Trial started this week in the UK High Court of COPA’s claim, in which it will seek to demonstrate once and for all that Dr Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, the author of the bitcoin whitepaper.
As COPA’s advocate said to the Court on day one of trial, “Our case is that Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto is a brazen lie, an elaborate false narrative supported by forgery on an industrial scale.”
Over the course of the trial, COPA will point to elements of Dr Wright’s conduct which stray into the realm of farce - including that he used Chat GPT to forge documents, submitted handwritten notes that purport to predate the whitepaper by referring to technologies that didn’t exist at that time, and electronic documents that show extensive meddling with metadata all the way up until the months before trial. On day two of trial, COPA showed the Court a large number of the documents Dr Wright relies on to prove he is Satoshi which its expert evidence shows have been manipulated. For many of those documents, Dr Wright’s own documents forensics expert, Dr Placks, had also confirmed in advance of trial that the documents were manipulated. Faced with those findings, Dr Wright surprised the Court during cross-examination by stating that his own expert was not suitably qualified in IT forensics. He stated that he considered Dr Placks (the expert that he had instructed) to be a psychologist rather than an information security specialist and called into question his independence and competence.
Over the course of the trial, COPA will show:
- The use of false and forged documents produced by Dr Wright
- That Dr Wright has failed to supply any evidence which might support his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto
- The fact that Dr Wright’s account is full of inconsistent and implausible narratives. Not only has Dr Wright’s own story changed, but it also conflicts with reliable evidence and established fact.
The case documents can be found here. To learn more about the case, please contact press[AT]opencrypto.org.