FT Alphaville was at the beginning of the performance art project called Craig Wright. We are therefore forced to mark the end of what should be (but probably won’t be) his final act.
A British court ruled in March after a month-long trial that Wright was not Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin. The Crypto Open Patent Alliance, an industry group, had filed the case to stop its legal action against Bitcoin developers.
Today the full judgment (PDF) was published, running to 231 pages, with a 150-page appendix covering the many forgeries submitted to the court. The summary on the first page gives a concise overview:
Dr. Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my opinion he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. Both in his written evidence and in the days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am fully satisfied that Dr. Wright lied extensively and repeatedly to the court. Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged that were supposed to support his claim. All of his lies and fake documents supported his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.
Here are a few more highlights.
Wright can’t be Satoshi, Satoshi was cool
Emails and early message board posts related to Satoshi “give the impression of a calm, knowledgeable, cooperative, precise person with little or no arrogance, willing to acknowledge and accept ideas and suggestions from others who have shown interest in Bitcoin.” to implement,” said Judge James Mellor. In the meantime . . .
The picture that Dr. What Wright wrote in his testimony was essentially that he was solely responsible for the creation of Bitcoin, that he was much smarter than everyone else, that anyone who questioned his claim or his evidence was not qualified to do so or simply did it did I don’t understand what he said. In my opinion, the arrogance he displayed contradicted what emerges from Satoshi’s writings. In short, in his writing and his demeanor, Dr. Wright simply doesn’t act like Satoshi and doesn’t behave like Satoshi.
The judge concluded that attempting to legally assert ownership of Bitcoin was a very un-Satoshi move. Congratulations, you played yourself, he doesn’t add.
The judge is done with the crypto chatter
Anyone who has spent time among token traders will be familiar with their cult-like claim that all disagreements are due to ignorance. Judge Mellor doesn’t want to hear it:
I am aware that Dr. Wright will disagree with my findings and this judgment and, true to the form he has shown on numerous occasions during his oral evidence in relation to the expert evidence, he could well claim that I have misunderstood his technical explanations or other aspects I didn’t understand the technology.
Blockchain etc. are “not particularly complex or difficult to understand,” says the judge. But although Wright was given the opportunity to explain himself, he “simply engaged in techno-babble.”
Wright’s method was to insert a kernel of truth into a popcorn bucket of lies, making it nearly “impossible to pin down each lie,” the judge concluded. Exposing every falsehood would be a waste of time because “Wright would simply invent more lies in his attempts to cover up existing lies.”
In the land of the blind. . .
As the judgment states:
It is clear that Dr. Wright has a keen ability to convince people of his technical acumen when they don’t fully understand what he’s talking about. In other words, he can tell a good story.
What was faked?
What wasn’t? This is how the appendix begins:
To avoid presenting essentially the same conclusions 40 times, I can say at the outset that I believe all allegations of forgery have been proven.
One of the more illustrative examples involves the credit card that Wright said purchased the bitcoin.org domain registration in 2008. Wright provided screenshots – supposedly proof of purchase – from 2018, when it was no longer possible to access the card’s records.
When approached about the forgery, Wright said he could not remember how he purchased the domain name and that the screenshots had been sent to him by a now-deceased attorney from a previous case and that they had been sent to the attorney by an anonymous Reddit user.
That didn’t make much sense. Wright said in April 2019 that he could prove the purchase of the domain using credit card details. The mysterious Reddit user didn’t appear to plant the evidence until two months later.
When asked to explain how a Reddit user gained access to his spending information, Wright said the card in the screenshot was canceled in 2005, only to show it was used at Lee Rowan’s Gardenworld in 2009.
And so it continues. Wright “was unable to provide a coherent explanation for the forgeries he uncovered, and yet he could not bring himself to accept that he was responsible for them,” the ruling said.
Being on the spectrum is not an excuse
Wright says he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in 2020. Because of this condition, he was sometimes portrayed in court as a vulnerable witness who acted emotionally and impulsively.
The judge didn’t buy it:
Wright proved to be an extremely sensitive witness. He added a slight caveat to many of the answers. He rarely gave a complete answer and that was intentional – he gave himself an “out” for later. At times he was extremely pedantic. At first I was inclined to give him some leeway because of his ASD, but his pedantry was inconsistent. He was pedantic when it suited him and not when it didn’t.
Wright’s witnesses had some problems
Stefan Matthews, co-founder of blockchain consulting firm nChain, was the last of Wright’s witnesses to be called. nChain had hired Wright as an advisor and its main backer, Canadian businessman Calvin Ayre, once supported Wright’s claim to be Satoshi.
Wright claimed he shared the Bitcoin white paper with Matthews in 2008, a claim the judge rejected. The argument was partially undermined by a WhatsApp message from Matthews to Christen Ager-Hanssen, the former CEO of nChain:
Matthews was clearly of the opinion that Dr. Wright is a fake. On a message in which Dr. Wright was described as the “biggest fake ever”, Mr Matthews replied: “Shit. WTF is wrong with him. Well, at least we have NCH [nChain] something to focus on, it’s not fake.”
A mock trial arranged by Wright’s supporters concluded that he had lied
In September 2023, nChain organized a dress rehearsal trial in which Wright was cross-examined by a criminal defense attorney. The judge assigned to preside over the mock trial found that Wright’s claim that Satoshi was false was false.
Ayre immediately withdrew his support and emailed Wright Call him an idiot. Ager-Hanssen posted the email on Twitter. Wright claimed in court that Ager-Hanssen had conspired with COPA. The judge called this “another lie.”
[checks notes]
Another witness called by Wright’s team was Robert Jenkins, formerly of the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Under cross-examination, Jenkins claimed that Wright showed him a precursor to Bitcoin called Timecoin in 2009 or 2010. This claim was missing from his witness statement and therefore appeared to have been intended “as a bomb to explode”. says the judge.
But when he testified, Jenkins referred to a piece of paper that had the word “Timecoin” written on it. When asked about this, Jenkins said he wrote the note himself during cross-examination “when it was clear to everyone in court that he had not done so.”
Timecoin cannot travel through time
Wright said he received the lost 2008 Timecoin document via email from a “Papa Neema” last September and discovered an identical copy on an old hard drive five days later. Although Neema is based in Nairobi, his emails were stamped with a British time stamp.
The judge concluded that Timecoin was “subsequently created from the Bitcoin white paper and edited to appear to be a prequel work,” and that Wright emailed himself.
Probably not a *master* forger
The “Papa Neema” emails also included some invoices that Wright claimed were created at various times over a four-year period, but all of which said “invoice” rather than “invoice.”
Careful spelling was not Wright’s forte. In technical documents, his “inconsistent and incorrect spelling of the term ‘opcode’ was a small indication that he was stating something that was outside his knowledge or experience,” the judge says. He also regularly misspelled Adam Back, the inventor of Hashcash, an early proto-crypto project mentioned in the Bitcoin white paper Wright supposedly wrote, as Black.
One of Wright’s claims was that if he Was If he forged documents, he would do better. The judge didn’t buy it either.
Wright said in a tweet that he intends to appeal the verdict and also use the opportunity to promote his latest thing:
And how to clarify the matter:
👍
further reading
— He’s not Satoshi, he’s a very naughty boy (FTAV)
– Craig Wright has not been officially “recognized” as Satoshi (FTAV) in any way
– Etc.