Dr Wright said that circumstances of late 2010 / early 2011 (including his marital problems and the ATO investigations) led him to decide to move away from the Satoshi persona, phasing out communications under the pseudonym in April 2011. Dr Wright recounted sending Gavin Andresen a file containing a copy of the network alert key (with Dr Wright keeping a copy himself) in October 2010 and that he was willing to handover to Mr Andresen due to Dr Wright’s belief that he was dedicated to the project. He says that he also granted Mr Andresen access to the Bitcoin code on SourceForge, though only on a lower-level administrator basis.

Dr Wright then painted a picture of disappointment. He said that Mr Malmi took down the bitcoin.org server and initiated a new server (bitcointalk.org) over which Dr Wright (as Satoshi) had no administrator rights, while Mr Andresen and Dr Wladimir van der Laan transferred the Bitcoin code from SourceForge to GitHub. There is no evidence that Dr van der Laan was involved at all, other than Dr Wright’s account. Dr Wright claimed that these changes were against his wishes. However, the forum move did not alter the forum database, and (as noted above) it is clear from contemporaneous emails that Satoshi was perfectly content with the move to GitHub.

Dr Wright’s account about being frozen out and denied administrative privileges by Mr Malmi and others when the new server was set was undermined when Mr Malmi pointed out that (a) Satoshi would have only needed to ask to get credentials if he had wanted them, and (b) that Satoshi never requested such credentials. This latter point is unsurprising, as at that point Satoshi clearly knew he was going to leave the scene {see, on these points {Day13/31:1} - {Day13/31:11}.

Dr Wright attempted to maintain his position that Mr Andresen made the move to GitHub against Satoshi’s wishes, but all the communications show that Satoshi approved of the increasing use of GitHub. Furthermore, his insistence that he (as Satoshi) wanted to maintain eternal control of the Bitcoin Source Code is starkly at odds with the fact that Satoshi (a) handed over project management to Mr Andresen (including telling him that he should feel free to disable or delete SourceForge forums) and then (b) in the parting email of April 2011 {L/220/1} urged Mr Andresen to make Bitcoin more an open source project and give more credit to developers. Dr Wright also maintained that Dr van der Laan had been involved in making the move to GitHub, without a shred of evidence.