In his witness evidence Dr Wright had contended that the formatting of the spaces between words in the White Paper LaTeX Files was a form of digital watermark. He implied during his evidence on Day 5 that this was a form of steganography intended to mark him out as the author. If that had been so, it was a surprising oversight for Dr Wright to have omitted to mention the White Paper LaTeX Files in his evidence in Kleiman, McCormack, Granath or prior to October 2023 in this litigation.

Counsel for the Developers suggested that Dr Wright probably happened upon the idea of saying that his attempts to adjust the spacing between words in his White Paper LaTeX files was a digital watermark in the evening of 17 November 2023 after making all of his formatting changes and that he was probably inspired to promote that theory by the fact that his repeated entry of \; and spaceskip commands would otherwise be an obvious sign of forgery. At that point he chose to post mysterious references to watermarking on his Slack channel {M1/2/156}. The times are in EST. Dr Wright suggested that someone else posted this on his behalf, but could not name the culprit: {Day15/122-123}, and then when he had completed his work on the Maths (OLD) project he inserted two comments into BitcoinSN.tex referring to watermarking and steganography {see {L21/16.1/696} and {L21/16.1/698}.

In reality, Dr Wright’s changes to the spaces between words were attempts by him to replicate the spacing of the Bitcoin White Paper, which (as explained below) was a consequence of the justification of the text in OpenOffice 2.4.

An example of Dr Wright’s attempt to fiddle with the formatting was explored in cross-examination, it concerned his use of the spaceskip command ahead of the initial line of text in the abstract of the Bitcoin White Paper. That command was introduced by Dr Wright in Row 345 of Maths (OLD)_chunks {L21/5} and can be seen at {L21/29.1/4}: see the command “\spaceskip=0.3em plus 3.4em minus 0.10em”.

Mr Rosendahl explained that spaceskip is a somewhat arcane LaTeX command {Day5/139-140}. Dr Wright did not seem entirely clear what the figures in its syntax meant {Day15/131-133}. However, he confirmed that the first number represented the base spacing, the second number reflected the amount by which the base spacing could be stretched and the third number represented the amount by which it could be reduced {Day15/133:8-25}.

Having inserted the spaceskip command described above, Dr Wright spent a little over half an hour on 17 November 2023 adjusting its parameters to try to get the spacing of the first line of the abstract to fit. During the course of those changes, he changed the position of the line-break in the text at the end of the first line (as shown by the first purple bar below). The changes (which resulted in the command reading “\spaceskip=0.30em plus 2.0em minus 0.16em”) can be shown as follows {X/61}: