dr Wright’s Counsel (quite properly) did not put any of those allegations to Dr Back, which tends to confirm that there is no supportive evidence for them.

Dr Wright then said that, while working on the White Paper, he presented his concepts to Microsoft under his own name but there was no interest in it. He claimed to have attended a series of business meetings at the Microsoft campus in Seattle in autumn 2008, but he said the specific names from those meetings “have become hazy with time”. The few communications he has provided with Microsoft {see {L3/247/1} and {L3/249/1}} suggest that he was simply looking for a job at the time he was taking redundancy from BDO. They do not indicate that he was making a proposal to sell Bitcoin to Microsoft, as he claimed in his evidence in the Granath case.

Dr Wright was taken through those communications in cross-examination {{Day6/88:13} - {Day6/97:9}}. He first tried to deny the plain fact that they showed him looking for a regular job in a click fraud team, not pitching a digital currency project. Then he changed tack, asserting that there were other communications with Microsoft which would have supported his account but which he no longer had. The emails that we do have appear to present a reasonably full picture of a set of communications about a regular job interview process and nothing more than that.

Dr Wright then claimed to have implemented the core of the Bitcoin system in Hoyts, a cinema chain in Australia, and for QSCU, a bank. However, in his dealings with the ATO, he said that he had dealt with Hoyts as a client “in his security role” {L8/408/5} and that he managed the company’s firewalls {L7/431/59 & 133}. Meanwhile, his work for Qudos Bank (formerly known as QSCU) was done through BDO, where his work appears to have been straightforward IT security and audit work.

Dr Wright said that these events effectively led to the release of the White Paper on 31 October 2008 on the metzdowd.com cryptography mailing list. This included a link to the White Paper which was uploaded to the bitcoin.org site, with Dr Wright claiming that he had registered that site two months earlier. The evidence deployed to demonstrate purchase of that site Dr Wright agreed was inauthentic.

Dr Wright asserted that the essential elements of the code were already in place by the time of the upload, a point I pick up in the next section. Dr Wright then mentioned that he engaged with Hal Finney and Mike Hearn as Satoshi, but these were known contacts of Satoshi derived from emails in the public domain {as Mr Hearn explained: {C/22/4}, at [14]}.

I have already found that I do not believe Mr Matthews’s evidence about receiving a draft of the Bitcoin White Paper prior to its publication by Satoshi.

I have also rejected Mr Don Lynam’s evidence from his Kleiman deposition about receiving a rough draft of a paper that he thought was a draft of the Bitcoin White Paper.

In his witness statement Mr Max Lynam spoke of Dr Wright’s solicitors referring him to the evidence he gave at the Granath trial in Oslo in October 2022 to the effect that he ‘had never read what is now known as the Bitcoin White Paper.’ He went on to say that his cousin’s solicitors had proceeded to show him a copy of the Bitcoin White Paper ({ID_000865}, the document which Mr Madden used as the ‘control copy’) and said:

‘I cannot recall whether I saw this exact paper or not, but what is written in the abstract is similar to the things that Craig sent through back then. What I do know is that in the late 2000s the papers Craig sent through covered, for example, the concept around hashing, and the secured keys pulling things through to authenticate transactions over a network. I can remember the concepts and what we were talking about, but whether it was that document or another document, I do not know as there was numerous documents with essentially the same information.’

In cross-examination, Mr Max Lynam was taken to the transcript of his evidence in Granath in relation to his evidence about testing code for Craig. On the subject of whether he had seen a draft of the Bitcoin White Paper, he recounted that he had said we had received numerous documents and bits of information from him. The highest he was able to put it was that ‘That could have been one of them.’ I found this evidence unconvincing at best. It carries no weight at all.

In my judgment, the evidence was overwhelming that the suggestion that Dr Wright drafted the Bitcoin White Paper or anything like it is pure fabrication. The account he gave in his witness statement(s), as summarised above, was pure fantasy. To the extent that others (such as Mr Matthews and Mr Don Lynam) were persuaded by Dr Wright to support his account, they unwisely went along with it.

E.

The writing of the Bitcoin Source Code (in C++)

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:

633.1.

Section 33: two pieces of C++ code.

633.2.

Section 34: a source code flowchart.

633.3.

Section 35: a hex-edited copy of bitcoin.exe.