Dr Wright’s remaining witnesses of fact
All the remaining witnesses of fact called by Dr Wright gave their opinion that Dr Wright was Satoshi, with varying degrees of support. They divide into three broad categories: family members (Max Lynam and Danielle DeMorgan), people who worked for Dr Wright (Dr Pang and Shoaib Yousuf) and people who encountered Dr Wright in a variety of work environments (Mark Archbold, Dr Jones and David Bridges).
Ms Danielle DeMorgan {E/8/1} – Ms DeMorgan is Dr Wright’s youngest sister. She gave evidence that Dr Wright was interested in Japanese culture and sometimes used nicknames for himself. Her evidence was to the effect that, when she was 16, she and some of her school friends encountered in the local park someone dressed in black as a ninja with a Samurai sword, and this person turned out to be her brother, Craig Wright.
In both her statement and the blog post on which she based it, the key reason she drew a connection between her brother and Satoshi Nakamoto was that as a teenager he had dressed as a ninja in the local park. Nothing in her evidence gave any credence to Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi, and she did not support his assertion that he shared a pre-release copy of the Bitcoin White Paper with her. Ms DeMorgan was plainly an honest witness but her evidence was of no probative value.
Mr Max Lynam {E/13/1} – Mr Max Lynam is Dr Wright’s cousin. He gave evidence that he and his father ran some computer code for Dr Wright at their farm in Australia at some time in or after 2009, and that Dr Wright later (in 2013) told them that it had been mining Bitcoin.
I should make it clear that I assessed Mr Max Lynam’s evidence in conjunction with the CEA evidence from his father, Mr Don Lynam, summarised below.
COPA submitted that Max Lynam’s evidence gave no support to Dr Wright’s claim. They pointed out that the communications he actually had with Dr Wright in 2008 which are in disclosure say nothing about a digital currency project or anything like it {{Day11/25:14} - {Day11/27:24}}. Mr Lynam agreed that the only work or projects about which those communications spoke concerned IT security and digital forensics {Day11/27:24}. As for the code run for Dr Wright by Don Lynam in 2009, Max Lynam acknowledged that it was an “unknown bit of code”; that he did not know what it was doing; and that at the time he connected it to Dr Wright’s “White Hat” ethical hacking work (i.e. IT security work, which is quite different from the Bitcoin system) {Day11/28:11} - {Day11/33:3}.
In my judgment, the notion that Max Lynam and his father were heavily involved in mining Bitcoin from the very start does not ring true. If Dr Wright, as Satoshi, had involved these relatively close family members in that activity then, in my judgment:
First, it is likely that Satoshi would have shared the secret with them yet asked them to maintain the secret that Dr Wright was Satoshi. Yet Mr Max Lynam said that there was no secrecy surrounding the running of this code. Further, prior to a dinner which he dated to 2013, he had no idea of Dr Wright’s claim to have invented the Bitcoin system. He could not recall having been shown the Bitcoin White Paper, as Dr Wright has claimed he was. By 2013, he had only heard the word Bitcoin from the general press and he did not connect the Bitcoin system with the code which he and his father had run for Dr Wright {{Day11/37:19} - {Day11/38:4}}.
Second, and more importantly, Satoshi would have shared at least some of the fruits of the mining with them. There are two aspects to this:
First, I consider it is inconceivable that Satoshi would not have told them, before they threw away the computing equipment which they used, at least at some point (not necessarily right at the beginning) that they were ‘mining’ and that, again at some point, they were generating Bitcoin and their Bitcoin were gradually increasing in value.
Second, in the very unlikely event that Satoshi had not told them that they were ‘mining’ prior to the disposal of the computing equipment (and the hard drives, on which the resulting Bitcoin were stored) then, in my view, on learning of the disposal of their equipment and their loss of their Bitcoin, Satoshi would have transferred a reasonable number of Bitcoin to them. After all, Satoshi is supposed to possess over a million Bitcoin.
In my view, it is inconceivable that Satoshi had them mining for some considerable time but did not transfer any Bitcoin to them for their efforts.
In making these findings, I have not lost sight of the fact that Bitcoin in the early days had negligible value. However, Dr Wright placed a ‘nominal’ value of $50 per Bitcoin in his dealings with the ATO, so the notion that Bitcoin could be ascribed some value would not have been lost on him.
I have also not lost sight of the fact that Dr Wright sought to justify never telling the Lynams to save their bitcoin on the basis that it was never about value at the time {Day6:142:11}. This is not something which Satoshi would have said: even in February 2009, he clearly envisaged the value of Bitcoin would increase and would be important {see his post at {L4/489/5} plus his earlier email to Dustin Trammell on 16 January 2009 at {L4/335}}.
It is also telling that Mr Lynam had no knowledge of documents Dr Wright later produced which suggested that he and his family had a stake in Bitcoin mined at an early stage {see {Day11/42:20} - {Day11/45:11}}.
Overall, I formed two related conclusions: first, that Mr Max Lynam’s evidence provided no support for Dr Wright’s case; and second, that Mr Max Lynam for the most part, tried to tell the truth. One possible exception is the paragraph in his witness statement which I quote at [630]. Due to the fact that Dr Wright’s lies have been so extensive, I am unable to reach a conclusion as to whether he did mention the topics mentioned in that paragraph. There are reasons to doubt that he did, but it is unnecessary for me to reach a concluded view.
Dr Ignatius Pang {E/10/1} – Dr Pang has known Dr Wright since 2007 and he recounted doing some analysis with Dr Wright on social network predatory behaviour. He claimed that, in the summer of 2008, Dr Wright used the word “blockchain” in a very odd conversation about a Lego Batman set (The Tumbler Joker’s Ice Cream Surprise). He also says that Dr Wright asked people in the office if they knew someone with a Japanese name which he now thinks was probably Satoshi Nakamoto. He says that this happened sometime after he had had whooping cough, which was in October 2008. Mr Pang accepted that his memory of both conversations from 15 years previously was “hazy” and had been improved by discussions with lawyers which had involved Dr Wright {Day9/25:11}; {Day9/28:10}; {Day9/32:5} and following; {Day9/37:2} and following}.
COPA submitted that the account of the Lego conversation is so strange and implausible that it cannot be right, and that Dr Pang could only explain it by saying that Dr Wright had a tendency to “say things that are nonsensical or funny”, such as that he had eaten “Babe” from the engaging family film about a charismatic pig. Furthermore, the real Satoshi did not use the word “blockchain” in the White Paper (although it was a term that had been mentioned in relation to HashCash).
Dr Pang’s account that Dr Wright went around the BDO office asking whether they knew someone with a Japanese name which he now thinks was probably Satoshi Nakamoto, is intriguing for two reasons:
First, the timing suggests that Dr Wright had seen the first version of the Bitcoin White Paper soon after its publication.
Second, it seems to me to be inconsistent with Dr Wright being Satoshi. The incident seems to me to be far more consistent with Dr Wright finding, reading and being intrigued by the Bitcoin White Paper, and then asking whether anyone had heard of the author.
Finally, in closing, Counsel for Dr Wright placed emphasis on the fact that Dr Pang was not challenged on his evidence relating to Dr Wright’s improvement to the ‘Diffie-Hellman equation’ which he says he was shown when Dr Wright was still at BDO. The submission was that this is ‘relevant to Bitcoin’. That is not what Dr Pang said. He said when he saw the paper, he did not know how the revised equation could be applied. Only later in 2014-15, when he worked as casual staff at Hotwire, ‘supporting the writing of blockchain related patents and/or white papers’, and came across the paper again, did he understand that ‘it is to do with hierarchical key encryption and has very important applications in how to structure ownership of data and how things can be structured hierarchically in data storage, which is very important in any computer security setting, including Bitcoin.’ The high level of generality in his link to Bitcoin is also confirmed by the fact that the Bitcoin system never used ECDH or Diffie-Hellman at all, but ECDSA on secp256k1 (see [315] below).
Overall, in my judgment, Dr Pang’s evidence provided no support for Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi. At best, his evidence shows that Dr Wright took an early interest in the Bitcoin White Paper, but no more than that.
Mr Shoaib Yousuf {E/7/1} – Mr Yousuf is a cyber security expert who has known Dr Wright since 2006. He says that in the late 2000s they discussed some general digital security topics and digital currency (as a broad concept). I agree with COPA that Mr Yousuf gave no useful evidence on the Identity Issue. All he could say was that he had rated Dr Wright highly as an expert in IT security and that he had spoken with Dr Wright about digital payment systems such as the use of Visa and Mastercard over the internet {{Day9/111:1} - {Day9/112:21}}. He gave no support to Dr Wright’s claim to have shared a pre-issue copy of the Bitcoin White Paper with him {{E/4/21} at [49i.]}. Even after Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi became public, Mr Yousuf was not sufficiently interested to discuss it with him {{Day9/123:7} and following}.
Mr Mark Archbold {E/11/1} – Mr Archbold has known Dr Wright since 1999 when they both worked for the online casino, Lasseter’s Online. He gave evidence that Dr Wright was a capable IT security professional who had a lot of computers at his home and at one point expressed an interest in digital currency. Mr Archbold gave honest evidence, but I agree with COPA’s submission that his recollections were simply of Dr Wright being a competent IT security professional. He was candid that he only believed that Dr Wright could “possibly” be Satoshi and that this belief was based on hindsight {{Day10/29:6} and following}. He did not support Dr Wright’s claim {{E/4/21}, [49n]} to have shared a pre-release copy of the Bitcoin White Paper with him.
Dr Cerian Jones {E/14/1} – Dr Jones is a consultant (but not a patent attorney) who has filed patents on behalf of nChain and Dr Wright since February 2016. She spends most of her time working for nChain on their patents. She accepted that she was not a patent attorney but had never objected to being given that title in a series of marketing events she attended on behalf of nChain.
She gave evidence about some of Dr Wright’s patent applications and claimed to have been convinced that he is Satoshi by a combination of “his academic knowledge, his professional background and [his] previous employment experiences”.
Her evidence was that Dr Wright could be Satoshi due to him having made three particular inventions recorded in three patents. Even if I assume this evidence might be relevant, she omitted to mention that Dr Wright was not the sole inventor. Indeed, for the first patent, all the internal documents show that the inventive work was done by Dr Savannah. She has personally and professionally associated herself with Dr Wright, nChain and the entire Satoshi story, so it is clear that her evidence was in no way independent. Overall, I agree that Dr Jones’ evidence gave no support to Dr Wright’s case, as Lord Grabiner KC appeared to accept when objecting that questioning her about the patents which were the subject of her statement was irrelevant to the Identity Issue.
Mr David Bridges {E/9/1} – Mr Bridges is a personal friend of Dr Wright who worked at Qudos Bank and worked with Dr Wright from 2006. He described what he perceived as Dr Wright’s skill in computer security and also talked about his interest in Japanese culture. Mr Bridges gave honest evidence, but it was of no probative value. Although his statement drew parallels between the Bitcoin system and Dr Wright’s work with him, on examination these were of no significance:
He drew a parallel between Dr Wright’s work for Qudos and the blockchain, but only on the basis that both featured a record of all transactions and good traceability, not based on any technical features in common: {Day11/5:19} and following.
He drew a parallel between an idea pitched by Dr Wright and the blockchain, but it turned out that the only parallel was that Dr Wright was proposing a payment platform with security features: {Day11/13:7} and following.
He did not support Dr Wright’s claim {{E/4/21}, [49.p]} to have shared a pre-release copy of the Bitcoin White Paper with him.
Furthermore, as COPA submitted, although disclosure has been given of nearly 100 emails and papers sent by Dr Wright to Mr Bridges ({ID_006367} - {ID_006463}), none of them addresses Bitcoin or prior digital currency systems: {Day11/6:22} and following. It is also notable that, when Dr Wright spoke to Mr Bridges about the Bitcoin pizza payment of 2010, Dr Wright did not mention having created the Bitcoin system, even though he now says that he had shared the Bitcoin White Paper with Mr Bridges before its release: {{Day11/15:7} and following}.