A judge in the UK High Court has declared that Australian computer scientist Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, marking the end of a years-long debate.
“The evidence is overwhelming,” said Justice James Mellor, delivering a surprise ruling at the close of the trial. “First, that Dr. Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper. Second, Dr. Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period 2008 to 2011. Third, Dr. Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin system. And, fourth, he is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin software,” he said.
The ruling brings to a close a six-week trial, in which the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of crypto companies, asked the court to declare that Wright is not Satoshi on the basis that he had allegedly fabricated his evidence and contorted his story repeatedly as new inconsistencies came to light. “After all the evidence in this remarkable trial, it is clear beyond doubt that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto,” claimed Jonathan Hough, legal counsel for COPA, as he began his closing submissions on Tuesday. “Wright has lied, and lied, and lied.”
In the last five years, Wright has used his claim to be the creator of Bitcoin to bring multiple lawsuits of his own against developers and other parties he has accused of violating his intellectual property rights. COPA is seeking an injunction that would prevent Wright from further brandishing the claim. “We are seeking to enjoin Dr. Wright from ever claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto again and in doing so avoid further litigation terror campaigns,” says a COPA spokesperson, who asked to remain nameless for fear of legal retaliation from Wright.
The parties will have to wait a month or more for a formal judgement to be published, detailing the specific findings and forms of relief Wright will be required to submit to. The judgement will “be ready when it’s ready and not before,” said Mellor.
Until the snap ruling, the trial appeared as if it would end less with a bang than a whimper. The courtroom, packed out for the opening week, was by the end only half-full. One onlooker, who had in the waiting area introduced himself as Satoshi Nakamoto, nodded off to sleep in the public gallery, chin resting on chest. Not even Wright was in attendance.
In a closing address that ran for six and a half hours, Hough drove home the extent and degree of Wright’s alleged acts of forgery, his failure to provide incontrovertible proof of his Satoshi claim, and the inconsistencies in his telling of the Bitcoin origin story.
To illustrate its point, COPA homed in on a handful of specific instances of alleged forgery. That included one forgery Wright is said to have committed mid-trial, whereby he allegedly fabricated an email between himself and his previous legal representatives in an attempt to paper over a contradiction in his previous evidence. In the witness box, Wright claimed the email was spoofed by a third party trying to undermine him. But Hough rejected the explanation, calling it a “parody.” The incident “speaks volumes about Dr. Wright’s preparedness to lie, forge documents in support of his lies, then add ever more outlandish lies in support of the coverup,” Hough told the court.
The allegations of forgery are founded on a series of reports compiled by an expert in forensic document analysis nominated by COPA, who analyzed the various materials on which Wright’s claim depends. The reports identified hundreds of alleged instances of forgery and tampering of various flavors, and were largely corroborated by two experts nominated by Wright. In closing, Hough emphasized Wright’s decision not to call his own experts for questioning, meaning their unflattering testimony must be taken at face value by the court.
Hough also pointed to previously unpublished communications between Satoshi and their early collaborators, which COPA says demonstrate clear discrepancies in Wright’s story. Wright has claimed that Bitcoin was profoundly influenced by the work of cryptographer Wei Dai; COPA says the emails show Satoshi became aware of Dai after having already drafted the Bitcoin white paper. Wright has long said that Bitcoin should not be described as a “cryptocurrency”; COPA says the emails show Satoshi embraced the term. Wright’s account is “so riddled with dishonest features it can confidently be dismissed as a fiction,” Hough claimed.
Throughout his stint in the witness box, Wright had made repeated allegations about the independence and objectivity of COPA’s forensic expert. In his closing arguments, Wright’s counsel, Anthony Grabiner, argued that the judge should disregard all of the evidence submitted by COPA’s forensic document analysis expert, citing the “unorthodox” way their reports had been produced. COPA’s legal representatives had assisted in the composition of the reports in a highly unusual fashion, Grabiner claimed, thus the expert had become “part of the team” and their independence compromised.
In its closing rebuttal, COPA rejected the idea that its expert was compromised. The attack on the expert’s credibility, claimed Hough, was a clear example of “playing the man when you manifestly cannot play the ball.”
Grabiner also turned to a series of private meetings in 2016 in which Wright was able to convince Gavin Andresen, an early contributor to Bitcoin’s underlying software, and Jon Matonis, former director of the Bitcoin Foundation, that he possessed the private credentials associated with known Satoshi transactions. Although Andresen has since walked back his support for Wright’s claims in a blog post, Grabiner called these so-called signing sessions “a key part of the case for Dr. Wright.” COPA counters that the signing sessions were “fixed or in some devious way subverted by Dr. Wright,” said Grabiner. “But the expert evidence focuses exclusively and speculatively on the theoretical possibility of the signing sessions being subverted.”
Grabiner reserved his final words to argue against the specific relief requested by COPA, beyond the findings that will be documented in the judgment. He wielded various legal precedents and technicalities to object to a formal declaration that Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin white paper, a matter he described as “purely academic.” Grabiner objected to an injunction restraining Wright from claiming he is Satoshi, meanwhile, on the basis that Wright should be free to “tell anyone who he believes he is,” irrespective of whether the court agrees with him.
Now begins a nervous wait for Wright, for whom there is more at stake than his reputation and ability to carry forward his other litigation. In its closing filing, COPA petitioned for the matter of forgery to be referred to the UK criminal courts. “In putting forward his dishonest claim to be Satoshi and backing it up with a huge number of forged documents, Wright has committed fraud upon the court,” Hough told the judge. If found guilty, Wright could face a fine, imprisonment, or both.
