Dr Wright’s contention that the PGP key was created in 2011 was addressed independently by both Mr Madden and by Martti Malmi.

Mr Madden described the key at Madden4 [144 et seq] {G/6/46}. He was able to verify the date of the key to 30 October 2008 in two ways:

781.1.

First, using the X-Archive-Orig fields in the header of the relevant web page on the Wayback Machine, he identified that the key had been uploaded to the bitcoin.org website with a date of 30 October 2008 {Madden4 [149] {G/6/48}}.

781.2.

Second, he was able to inspect the internal timestamp of the PGP key itself, which also gave a date of 30 October 2008 {Madden4 [152] {G/6/50}}.

Mr Malmi disclosed emails that he had exchanged with Satoshi Nakamoto in December 2010. On 6 December 2010 Mr Malmi had asked Satoshi to send his PGP key {L6/478/1}. Satoshi responded the same day, sending the PGP key and stating “It’s also at http://www.bitcoin.org/Satoshi_Nakamoto.asc” {L6/477/1}. The key sent by Satoshi is identical to the key analysed by Mr Madden.

So the evidence from those two independent sources established that the key was not created in 2011.

Mr Malmi’s emails were disclosed by COPA with his witness statement on 28 June 2023. They presented an immediate problem for Dr Wright’s then account of events. His story changed in Wright4. He continued to state that the “key was created by person or persons unknown” (Wright4 [104] {E/4/34}) but now said:

“This was generated by Vistomail when I set-up the Sakura account in 2008. I subsequently shared this with a number of individuals, including Marti [sic] Malmi, so that they could send code updates to me. It was only published in 2011 by an unknown party (I suspect Marti [sic] Malmi), after I stopped the active use of the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym.”

Leaving aside the sudden reversal of the position previously taken by Dr Wright, his suggestion that the PGP key had been “generated by Vistomail” is wrong. As described in [788.1 below], the key was associated by Satoshi with his satoshin@gmx.com account (not his satoshi@vistomail.com address).

However, in addition Dr Wright had overlooked Satoshi’s confirmation that the key that he had sent to Mr Malmi was already on the bitcoin.org website, i.e. that it had been on the bitcoin.org website no later than December 2010: see paragraph 782 above. Dr Wright repeated this error in Wright9 [34] {E/26/12}, continuing to contend that the PGP key was posted after he “ceased to be active under the Satoshi Nakamoto identity”.