The next point taken is that, particularly in relation to the allegations concerning Dr Wright’s original disclosure, Dr Wright never suggested that his original Primary Reliance Documents were not accessed or edited by anyone since the publication of the Bitcoin White Paper, such that they could be treated as a ‘time capsule’. It is further contended that ‘Indeed, the opposite was clear from Dr Wright’s own Chain of Custody of Reliance Documents schedule’ along with a footnote: ‘13 October 2023 {K/11/1}. Although the custody details provided by Dr Wright in this document were provided after service of Madden 1, COPA is not understood to have challenged them and they are consistent with Dr Wright’s original 11 May 2023 Chain of Custody schedule at {M/1/778}, which also explained that the documents had been stored on third party devices.’ It is also said that Dr Wright re-emphasised this point during his oral evidence at {Day 3/16/5} to {Day 3/16/21} and {Day 3/53/4}. On this basis, the submission is made that ‘evidence that his documents were accessed or even edited after the publication of the Bitcoin White Paper should not, by itself, lead the Court to conclude that they have been deliberately forged by Dr Wright.’ (emphasis added).

It is true that Dr Wright did emphasise this point in his oral evidence. However, by that point, Dr Wright was looking for ways to explain away the anomalies identified by the experts as indicative of forgery. Indeed, this point involves a certain amount of re-writing of history. I have reviewed his original Chain of Custody Schedule {M/1/778-799, letter of 11 May 2023 from Ontier} and it is true that Dr Wright repeatedly says that he was not the owner of a particular hard drive or laptop. Instead, (most frequently) Lynn Wright or one of the companies which he owned (DeMorgan) is identified as the owner. The vast majority of the documents are identified as ‘Drafted by Dr Wright’ or ‘Drafted by Dr Wright, typed by Lynn Wright’. If these were ‘third party devices’, they were third parties very closely associated with Dr Wright, and he is identified as the author and custodian for most of the documents. Furthermore, at that stage I understand that requests for intermediate custodian information were rejected as disproportionate.

The Chain of Custody information related to documents which Dr Wright had identified as his Primary Reliance Documents {K/5, Ontier letter of 4 April 2023} i.e. the documents on which he primarily relied to substantiate his claim to be Satoshi. Against that backdrop, it is in my view clear that, in the original Chain of Custody information, Dr Wright was representing each of these documents to be genuine and authentic, a representation also made by way of his production of these documents on disclosure, and his signed Disclosure Certificate. No qualification was hinted at, either on disclosure or in the Chain of Custody information.

It might be said that, at that stage, Dr Wright had no reason to investigate whether any changes had been made to his documents dating from 2007/2008/2009, especially since many of the changes relied upon by COPA and their experts as indicating forgery lay in metadata, changes which one would not see if simply opening a document to review its content (e.g. to confirm it was a draft of the Bitcoin White Paper).

Almost all of his Primary Reliance Documents were the subject of COPA’s List of Challenged Documents {K/8, 30 May 2023}, along with almost all of the documents he produced on disclosure. Many documents were alleged to have been altered. For others, COPA clearly reserved their position on the basis that ‘Context unknown to the Claimant, pending chain of custody and provision of further explanation.’

From that point, at the very least, Dr Wright must have been well aware that the authenticity of a large number of his documents, including nearly all of his Primary Reliance Documents, was challenged.

The second set of Chain of Custody information {Schedule at K/11, 13 October 2023} was long and confusing. Much fuller information was provided. Overall this document represented a significant change in tack. Now it was suggested that numerous unnamed staff members might have altered documents. With the benefit of hindsight, it can be seen that Dr Wright laid the foundations for a number of his answers to the forgery allegations which were introduced later. These include: (i) identifying others as the owner of or responsible for particular data sources, including Lynn Wright, Ramona Ang, DeMorgan, Hotwire etc. and nChain; (ii) documents said to be drafted in Open Office and LaTeX, (iii) his inability to comment on the authenticity of a document because e.g. ‘many parties had access to it or copied it from the shared servers from 2002 onwards’ and ‘upwards of 70 staff members from the various companies would have had access to this document on the respective companies’ ‘shared server’.

Overall, the Chain of Custody Schedule is internally inconsistent and unreliable, as demonstrated by Madden2 and Appendices PM43 and PM44. It also adopts a position which is at odds with previous chain of custody information (which simply presented Dr Wright as author and custodian).

Overall, the possibility of documents being accessed by other staff members cannot, in my judgment, account for all the indicia of forgery identified by the experts and which are set out in the various sections in the Appendix. However, this point has been taken into account in my assessments in the Appendix, to the extent appropriate.

More generally, the service of Madden1 can be seen as a watershed date in the procedural history of this case. It was Mr Madden’s exhaustive and detailed unpicking of Dr Wright’s Reliance Documents which gave rise to so many of Dr Wright’s changes in story. In addition to the second set of Chain of Custody information, this also led to (a) the Schedule of White Paper versions (CSW5), which suggested that many of the original Reliance Documents could have been changed by others; (b) his “discovery” of the new documents on the BDO Drive and on his Overleaf account; and (c) the complex explanation of his operating systems in Wright9 (Appendix A) and Wright10, which suggested that features of those systems could account for apparent signs of document alteration and tampering.