The animations
Apparently unbeknownst to Dr Wright, the alterations he made to the White Paper LaTeX Files between 17:29 on 17 November 2023 and 17:07 on 24 November 2023 were recorded by Overleaf and are now available in the chunks.json files. From those data, the Developers created the two animations at {L21/12} and {L21/13}. The former is set against a blank background, the latter against the control version of the March 2009 Bitcoin White Paper.
I agree that the animations produced by the Developers illustrating the output of those alterations show the process by which Dr Wright forged the White Paper LaTeX Files in real time. They are the digital equivalent of a video capturing Dr Wright in the act of forgery.
The following information emerges from the animations themselves:
The first frame of the animation (which is derived from the first version of the BitcoinSN.tex file, which was in turn drawn from TC8.tex: see paragraph 449 above) shows that Dr Wright had managed to produce a reasonable approximation of the first page of the Bitcoin White Paper. Even that first page was far from perfect, and it was certainly not an “exact replica”. However, it may have been sufficiently similar for Dr Wright to try to persuade Shoosmiths that the document was of some probative value. I agree the rest of the document was a mess.
Over the course of the next few hours, Dr Wright focussed his attention on making adjustments to the text of the first page of the White Paper LaTeX Files. He then proceeded to make adjustments to the remaining pages in a broadly sequential order.
The process was extremely hit-and-miss. For example, at about 14:21 on 18 November 2023, Dr Wright made a change to the formatting of the headings by introducing a “stretchtitle” command which caused them to jump to unnatural sizes {see row 535 at {L21/5}}. But more generally the blank-background version of the animation shows the stretching and shrinking of spaces between words and knock-on effects for line-breaks, page breaks and so on.
Dr Wright also had to play with the placement of the images in the Bitcoin White Paper. Initially, the images in BitcoinSN.tex were mostly comprised of png images (though Image1 was based on the importation of the Image1.tex file from an Images subfolder). Dr Wright gradually replaced those image files with pdf images that he had created from those image.tex files, that he effectively had to drag into place {In {L21/5}, the replacement of the image.tex files can be seen for Image1 at Row 498, for Image2 at Row 703, for Image3 at Row824, for Image4 at Row 1075, for Image5 at Row 1073, for Image6 at Row 1066 and for Image7 at Row 1064}. The effective dragging and dropping of image 1 can be seen in the blank-background version of the animation from Rows 625 to 679 (each frame in the animation can be advanced individually by using the right-arrow key on a keyboard).
In short, the process was not one in which “minor corrections” were being made to put right known “typographical errors” in the Bitcoin White Paper (as had been stated twice by Shoosmiths on instructions from Dr Wright {Shoosmiths’ letter dated 13 December 2023 at [3.1] {AB-A/2/67} and Shoosmiths’ letter dated 29 December 2023 at [3] {AB-A/2/141}}).
Instead what the animations illustrate is that Dr Wright was trying to get his White Paper LaTeX files to fit the formatting of the Bitcoin White Paper. He was literally reverse-engineering the White Paper LaTeX Files from the Bitcoin White Paper. That was the very process that on 1 December 2023 he had sworn (in support of his application of that date) was “practically infeasible”.
Perhaps appreciating the impossibility of the “minor corrections” explanation formerly provided, when the unredacted chunks.json files were produced to COPA and the Developers on 16 February 2024, Dr Wright instructed Shoosmiths that {Shoosmiths’ letter dated 16 February 2024 at [14] {M/3/16}}:
“Dr Wright did edit the code in the intervening years for personal experimentation and to make corrections and improvements, and for the purposes of the demonstrations referred to above, and that Dr Wright then sought to undo the changes to the LaTeX code he had made since publication of the Bitcoin White Paper in order to put the code into the form that would compile the Bitcoin White Paper”.
That explanation is untenable in light of the changes recorded in the chunks.json and visible in the animations. It is absurd to suggest that the process of continual, iterative change and adjustment demonstrated through the animations represents the “undoing” of changes made previously. Still less is it tenable that the changes were made during demonstrations.
Dr Wright emphasised the “I was giving demonstrations” explanation in his oral evidence, as for example in the following passages on Day 15:
“125: 9 Q. We're going to come to the changes in a minute and we're
10 going to come to the demonstrations in a minute, but the
11 changes that you made to the BitcoinSN.tex file of
12 the Maths (OLD) project and then to the main tex file of
13 the Bitcoin project included changes which were designed
14 to make the text of your LaTeX file more closely
15 resemble the formatting of the Bitcoin White Paper;
16 correct?
17 A. No, not at all. The demonstrations were to show how
18 the differences were. I'd actually already told my
19 solicitors about it going back to October.
20 Q. We can see, and we're going to go through some of this
21 but hopefully fairly briskly, that you were adjusting
22 the size of the spaceskip commands; do you agree?
23 A. Yes. Like I was saying, you demonstrate how the thing
24 works and I put them in and out.
25 Q. And then you were adding and moving "/:"s, right?
126: 1 A. Yes.
2 Q. And that was to try to enable you to try to replicate
3 the line breaks and the spaces between words in
4 the Bitcoin White Paper, wasn't it?
5 A. Not at all. It was actually putting things back to
6 demonstrate what it is without it and how these things
7 work.”
“127: 5 Now, what that animation shows is that you were
6 moving and adjusting text, right?
7 A. Yes, that was part of capturing and what I was
8 demonstrating. The original was demonstrated to my
9 solicitors at my home before any of this happened.
10 Q. And we can see that, generally, the changes started on
11 page 1 and continued down the document, right?
12 A. Oh, as I made each of the change, it's not the whole
13 document changes. To demonstrate what the different
14 commands do, I had to actually put them in.”
“132:11 Q. Were you very familiar with LaTeX before you were doing
12 this?
13 A. I know LaTeX. I don't -- I'm not an academic, I don't
14 teach it, so I don't know all the terminology.
15 Q. Because there seemed to be a lot of faffing around with
16 LaTeX in your adjustments, which looked like somebody
17 learning how to do it on the go?
18 A. No, it's demonstrating the differences. Like I said, if
19 you make one small change in any of those values, it
20 significantly changes everything in the line and
21 the only way to demonstrate that is to show it.”
I agree that Dr Wright’s “demonstrations” excuse is demonstrably false. The period of the demonstrations to Shoosmiths is illustrated in the animations by changing the background colour to red. It occupies just 4 frames of the animations. Dr Wright was not otherwise demonstrating anything to anybody. He was trying to work out what adjustments he might make to the LaTeX code to get his text and images to fit the layout of the Bitcoin White Paper.
With that in mind it is useful to turn to Dr Wright’s evidence about the text, images and other commands in the LaTeX code.