Mr Robert Jenkins {E/6/1-9} made a single witness statement at {E/6/1-9} dated 28 July 2023, in which he set out in 37 paragraphs a fairly detailed account of their relationship over many years from their first meeting in 1998/1999, when Dr Wright worked on security measures for Vodafone in Australia, until around 2010/2011. He says that he discussed concepts of electronic ledgers involving linked blocks of data which in hindsight he relates to the Bitcoin blockchain.

His witness statement includes a section dealing with the time he was employed at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) from late 2002 until January 2008 and he said:

‘During the time I was at CBA, which was from October 2022 [sc.2002] until January 2008, Craig and I talked about a whole range of things over that five or six year period: we had a common interest around some stuff that in hindsight related to Blockchain and Bitcoin (I first heard the word Blockchain in late 2008, after I left CBA; I don't remember precisely when I first heard the word Bitcoin, but it was later than that).’

In the following six paragraphs, it is clear that Mr Jenkins had taken care to mention any aspect of their discussions which might possibly relate to Bitcoin. The next section of his witness statement, which is concerned with his next period of employment at BT, follows the same pattern, in which Mr Jenkins mentioned discussions with Dr Wright of a ‘white paper’, distributed computing, mining and bitcoin.

At the conclusion of his (first) cross-examination, the evidence Mr Jenkins had given was not controversial: he had discussed E-Gold with Dr Wright because it was an interest of his own; that there had been some discussion of buying Bitcoin (i.e. tokens) from Dr Wright in early 2011; that he had not received a copy of the Bitcoin White Paper from Dr Wright; and that he first discovered that Dr Wright was claiming to have invented Bitcoin at the time of the public “outing” in December 2015. When it was put to him that he could only speculate on Dr Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto based on hindsight, Mr Jenkins agreed and gave a vague answer about Dr Wright being unique and shy {{Day9/91:24} and following}.

However, Mr Jenkins’ re-examination revealed that he had been prepared to answer questions in a certain way, but had not been given the chance to do so during cross-examination. The issue arose because Mr Jenkins had confirmed in Granath that he had not been sent the Bitcoin White Paper – contrary to what Dr Wright claimed. In re-examination he was asked: ‘Did he show you anything?’ He answered, after looking down at notes in front of him, as follows:

‘96:19 Did he show you anything?

20 A. I do. I do remember seeing a couple of things, besides

21 what Craig drew on the napkin. At a -- at a subsequent

22 meeting, I was shown a paper. It didn't make mention of

23 Bitcoin but it did make mention of -- of something

24 called Timecoin, and that was something that -- as

25 a White Paper that he -- he showed me at that time.

97: 1 Q. You said a bit later. When was that?

2 A. It would have been in that time window I was saying. It

3 was before I joined Westpac and -- and after those

4 series of lunches where he drew on the -- on the napkin.

5 So, around, again, 2009/2010.’

The re-examination continued a few lines further down in the transcript:

‘Q. I'm going to show you a document and I want to ask you

17 if you recognise the document. Could you be shown -- or

18 could we look at {CSW/31/1}. That's a Timecoin paper,

19 "A peer-to-peer electronic cash system", with

20 Craig Wright's name at the top of it. Do you recognise

21 that document?

22 A. As far as I can recollect that far back, because this

23 isn't something that was discussed in the -- in

24 the Granath court case, but, yes, it does look certainly

25 similar to the document I saw, yes.’

Since that evidence had not featured in Mr Jenkins’ statement or in his testimony in the Granath proceedings, I permitted further cross-examination. COPA submit that Mr Jenkins’ new evidence then unravelled. He admitted that he had referred to a note when giving the evidence I quoted in [178], and that the note had the word “Timecoin” written on it. At first, he agreed that he “wrote Timecoin down on that piece of paper before [his] evidence started”. However, when it was then put to him that this was a sign of him having been primed by others to mention Timecoin, he contradicted the evidence he had given just moments before, saying: “these were notes I took during the course of this interaction rather than anything I wrote down before the interaction”. When pressed with the contradiction, he replied that he had written some of the notes on the piece of paper before his evidence began, but insisted that Timecoin and two other notes (each of several words) were written during his cross-examination. Even when it was put to him that he had not been seen to write anything during cross-examination, he insisted that he had {{Day9/99:16} - {Day9/105:13}}.

Thus, within the space of about a minute, Mr Jenkins contradicted himself about whether the word “Timecoin” was a note written before his evidence. COPA submitted that he lied about his having written notes during his cross-examination, when it was obvious to all in court that he had not done so.

Before I make any findings about Mr Jenkins and this aspect of his evidence, there are some prior issues I have to address which concern {ID_006565} and Dr Wright’s evidence about that document. So I return to this issue later.

Dr Wright produced in his disclosure a number of “Timecoin” White Papers. One of them, {ID_000254}, was one of COPA’s pleaded forgeries which I have found, in section 24 of the Appendix, to have been forged by Dr Wright.

The document Mr Jenkins was shown in re-examination was {ID_006565}, ‘TimeDoc 2.pdf’. This was one of three documents attached to {ID_006564}, which is one of the Papa Neema emails to which I have referred above. Mr Madden identified {ID_006565} as hash identical to a file within the zip file of similar name. As he said, the email had attached to it both the pdf file itself and an encrypted zip of the same pdf. I have already touched on {ID_006565} above when considering Dr Wright’s credibility but I must consider it in more detail in order to make findings about Mr Jenkins’ evidence.

As the ID number indicates, it was one of the last documents disclosed by Dr Wright. It was one of the set of documents referred to in Wright11 which had not previously been disclosed and which were the subject of the application on Day 1 of the Trial for permission to rely upon them.

The chain of custody information {M3/16/3} shows only that the document was sent by email from Craig Wright to Shoosmiths on 25 January 2024. Shoosmiths’ letter dated 9 February 2024 refers to the difficulty in giving further chain of custody information since Dr Wright was in the witness box.

In Madden5, Mr Madden was unable to undertake a full analysis of this document. He concluded at [126] that the document should be considered as ‘unreliable’ without further supporting evidence. He also said:

‘It may be possible to come to a more concluded view if I was provided access to the computing systems used to author and store this document and the emails associated with it.’

The document is dated to 9 April 2009 (i.e. after the publication of the 2008 and 2009 versions of the Bitcoin White Paper) and has several of the metadata property fields populated, whereas the control copy of the Bitcoin White Paper did not. The title is ‘TimeChain – Logging System Built on Bitcoin to Extend and Deliver Blacknet’.

It has 5 diagrams which appear identical to those in the Bitcoin White Paper. They are embedded as picture items and not as vector diagrams. Mr Madden also found the pictures to be of low resolution and pixelated compared with the equivalents in {ID_000865} (a control copy of the Bitcoin White Paper).

Although there are differences in the text between {ID_006565} and {ID_000254} there remains significant similarity. As with {ID_000254}, it is clear that there is such a degree of similarity with the text of the Bitcoin White Paper that the only possible conclusion is that {ID_006565} was derived from the Bitcoin White Paper.

Indeed, that was Dr Wright’s evidence in Wright11 at [289]:

‘The TimeDoc 2 pdf is a document I created after I had founded Information Defence Pty Ltd (“IDPL”) in January 2009. It has similarities to the Bitcoin White Paper because it is an extended version of the time stamping service included in bitcoin that I was using commercially. It deals with my plan to exploit the technology underlying Bitcoin for other purposes. My recollection is that I sent it or a similar document to Qantas Staff Credit Union (now QDOS Bank), David Bridges, Rob Jenkins, Stefan Matthews at Centrebet, Hoyts, and a number of other people. I believe that these individuals would recognise this document. I had not sent the original bitcoin White Paper to either David Bridges or Rob Jenkins. However, I would likely have sent the commercialised version to each of them.’ (my emphasis).

One curiosity is that although {ID_006565} includes a few references, there is no reference to the Bitcoin White Paper, from which it has clearly been very substantially derived.

The bulk of Mr Madden’s ‘Summary’ on {ID_006565} reads as follows:

‘120. Other than the visual observations I make above, I do not comment on or consider the content of the document of as this is outside of my expertise, though I have seen the comments made in the Twentieth Witness Statement of Philip Nathan Sherrell.

121.

While I have found no anachronistic metadata characteristics within this document itself in the time available to me, I have made several observations that bring it into contrast with the Bitcoin White Paper control copy {ID_000865}. This is to say that the document has been assembled in a different manner to {ID_000865} and does not appear to have been produced from the OpenOffice document used to create {ID_000865} (and it also does not appear to come from {ID_000254}, a document which I understand is said to be related).

122.

The same OpenOffice document could not have been used without undergoing significant changes to the formatting and style of the document as well as its content, and the diagrams have been replaced with relatively low-quality static pictures instead of flowchart-style graphic drawings.

123.

I also note that the OpenOffice software version 3.0 that was used to author {ID_006565} is still available for download today from Internet resources, and it would have been possible to create a document identical to ID_006565 by downloading and running that software on a computer (or virtual computer) with a backdated clock. The manner in which the email message to which the document was attached has been disclosed is less than ideal and does not allow me a full picture for forensic analysis.

124.

The copy of the ZIP file that was created on the Samsung drive has been attributed with timestamps of 31 October 2017, a date I have attributed with significant backdating behaviour on the Samsung drive {G/6/13}.’

I regret to say I found Mr Jenkins’ evidence about having seen a Timecoin paper deeply unconvincing. If he really had been shown a Timecoin paper at any point in the period 2007-2009, I am sure that Dr Wright would have told his lawyers and Mr Jenkins would have been certain to have mentioned it in his witness statement. Furthermore, I found the way in which this potentially important piece of evidence was elicited in re-examination was also deeply unconvincing. If it was known about in advance (as appears to have been the case), it should have been included in a supplementary witness statement or, at the very least, elicited in examination in chief. Instead, it seems to have been left as a bomb to go off in cross-examination, except the cross-examiner did not trigger the bomb, so it had to be dealt with in re-examination.

It is also revealing that the first time Dr Wright made his claim to have shown Mr Jenkins a copy of the “Timecoin” paper was only in Wright11 at [289] {CSW/1/53, 12 January 2024}.

In the circumstances, I agree that the natural inference to be drawn from this sequence of events is that Mr Jenkins had been primed by Dr Wright to bring up a “Timecoin” White Paper, something he had not mentioned in his witness statement in these proceedings nor in his Granath testimony.

In these circumstances, I make the following findings: (a) Mr Jenkins was prepared by Dr Wright to slip “Timecoin” into his evidence, and his denial of that was a lie; (b) he had written a note of “Timecoin” before he gave evidence to remind him to insert it; and (c) his claim to have written it and other notes during cross-examination was a lie. Furthermore, in view of my finding in section 24 of the Appendix that the Timecoin ODT Whitepaper was forged by Dr Wright and the evidence summarised above, I am compelled to find that {ID_006565}, ‘TimeDoc 2.pdf’ was also forged by Dr Wright. In relation to finding (a) above, I wish to make clear that I do not believe Dr Wright’s legal team had anything to do with this, particularly in view of their exemplary conduct of his difficult case.

As noted above, there is nothing material in the balance of Mr Jenkins’ evidence which advances Dr Wright’s case on the Identity Issue. However, given the lies he was prepared to tell, COPA submits that in general his evidence cannot be believed except to the extent that it is supported by contemporaneous documents.

The final curiosity with Mr Jenkins’ evidence was his repeated insistence that he had been explicitly told he should not consult any documents to aid his memory. It was not clear who might have told him that, but COPA presumes it cannot have been the lawyers who took his statement. As such, it appears either that Dr Wright (or someone else associated with him) told Mr Jenkins not to go looking for documents, or alternatively that this was another story invented by or fed to Mr Jenkins to justify why he had no documents to back up his assertions.

Overall, in my judgment there is no probative evidence given by Mr Jenkins that in any way assists Dr Wright’s case on the Identity Issue.