Dr Wright claims that, sometime after 4 May 2016, he destroyed the hard drive(s) containing the private keys used in the signing sessions and that he has not had access to them since then. As COPA submitted, he has given inconsistent accounts on this, when one would expect him to have retained a clear recollection of such an important event. In his evidence for these proceedings, he says he destroyed a single hard drive in around May 2016 at his home in Wimbledon and that he threw the hard drive with enough force to shatter the glass platters in the hard drive {Wright4 [33] {E/4/15}}. As for his motive, he refers to his ASD and says that a feeling of betrayal by Mr MacGregor caused an emotional response in which he acted impulsively {Wright4 [34] {E/4/16}}.

By contrast, in his evidence in the Granath case, he claimed that he had “the first 12 keys and a number of key slices” on two drives (a hard drive and a USB stick) and that he destroyed both, one by hitting it with a hammer and one by stomping on it with his foot {{O2/11/29}, internal pages 108-110}. He is not only inconsistent on the method of destruction. In his Granath evidence, he said that his motive was to “make sure that judges and courts understand that Bitcoin is not encrypted and it can be seized, frozen and accessed”. He said that he believed that destroying the drives had been the only way to prove this. This account of a principled motivation which he still held in September 2022 is very different from the account of an action on impulse triggered by a feeling of betrayal by Mr MacGregor. Dr Wright’s attempts in his oral evidence in cross-examination to make these two different accounts reconcile were not impressive {Day8/79:3} - {Day8/84:25}.

Dr Wright’s pleaded stance in this case is that he no longer has access to the keys associated with the early blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain. In Granath (in September 2022), he said that he could probably gain such access: “In theory, I could probably track down Uyen [Nguyen] and get other people and do other thing that might give access, but I have not even tried to see whether I could do that” {{O2/11/31}, internal page 119}. He insisted that he would not do so. If, since September 2022, he has tried and failed to gain access, it is surprising that he has not given details in any of his witness statements. The alternative, that he has not tried, or has chosen not to access the keys, is simply implausible in view of the pressure which Mr Ayre applied in his email of September 2023 {L19/212/6} and in view of what is at stake for him in this litigation, both personally and professionally. When he was cross-examined about this, he claimed to have discovered in 2019 that he could not access the keys. This conflicted with his evidence in Granath, but he then proceeded to deny the conflict {Day8/85:1} - {Day8/87:8}. These, in my judgment, were just more convenient (but conflicting) excuses.