The expectation of his entire team, including Mr MacGregor, Mr Matthews and Mr Ayre, was that on 2 May 2016 Dr Wright would issue a blog including a message signed with a key associated with one of the early blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain. That expectation was shared by Mr Andresen, Mr Matonis, the media outlets to which Dr Wright had given interviews and the media consultants with whom he had worked. Instead, the “Sartre blog” post which Dr Wright issued provided an over-complicated explanation of a means of verifying a cryptographic signature and presented a signature which had simply been lifted from the public blockchain. As set out above, those who had been supporting Dr Wright reacted with expressions of panic and betrayal.

It is common ground between the parties’ experts that the Sartre blog post proved nothing. Prof Meiklejohn explained that all the main cryptographic objects in the post “can be derived directly from the data for the [Satoshi / Finney] Transaction and the Block 9 Generation Transaction, which due to the nature of the blockchain are available to everyone.” She added: “This data is thus replayed from those transactions, which… means it provides no cryptographic evidence of the possession of the associated private key.” Mr Gao accepted this point.

Dr Wright sought to explain away this failure of proof by two excuses: (a) that the Sartre blog post was altered between his draft and the published version; and (b) that it was never intended to provide actual proof of his claim to be Satoshi, but rather to state his principled opposition to providing such cryptographic proof {Wright 1 [217-220] {E/2/37}}. As to the first of those points, his own draft of the blog post (sent on 29 April 2016) was largely the same as the published version, and his own team read it as intended to provide proof by a valid signature. As to the second, it is plain from the email correspondence from the time (summarised above) that it was intended to give such proof. Even Mr Matthews could only attempt to defend Dr Wright by saying that he was committing an act of “sabotage” to embarrass Mr MacGregor, which I consider to be a bizarre explanation and which conflicts with Dr Wright’s own account {Matthews1 [104] {E/5/22}}.

The aftermath of the Sartre blog post is equally striking. Over the following 48 hours (from 2 to 4 May 2016), Dr Wright’s supporters pressed him to provide some form of objectively verifiable proof in one of various forms. As explained above, on 3 May 2016 the blog post was issued in his name entitled “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Proof” {L13/262/1}, promising over the following days to post a series of pieces to “lay the foundations for [his] extraordinary claim”, including “transferring bitcoin from an early block”. The post concluded: “I will present what I believe to be ‘extraordinary proof’ and ask only that it be independently validated.” However, that proof never came.

It was arranged that Mr Cellan-Jones and Mr Andresen would transfer Bitcoin to addresses associated with Satoshi, and that they would be sent back. Mr Cellan-Jones explains how on 4 May 2016 he sent 0.01701 Bitcoin (which COPA estimated to be now worth around £600) to the address used in the first Bitcoin transaction with Hal Finney. This sum was never returned, and Dr Wright failed to follow up on what Mr Cellan-Jones accurately described in his witness statement as a “simple and comprehensive way for Wright to prove that he was Satoshi”. Mr Andresen made a similar transfer, which was also never returned.

Dr Wright did not provide any other form of proof. In the two days between 2 and 4 May 2016, he told his team that he was taking steps to gain access to Satoshi’s PGP key to sign a message with that (something he now says is impossible or infeasible). He dodged their questions, while trying to divert them with a short article about the Genesis Block (which anyone could have written from publicly available information). In the end, he did not provide any proof and the “big reveal” project fell apart.

This is a remarkable series of events. It might be said that Dr Wright had a dramatic loss of nerve when put under pressure to provide proof that he was Satoshi, but it is clear that he later regained his nerve to continue with his long-running project, notably in these proceedings, to establish that he is/was Satoshi. I do not consider it is necessary to make any detailed findings about these events or Dr Wright’s state of mind over the period in question. It suffices for me to find that none of the events surrounding the Sartre blog provide any support for his claim to be Satoshi and the contrary is true: those events are entirely consistent with Dr Wright not being Satoshi. It must be remembered that these events took place before Dr Wright claims to have destroyed the hard drives on which he had stored the private keys for the early blocks or, at the very least, for blocks 1 and 9. As the experts agreed, Dr Wright could have proved his possession of one of the private keys to an early block easily and simply. In these circumstances, the natural inference is that Dr Wright was unable to do so because he has never had any of those private keys.

In my judgment, the suggestion that he took a principled stand against offering cryptographic proof is just another convenient excuse. It is also contradicted by (a) the fact that he engaged in the various private signing sessions with the aim that they should be fully written up in articles and (b) the fact that his associates (not just Mr MacGregor, whom he now seeks to cast as a villain) believed that he had committed to provide such proof. Again, the inference is that Dr Wright came up with this excuse after the event.