The ‘before’
As Counsel for the Developers submitted, despite the fact that Dr Wright had either given evidence or an account of his authorship of the Bitcoin White Paper no less than four times, he did not mention LaTeX at all until after the service of Madden1 on 1 September 2023.
The four (or more) previous occasions on which one might have expected Dr Wright to have mentioned that he drafted the Bitcoin White Paper using LaTeX, yet no mention of LaTeX was made, are:
when he was deposed, examined-in-chief and cross-examined in the Kleiman proceedings, notwithstanding that he gave evidence about his supposed authorship of the Bitcoin White Paper;
in his lengthy Amended Reply in the libel proceedings brought by Dr Wright against Mr McCormack, which directly addressed the question of whether he wrote the Bitcoin White Paper. On this point, reference was made to (i) Dr Wright’s Amended Reply in those proceedings at paragraphs 13 et seq {L16/342/14} and (ii) that Ontier, who represented Dr Wright in the claim, have subsequently confirmed that Dr Wright did not tell them about the so-called White Paper LaTeX Files: {AB-A/5/10}.
in his lengthy evidence given in Granath in Norway on 14 September 2022, which included evidence about the way in which he had supposedly composed the Bitcoin White Paper from handwritten form to the printed page: see {O2/11/9} (internal transcript pages 29-31); or
in his first witness statement in these proceedings, dated 28 July 2023, notwithstanding that his statement included a 2½ page section {Wright1 [86-99] {E/1/17}} headed “Writing and sharing the White Paper” and purporting to describe the drafting process.
As far as I am aware, the first mention of LaTeX came in Dr Wright’s second Chain of Custody schedule, served on 13 October 2023, followed by a brief mention in Wright4, served 23 October 2023, where, at [6.c] {E/4/5}, he said that the development of the Bitcoin White Paper involved a “complex workflow utilising various software platforms, including LaTeX, OpenOffice and Microsoft Word”. No further detail was provided at that point.
These first mentions of LaTeX came after Madden1, in which Mr Madden had set out detailed evidence of Dr Wright’s manipulation of the metadata of many of the electronic documents on which he primarily relied in support of his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
In his Eighteenth Witness Statement for the PTR, Mr Sherrell of Bird & Bird exhibited a Tweet on 30 September 2023 from Mr Ager-Hanssen in which he set out a screenshot from a report (which he tagged as #faketoshi) which indicated that:
Under a heading ‘Incriminating content of browsing history’ the report referred to ‘The contents of the browsing history file show that Dr Wright has researched topics relating to backdating files and manipulating metadata’ followed by ‘Here are some examples’.
The first example given is under the next heading ‘LaTeX software’. The screenshot included in the report indicates Dr Wright had accessed an online Q&A on TEX asking ‘Was anything in Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin paper compiled in LaTeX?’
Underneath that screenshot, the report continues with this question: ‘The obvious question is: if Dr Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, why would he ask what software he had used when he wrote the White Paper?’.
As Counsel for the Developers observed, at best this would have been a bizarre question for Satoshi to have asked. Counsel also drew attention to the feature of PDF documents compiled from LaTeX code that the PDF file’s internal metadata properties may be defined by the document author. He suggested that would have appeared attractive to a person who wanted to avoid the metadata pitfalls exposed by Madden1.