A bitterly fought court battle over a computer scientist’s claim to be bitcoin’s inventor represented a ‘most serious abuse’ of the High Court’s process, a judge ruled today. In his 230-page judgment in Mr Justice Mellor set out his reasons behind his finding in March in the sixth week of a trial that Dr Craig Wright’s claims were false. The Rolls Building hearing was watched by some 1,100 people around the world.
The case was brought by a group of US software developers seeking a declaration that Wright, an Australian-born entrepreneur resident in the UK, was not ‘Satoshi’, the pseudonymous author of the 2008 white paper which sparked off the trillion-dollar bitcoin phenomenon. Wright’s defence consisted largely of documentary submissions which the judge agreed were forged. On cross-examination, Wright proved to be ‘an extremely slippery witness’, Mellor observed. At one stage the forgeries put his solicitors, City firm Shoosmiths, ‘in an impossible position’, the judge commented.
Among the 47 forgeries found proven in the judgment were documents purporting to be precursors of the seminal 2008 white paper. These were challenged by expert witnesses on the ground that they were written in LaTeX software, which was not available in 2008, and contained ‘evidence of anachronistic metadata’ created by Wright’s ‘attempt to fiddle’ with formatting to resemble Satoshi’s published white paper.
‘Dr Wright lied about these matters (and sought to abuse legal professional privilege) to conceal the fact that the white paper LaTeX Files were a recent creation,’ the judge concluded. ‘Dr Wright’s elaborate attempt to carve an alternative narrative by forging documents in LaTeX mark him as a fraud and his claim in these proceedings as a fraudulent claim.’
The judgment comprehensively backs expert evidence challenging the authenticity of Wright’s oridinal submissions. Attempts to blame unknown ‘bad actors’ for tampering with documents were ‘literally incredible’. On ‘numerous occasions’ Wright also unsuccessfully sought to put the blame for anomalies on his previous legal advisers.
During the trial Wright had attempted to attack expert evidence on forgery on the ground that reports were prepared with the assistance of the claimant’s solicitors, IP specialist Bird & Bird. Finding ‘nothing at all wrong’ in the way the reports were prepared, the judge said ‘I acquit Bird & Bird of any charge that [the expert’s] reports were prepared in an inappropriate manner.
Overall, Wright’s submissions contained no authenticated ‘time capsule’ documents, the judgment found. By contrast COPA’s evidence was ‘cogent and compelling’.
‘Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the court extensively and repeatedly,’ the judgment states.
Stating that the real ‘Satoshi’ would have little difficulty in proving the fact, the judgment highlights Wright’s failure to prove his assertion that he owns ‘genesis blocks’ of bitcoin which would today be worth billions of pounds. Under cross-examination he attempted to explain gaps in his evidence by resorting to ‘technobabble’.
The judge commented that, to judge by his correspondence and writings, the real Satoshi was ‘a calm, knowledgeable, collaborative, precise person with little or no arrogance’, adding ‘I consider it is most unlikely that Satoshi would ever have resorted to litigation against the [software developer parties in the case]’. This was contrasted with Wright’s arrogance and record of serial litigation. ‘It is likely that the real Satoshi would never have set out to prove in litigation that he actually was Satoshi and certainly not in the way that Dr Wright attempted to do so,’ the judge observed.
Injunctive relief will be decided after a form of order hearing following the hand-down.