Mr Joost Andrae {C/1/1} – Mr Andrae is a software engineer who contributed to the OpenOffice.org project. He gave evidence on Open Office 2.4.0 being released on 26 March 2008, which supports a conclusion that one of the Reliance Documents is not authentic to its suggested date. {See Madden 1 Appendix PM23}.

Ms Hilary Pearson {C/3/1} – Ms Pearson is a former partner (retiring in 2015) at Bird & Bird who was a pioneer in writing about IT law. She authored two papers, “Liability of Internet Service Providers” from 1996 and “Intellectual Property and the Internet: A Comparison of UK and US Law” from 1998. She exhibited a comparison made between her work and Dr Wright’s LLM dissertation which shows the extent of Dr Wright’s plagiarism and copyright infringement of her work {D/490/2}. As was common ground at the hearing of 12 October 2023, this evidence is admissible. I consider it in relation to Dr Wright’s credibility.

Professor Daniel Bernstein {C/4/1} – Professor Bernstein is a cryptographer and professor at the University of Illinois. He is a member of the team that jointly developed the digital signature scheme known as “EdDSA” and he recounts that term being coined in February to April 2011 and first used publicly in July 2011. Dr Wright had put forward a Reliance Document (ID_004009) {L1/115/1} which appeared to be a set of manuscript notes dating from prior to the release of Bitcoin and which contained reference to EdDSA. After receiving Professor Bernstein’s evidence, Dr Wright has claimed that some of the notes (including the reference to EdDSA) were written in or after 2011 (an account which has its own difficulties which I discuss later).

Mr Rory Cellan-Jones {C/5/1} – Mr Cellan-Jones is a technology journalist who worked as such for the BBC for many years. He was involved in the 2016 signing sessions, which he addressed in his evidence. He was told that Dr Wright could prove he was Satoshi and in reliance on that he transferred bitcoin on 4 May 2016 to the Bitcoin address that Satoshi used for the first transaction, on the understanding that Dr Wright would send it back. To date Mr Cellan-Jones has not received his bitcoin back.

In the course of his answers in cross-examination, Dr Wright accused Mr Cellan-Jones and the BBC of being biased and, more importantly, of ‘splicing’ together various answers on film to create, effectively, a false record of the signing session which Dr Wright undertook with Mr Cellan-Jones. It is understandable that Mr Cellan-Jones would feel aggrieved at these allegations and would want the opportunity to address them. Discussions between the parties led to an agreement that in submissions, Counsel for Dr Wright would not rely upon or repeat any of the allegations made in evidence by Dr Wright against Mr Cellan-Jones.

Whilst this arrangement was procedurally efficient for this Trial, the effect is capable of being misunderstood. For this reason, I wish to make it clear that I completely reject Dr Wright’s spurious allegations about Mr Cellan-Jones and the BBC and I accept the evidence in Mr Cellan-Jones’ written statement in its entirety.

Mr Dustin Trammell {C/7/1} – Mr Trammell is an Information Security Research Scientist who corresponded with Satoshi in January 2009. He gave evidence of his correspondence with Satoshi and exhibited it. He denied a claim Dr Wright made in his evidence in the Granath proceedings that Dr Wright as Satoshi shared Bitcoin code with him.

Mr John Hudson {C/8/1} – Mr Hudson is the lead designer of the font Nirmala UI and confirmed it was not publicly available until March 2012 at the earliest. This is relevant to a number of Mr Madden’s findings that documents of Dr Wright are not authentic to their suggested dates and have been backdated.

Mr Nicholas Bohm {C/10/1} – Mr Bohm was a retired solicitor who corresponded with Satoshi shortly after the release of Bitcoin in January 2009. Mr Bohm provided evidence of his email communications with Satoshi that had not previously been made public (and to which Dr Wright had never referred). He has also provided a version of the White Paper that he downloaded in January 2009, which Mr Madden authenticated and which has been used in the evidence as a control copy. Mr Bohm sadly died just before the Trial commenced.

Mr Ben Ford {C/11/1} – Mr Ford is the director of a company trading as DataStation who gives evidence about a DataStation notepad which is one of Dr Wright’s Reliance Documents (ID_004018). This presents as being a set of pre-release development notes on the Bitcoin concept. Mr Ford explained that the notepad was not printed until 22 May 2012. Dr Wright reacted to this evidence in his Chain of Custody schedule by saying that the notes were written in 2011 / 2012. Again, this account has its own difficulties which I discuss further below

Professor John MacFarlane {C/19/1} – Professor MacFarlane is a professor of Philosophy who has designed his own software tools, one of which is pandoc (a universal document converter). He stated that templates were only added to it in 2010, with the default LaTeX template being added in 2017. It cannot therefore have been used in 2006 when it features in documents of Dr Wright (from the BDO Drive) dated to that period.

Professor Richard Gerlach {C/20.1/1} – Professor Gerlach is now a professor of Business Analytics, but was in 2005 a lecturer in statistics at the University of Newcastle, where Dr Wright studied for an MStat course. He gave evidence that various features of a statistics assignment document in Dr Wright’s disclosure are anomalous.