Dr Wright’s CEA Notice
In addition to the written and live evidence of those witnesses, Dr Wright relied on certain statements by way of CEA Notice. The Witness Statement of Mr Jenkin, a partner in Travers Smith LLP, provided further explanation. He set out the reasons why the individuals in question could not or should not be called to give oral evidence.
The transcript of the deposition of Donald Joseph Lynam in the United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, dated 2 April 2020, in the proceedings Kleiman v Wright (Case No. 9:18-cv-80176-BB/BR).
The transcripts of the deposition of Gavin A. Andresen in the United States District Court, Southern District of Florida, dated 26 February 2020 and 27 February 2020, in the proceedings Kleiman v Wright (Case No. 9:18-cv-80176-BB/BR).
The transcript of the oral evidence provided by Neville Sinclair to the District Court in Oslo, Norway, in Magnus Granath v Craig Wright (case number 19-076844TVI) on 16 September 2022.
In his witness statement, Mr Jenkin did not identify particular parts of those transcripts which were relied upon and, indeed, the CEA Notice itself makes it clear that the entirety of each transcript was relied upon. Notwithstanding this, very limited extracts in each transcript were highlighted, as I understand matters, as being the principal parts relied upon. Although I read each transcript, it was clear that the highlighted passages were the only parts of any real relevance, and it would have been better if the CEA Notice had been appropriately limited.
Mr Don Lynam is Dr Wright’s maternal uncle. He served for nearly 30 years in the Royal Australian Air Force, rising to the rank of Wing Commander in the Engineering branch and received an award for his work in IT in logistics management. He was just verging on age 80 when he gave evidence in deposition for the Kleiman v Wright case in Florida.
The only passages highlighted in the transcript of the deposition are in his evidence in chief. Indeed, the full transcript of his evidence did not form part of the CEA notice.
In Dr Wright’s Opening Skeleton Argument, the deposition is described as supplying evidence of Don Lynam’s “knowledge of, and involvement in, early work on Bitcoin, including their review of precursors or drafts of the White Paper and running nodes for initial testing of the Bitcoin software and code”.
Very little of the deposition of Mr Don Lynam is relevant to this Identity Issue which I have to decide. That is largely because Ira Kleiman brought his claim on the premise that Dr Wright had been involved in creating the Bitcoin system (as Dr Wright had told the Kleiman family in 2014). As a result, nobody in that case had any wish or incentive to test Mr Lynam’s statement that he saw a copy of the Bitcoin White Paper. Much of the questioning was directed to whether Dave Kleiman was involved in the creation of Bitcoin.
In his evidence in chief in his deposition, he gave some evidence of the familial influences on Dr Wright as he was growing up. Mr Don Lynam gave an account of being close to Dr Wright and regularly discussing his work in the mid-2000s. He spoke of Dr Wright’s interests in mathematics, cryptography and internet security, describing him as one of the top three in the world in terms of his cryptography qualifications. Mr Don Lynam described Dr Wright’s work for Centrebet as security, but for Lasseter’s Casino he said Dr Wright developed what he understood to be the world’s first token system enabling global gambling, internet gambling, using all fiat currencies ‘so basically doing the same type of thing as Bitcoin’. Mr Don Lynam said he believed the Lasseter’s system ‘was the precursor of Bitcoin’.
He was asked by Dr Wright’s lawyer if he was familiar with the Bitcoin White Paper, to which he answered that he had “received the advance and pretty rough copy of it in 2008”. He said ‘Craig sent me a copy for my review but it was far too technical for me and also was poorly written’. He said it was ‘way above me technically’. He didn’t think the draft paper was headed Bitcoin but said it was ‘clearly to be a digital monetary system’. He said he had ‘no doubt in his mind that that was the precursor because it had the same content as the paper that came out or very similar content.’ He thought it was the natural flow-on from some of the work that Dr Wright been doing over the years, the mathematics and the cryptography and he had been playing about with other digital currency systems which existed earlier than that and the fact that he was working with banks and large accounting systems.
In response to a leading question from Dr Wright’s lawyer, he confirmed that he had run a node for Dr Wright after the release of the Bitcoin system and that doing so had caused his brand-new computer to become very hot and noisy, adding to his electricity bill. When cross-examined by Mr Kleiman’s lawyer, Mr Don Lynam said that he could not remember how he had received the paper. He said that he had not attempted to edit it.
The contemporaneous material in disclosure paints a different picture. An email in May 2008 provides a family update about Dr Wright’s LLM qualification. Another, from December 2008, is titled “Pop’s Service Records” and provides another update about Dr Wright’s newest qualifications with a note that “the farm is going well”. Neither of these mentions anything relating to Bitcoin at all. The emails do not suggest any relationship of regular contact and sharing research, but a distant relationship of occasional updates.
There is nothing further until 2019, when Mr Don Lynam was being asked to supply an account for the Kleiman case. Mr Lynam wrote to Dr Wright {L15/209/2}, making clear that Dr Wright had “advised” Mr Lynam of what the evidence was to be: “Memory is a bit foggy of my playing to link as part of the network in the way that you advised”. Mr Lynam at that stage was unsure of the year Dr Wright supposedly told him of his invention (“since you emailed me in 2007/8/9 about your new currency invention”).
Dr Wright responded to the effect that he may be able to assist Mr Lynam to trace the coins represented by any early Bitcoin mining. Shortly afterwards, Dr Wright’s lawyers evidently suggested the same thing, because Mr Lynam later wrote: “The lady lawyer said that they were valuable now as motivation to search” {L15/322/3}.
Following this prompting and the promise of value, Mr Lynam appears gradually to have improved his account to prepare for his deposition. By 10 September 2019, he began describing more detail in an email, offering a narrative to Dr Wright for comment (“Is this all some sort of fantasy in my mind or did this really happen? My recollection (or dream??) is that you set me up to mine Bitcoin...”) {L15/322/3}. According to what he later said in his deposition, he “went back researching” for references to Mr Kleiman on the internet {{E/16/32-33} at 33 line 21}; he bought books about Satoshi Nakamoto {{E/16/79} at line 11}; he discussed his deposition with Dr Wright’s mother and joined Twitter for the first time specifically to follow what was happening with Dr Wright {E/16/81}. He continued researching even up to the week before his deposition {E/16/75} - {E/16/76}.
By the time of his deposition, Mr Don Lynam (then aged nearly 80 years) no longer had difficulty recalling the dates and events. And he was no longer unsure as to whether the year of Dr Wright discussing his supposed invention was 2007, 2008 or 2009.
Had Mr Lynam been called to give evidence in this case, it would have been possible to investigate why his memory worked in reverse, becoming clearer as the weeks progressed even though months earlier the details had seemed “foggy”, a “dream”, “some sort of fantasy”. As COPA submitted, there is good reason to doubt the accuracy of what he had come to believe, having been “advised” by Dr Wright of the facts he was required to state, “motivated” to search for what could be “valuable” to him, and pointed by Dr Wright’s mother to follow the social media narrative that Dr Wright was posting during that time.
As for the one point on which Dr Wright really seeks to place heavy reliance (i.e. Mr Don Lynam’s supposed sight of a draft of the Bitcoin White Paper), Mr Don Lynam and Dr Wright diverge on the detail. In particular, Dr Wright has insisted at various times that his uncle actively edited the draft, as a result of which he (Dr Wright) considered his uncle a central contributor to Bitcoin. By contrast, in his Kleiman deposition, Mr Don Lynam said that it was “way above [him] technically” and that he had not edited it, stressing that he had actively decided not to edit it {E/16/61 and the following pages}. In summary, and with the relevant quotations:
In his deposition in the Kleiman proceedings, Dr Wright said that “Dave helped me edit part of the White Paper, as with other people, including Doug [Don] Lynam, some of my other family...” {L16/267/22 at internal p85, l.12}.
By contrast, Mr Don Lynam said that he “did not attempt to edit the paper” and that if someone said that he had edited it, “that would be incorrect” {{E/16/62} at line 21 to {E/16/64} at line 7}.
Mr Don Lynam also made clear that he did not have “any technical input into establishing or operating” the Bitcoin system {E/16/64}. This is starkly in contrast to Dr Wright’s contorted story that Mr Don Lynam was “one of the three people behind Bitcoin” {Day6/129:7} - {Day6/132:22}.
It is also difficult to reconcile Mr Don Lynam’s evidence of being made fully aware of Dr Wright’s digital currency project and the evidence given by his son Max Lynam, which (as discussed above) was that he first became aware of the project several years later and that he was only aware of the family running an “unknown bit of code” for Dr Wright (which he said was not unusual in their family).
Finally, the detail given by Mr Don Lynam of his new computer becoming hot and noisy (and costing more in electricity) as a result of running the Bitcoin code is not plausible, given the expert evidence about the early Bitcoin mining. However, it does chime with Dr Wright’s false understanding of early Bitcoin mining.
I have little doubt that Mr Don Lynam wanted to believe the best of his nephew but also that he had been carefully prepared for his evidence in his Kleiman deposition. In all the circumstances, I conclude that his account was made up. Accordingly, the extracts from his Kleiman deposition carry no weight at all.
The transcript of Mr Gavin Andresen’s deposition in the Kleiman case covers some 440 pages (including the indices) with only very few passages highlighted. He considered Satoshi to be in the top 10% of all the programmers he had interacted with (he put himself in the same category) and believed him to be a brilliant programmer. He had looked at the original Bitcoin code (in C++) and gained the impression that a small number of people, possibly one, wrote it because it was dense with few comments – i.e. the code did not include much explanation as to what the code was doing, unlike in a large programming project where it is necessary to co-ordinate among multiple people.
Mr Neville Sinclair worked with Dr Wright at BDO from 2006. He was the audit partner in charge of signing off on financial statements. He described Dr Wright as a senior manager in the IT division of BDO and worked with a team in that division to support the general audit area in relation to IT, security and controls. He described Dr Wright’s technical skills as extraordinary, particularly in identifying potential threats for clients but in terms of his personal skills, he was very direct which sometimes caused a little bit of friction.
Mr Sinclair said Dr Wright was very keen on how clients could better improve their security systems, by better logging of transactions and the holding of data. He recalled something drawn by Dr Wright as ‘somewhat similar to what we’d currently look at in terms of the description of the blockchain’ but added it wasn’t referred to in that context in that sense.
Mr Sinclair had further occasional contact with Dr Wright after Dr Wright had left BDO at the end of 2008. One contact seems to have been related to possible support for unspecified systems which Dr Wright was developing. Somewhat later in 2011, Dr Wright told him a bit more about what he was doing with some of our (i.e. BDO) clients, and gave him a circular coin with the Bitcoin symbol on it – that was the first time Dr Wright had mentioned Bitcoin to Mr Sinclair.
Ultimately his evidence was that having seen Dr Wright work in IT systems and from a couple of occasions where he was able to ‘oversight’ what he was doing, Mr Sinclair said there was ‘a high probability’ that he would be able to do what he was claiming to do with Bitcoin and the blockchain technology. Mr Sinclair also spoke of a conference on 23rd November 2017 on IT security and banking systems. He said the day before an article had been published about Dr Wright being involved with Bitcoin and being the author of that system. He said quite a few of the people there who knew him were in agreement that most likely he would be the likely candidate to have developed the Bitcoin system.
COPA sought to call Mr Sinclair for cross-examination but he is out of the jurisdiction and would not agree to be cross-examined. I agree with COPA that his account as recorded in the transcript provides no support to Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi.