COPA also drew attention to the circumstances in which Mr Andresen arrived at and participated in the signing session that took place on 7 April 2016. His flight to London departed from Boston at 21:35 on 6 April 2016 (02:35 GMT on 7 April 2016), arriving in London around 6.5 hours later (at around 09:10 GMT). According to his deposition in the Kleiman proceedings he “can’t sleep on airplanes very well.” He arrived at the Firmdale Hotel in Covent Garden at around 11:00 GMT. In his Kleiman deposition, Mr Andresen repeated that at this point he was “very tired” as it was a red-eye flight.

After landing, Mr Andresen got 1-2 hours of sleep. According to the schedule that was prepared for the day, he then met Mr Matthews and Mr MacGregor for lunch at 1pm (13:00 GMT).

Following the lunch meeting, it appears there was an “introduction” session with Mr Matthews and Mr MacGregor, following which Mr Andresen and Dr Wright met in person for the first time. According to Mr Matthews they spoke for around 1-1.5 hours on a number of topics, including “eight or ten different aspects of the Bitcoin code”. According to the account he gave to Andrew O’Hagan for The Satoshi Affair, Mr Andresen “was so jet-lagged at one point… that [he] had to stop [Dr Wright] from diving deep into a mathematical proof [Dr Wright had] worked out related to how blocks are validated in bitcoin.”

The meeting moved towards the signing session itself, although Mr Andresen describes the session as “one continuous meeting” in the hotel room. According to the account given in The Satoshi Affair, at around 5.30pm, Dr Wright logged onto his laptop in order to sign a message with Satoshi’s private key. Mr Andresen wished to perform verification using his own laptop, and produced a “brand new sealed in the package USB stick” which he expected Dr Wright to “take and produce some digital signatures that [he] could verify on [his (i.e. Mr Andresen’s)] laptop.” However, Dr Wright did not agree to do this.

There was then a discussion that lasted around 15-20 minutes, following which a new laptop was “procured” by an assistant, which Mr Matthews has said was purchased from Curry’s on Oxford Street. The distance between the Firmdale Hotel and Curry’s on Oxford Street is 11 minutes each way by foot. It is therefore reasonable to assume that it was some time after 6pm by the time the assistant returned with the laptop, and the signing session continued.

By Mr Andresen’s account, the process of convincing him that Wright had taken an early block and signed a message using its private key, took “some—many hours, I don’t recall how many hours, but it took much longer than – than expected”.

Even if the assistant returned with the laptop promptly, and the signing session completed very shortly after they returned (say 7pm), this would be 16.5 hours after Mr Andresen’s flight had departed Boston (which itself was at the end of day on 6 April Boston time – 9:35pm). Assuming that Mr Andresen had woken at, say, 9am on the day of his flight, and allowing for the time difference, by 7pm London time on 7 April (the earliest time at which the alleged signing can have been completed), Mr Andresen would have been through a 29-hour period since waking up on 6 April with only 3-4 hours of sleep. By his own account, by the time that Dr Wright allegedly signed the message, Mr Andresen was “exhausted”.

As for the technical possibility of Mr Andresen’s session being hacked or interfered with in some way, both Professor Meiklejohn and Mr Gao agreed this was all technically possible and in fact relatively straightforward. Professor Meiklejohn also clarified how easy it was for this to be done, noting as the final answer in her cross-examination, the following:

Q. And I suggest that you have consistently understated the inherent difficulty of actually subverting the Andresen signing session in your reports.

A. That is completely inaccurate.

Q. The fact is that, in reality, it would have been extremely difficult to subvert the process.

A.

I can think of literally hundreds of people who could compromise the router in a matter of minutes, and from there, the entire process would be almost trivial from a computer science perspective.

In his evidence, Dr Wright tried to argue that any attempt to subvert the signing session would either have been obstructed because of the blockchain having been downloaded or have given rise to a clear red warning highlighting the use of a spoof website. Professor Meiklejohn addressed and rejected this evidence in her second report: {G/10/1}. Mr Gao accepted in cross-examination that the downloading of the blockchain would not have provided any special protection against spoofing and that there were various very feasible ways to subvert the process, at least some of which would not result in any clear warning notice.

Finally, it is clear from Mr Andresen’s Reddit exchange with ‘etmetm’ that he wished (with the benefit of hindsight) that he had taken detailed notes of what happened. It seems he did not come prepared to take notes and therefore took none because they would be unnecessary ‘because Craig would simply post a signature’ {L14/354.1/1}. In that exchange he also said ‘We may now never know for certain if I was tricked somehow, and that might be for the best. (feel free to republish)’ {L14/354.1/2}. Furthermore, it is notable that Mr Andresen never said he and Dr Wright set up the laptop together, that was something inferred by etmetm in a summary of what happened - Mr Andresen responded saying he had got several details wrong.

By way of background, I refer to the following section in the Appendix which contain my finding that the following document, relevant to these matters, was forged by Dr Wright, namely: section 39: the Sartre Message.

As above, I first set out the essential facts and then deal with the contentious issues.