By way of background, in his original reliance documents, Dr Wright included many supposed versions of the Bitcoin White Paper, including a purported precursor draft with the title “Timecoin” {ID_000254}, supposedly dating from 2008. In section 24 of the Appendix, I have found that document to be forged by Dr Wright.

During his evidence at trial, Dr Wright repeatedly sought to use the “Timecoin” moniker in relation to his work developing Bitcoin. Part of the motivation appears to have been to explain away his witnesses’ inability to remember being given a document referencing “Bitcoin”.

One feature of Dr Wright’s account concerning the Papa Neema emails was that Dr Wright claimed that Mr Mayaka had responded to his request for documents relating to the formation of two Seychelles companies by sending him on 10 September 2023: (a) some invoices relating to those companies; and (b) a “Timecoin” paper, “TimeDoc2.pdf” {CSW/31/1} ({ID_006565}), which supposedly dated from April 2009 and presented a development of Bitcoin on behalf of Information Defense (one of Dr Wright’s companies).

This was remarkable for a number of reasons. First, no reason was ever identified as to why Mr Mayaka (a company formation agent) would have had a copy of the Timecoin paper. Secondly, Dr Wright had not asked for this document or anything like it. Thirdly, by a striking coincidence, this document (which was not in his original disclosure) came to Dr Wright by two means in mid-September 2023; once from “Papa Neema” on 10 September 2023 and a second time through his discovery of the Samsung Drive on 15 September 2023 (which, as Mr Madden found, contained a hash-identical document). Dr Wright had no good explanation for that coincidence {{Day15/57:16} and following}.

In Wright11 [289], Dr Wright claimed that he had sent this document to a series of individuals, including Mr Bridges, Mr Jenkins, Mr Matthews and various unnamed others at QSCU (a bank), Centrebet and Hoyts. In a direct contradiction of his evidence in Wright4, he said that he had not sent the original Bitcoin White Paper to Mr Bridges or Mr Jenkins. The only person who gave any support to this account was Mr Jenkins, who said that he had been shown (not sent) a copy of such a document. Mr Jenkins had never mentioned this in his Granath evidence or his witness statement, and it became clear that he had been primed to add the reference to his evidence. I must return to these points in more detail below when I consider a key aspect of Mr Jenkins’ evidence.

The Timecoin paper supposedly supplied by Papa Neema (and on the Samsung Drive) was light on metadata but contained features that led Mr Madden to doubt its authenticity, including (a) the fact that diagrams had been embedded as low resolution picture images, consistent with having been copied in as screenshots from a public source; and (b) irregular metadata timestamps which were of a date (31 October 2017) associated with the 2023 editing process that created BDOPC.raw {Madden5 [104-126] {G/9/34} and following}. Furthermore, the content of the Timecoin paper is very odd. It has an abstract which is very similar to that of the Bitcoin White Paper, including detailing proof-of-work and outpacing, but the body of the paper then includes a mix of copied and paraphrased sections of the Bitcoin White Paper while missing out the sections on proof-of-work and outpacing. Some incongruous IT security features (including Tripwire) are then bolted on to tie the document to Dr Wright’s areas of expertise {see the cross-examination at {Day15/63:16} - {Day15/91:8}}. I agree that it bears all the signs of a forgery prepared in haste to suggest Dr Wright was developing the Bitcoin project in early 2009.