This week is closing arguments in the seminal COPA v Craig Wright trial. The objective is to prove, once and for all, that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. On March 12, as part of closing statements, COPA outlined a number of important reasons why Dr Wright simply cannot be Satoshi Nakamoto. These points, outlined below, come in addition to a large number of arguments focusing on Wright’s fraud and forgeries ‘on an industrial scale’.

Here’s the compendium of reasons why Wright is simply not Satoshi Nakamoto:

  1. The Bitcoin White Paper. The Bitcoin White Paper was produced in OpenOffice, not in LaTeX. The real Satoshi would know that. Dr Wright has insisted that it was produced in LaTeX and has tried in vain to support the story with false documents.

  2. The exchange with Adam Back. The real Satoshi would know that in response to Satoshi’s August 2008 approach, Adam Back was not dismissive of the Bitcoin concept and did not say it would fail. Dr Wright has insisted otherwise, yet his story has been shown to be false by Adam Back’s own emails.

  3. The influence of Wei Dai’s work on Satoshi. The real Satoshi first discovered Wei Dai’s b-money proposal in August 2008, as is clear from the now-disclosed Adam Back and Satoshi email correspondence. Dr Wright, by contrast, has claimed to have been captivated by Wei Dai’s work since the late 1990s. Dr. Wright has compounded this by telling a series of lies about work he supposedly did with Professor Wrightson, who he says pointed him to work by Wei Dai, including a paper which Wei Dai did not in fact write.

  4. The Satoshi PGP key. The real Satoshi would know that the PGP, first of all, had been created, posted and used before 2011; that its primary function was as a signing key; and that it wasn’t restricted in some way to a Vistomail account. Dr Wright’s various inconsistent accounts about the PGP key only go to show that he’s not the person who generated it.

  5. The Bitcoin Code. The real Satoshi would know the code they wrote, what the CheckBlock function did, that the CheckBlockHeader wasn’t a function that existed in 2013, and what an unsigned integer is. During trial, Dr Wright showed he didn’t know any of this.

  6. Upload.ae. The real Satoshi would know that the site from which the White Paper was made available was a free file hosting service owned and operated from Dubai and not, as Dr Wright has said, a secondary server operated by him from Melbourne.

  7. Patch Tuesday. The real Satoshi would know that the Bitcoin System did not crash as a result of patches issued by Microsoft on Patch Tuesday in January 2009. Dr Wright’s series of false stories about Patch Tuesday provides further evidence that he is not Satoshi.

  8. Mining requirements. The real Satoshi would know that the early operation of the Bitcoin System didn’t require more than 70 computers or cost $11,000 per month to run in electricity costs. Dr Wright’s account of his 2009 mining operations only reveals that he’s not Satoshi and wasn’t mining at that point.

  9. Bitcoin transactions. The real Satoshi would know that, contrary to Dr Wright’s claims, Satoshi did not send Bitcoin to Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn. In addition, the real Satoshi would be able to correctly name a person to whom they transferred Bitcoin, in addition to the few names known publicly, for example Nick Bohm, whose name wasn’t public. And if, as Dr Wright claimed, Satoshi had sent Bitcoin to a hundred people not already known, then the real Satoshi would have been able to name at least one of them.

  10. The Genesis Block. The real Satoshi would not make the serious and obvious mistake of claiming that there isn’t a public key associated with the Coinbase transaction for the Genesis Block. Yet that is the mistake Dr Wright made in his statements.

  11. The Satoshi cryptocurrency post. The real Satoshi would know that Satoshi, and not Martti Malmi, wrote the cryptocurrency post in July 2010. The real Satoshi would certainly not have gone on insisting the opposite in the face of clear evidence to the contrary, as Dr Wright did.

  12. The transfer to GitHub. The real Satoshi would have known that in 2010 to 2011, Satoshi took no objection to Gavin Andresen using GitHub in place of SourceForge in connection with the Bitcoin System. Satoshi would also have known that Vladimir van der Laan had nothing to do with the transfer, and that there wasn’t a shred of evidence to suggest he had. Dr Wright’s false accounts on those points mark him out as not being Satoshi.

As Jonathan Hough KC stated, after all the evidence shared in this remarkable trial, it is now clearer than ever – clear beyond any doubt – that Dr Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto.