The cross-examination of Craig Wright, a computer scientist defending his claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin in court, proceeded fitfully over the course of seven days. In the UK High Court, opposing counsel Jonathan Hough bombarded Wright with examples of what he argued were anomalies that showed Wright had forged or manipulated evidence on which his claim to being the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto depends. He contested them all, weaving a patchwork of justifications whose thread became increasingly difficult to follow.
“This is just another fairy story, isn’t it,” said Hough on Wednesday, losing patience with Wright, from whom he stood opposite in a packed London courtroom. “No, it is not,” Wright replied. It was the ninth hour of a cross-examination that would last more than 30. This type of exchange would repeat over and again: “We’re going round in circles,” said Hough in one instance. “You are simply saying that black is white,” he told Wright, in another.
Wright was being cross-examined as part of a case brought against him by the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, a nonprofit consortium of crypto and tech firms. Since 2016, Wright has claimed to be Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, and filed a raft of intellectual property lawsuits on that basis. To prevent Wright from pursuing further litigation that could intimidate developers into retreating from Bitcoin, COPA is asking the court to declare that he is not Nakamoto.
The ruling will spill over into three related cases, brought by Wright against Bitcoin developers and other parties, the outcome of which will shape the future development of Bitcoin. If the court rules in Wright’s favor, and he subsequently wins his own cases, he would be free to dictate who can work on the Bitcoin codebase and under what terms the system can be used. “In the eyes of the law, [Wright] is asking for ultimate control over the Bitcoin network,” claims a representative of the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit that is funding the defense of Bitcoin developers in a separate lawsuit filed by Wright, who asked to remain nameless for fear of legal retaliation.
On the second day of the trial, Wright’s cross-examination began. The exchange was Kafkaesque in its mazy rate of progress, technical complexity, and disorienting tendency toward digression. Hough and Wright sparred at length over practically every exhibit, contesting the characterization of their contents, relevance to Wright’s claim to Satoshi-hood, signs of tampering, or way they had been introduced into evidence. There was talk of schema files, virtual environments, plug-ins, hex editing, and other technical arcana. It was an attritional dance wherein Hough sought to impress upon the judge the full scope of Wright’s alleged campaign of forgery, and Wright to show that even the most improbable set of coincidences have a reasonable explanation.
The strategy of COPA’s legal team was clear: force Wright to account for each of the hundreds of indications of alleged forgery or inauthenticity claimed by its forensic document analysis expert, who submitted multiple reports to the court ahead of the trial. “The more instances of forgery or fraud that COPA can pin on Dr. Wright, the greater the impact on his overall defense,” says James Marsden, a senior associate at the law firm Dentons.
Among various acts of alleged forgery, Hough charged that Wright backdated documents to make them seem like precursors to the original 2008 Bitcoin white paper; manipulated email communications in support of his claim to be Nakamoto; inserted material post-factum into his academic papers to imply he conceived of Bitcoin long before its release; and used ChatGPT to help create additional forgeries after experts cast doubt over existing materials. The specific discrepancies identified by Hough included anachronistic use of fonts, metadata that implied computer clocks had been manipulated, internal time stamps that contradicted the outward-facing dating of documents, and more.
Hough gave the appearance of trying to construct an exhaustive catalog of discrete pieces of evidence that, combined, painted a picture of fraud “on an industrial scale,” as he put it in his opening arguments.
In some respects, the cross-examination process was less about Wright’s responses, says Lindsay Gledhill, IP partner at law firm Harper James, and more about the performance of Hough. It was “about the barrister’s grinding, relentless list of detail on detail,” she says.
For every anomaly presented by COPA, Wright supplied an explanation. He claimed, variously, that a printing error had caused a misalignment of pixels that gave the appearance of tampering; the complexity of the IT systems used in the editing and storage of documents was not reflected in the testing conducted by the experts; and that his documents may have been altered by staff members in whose custody they had been left. In instances where Wright agreed that a document was inauthentic, he said he had fallen victim to cybersecurity breaches, had never intended to rely on them to support his claim, or implied that documents had been planted by adversaries to undermine him.
A central feature of Wright’s strategy for deflecting the forgery allegations appeared to be to cast doubt on the credibility of the forensic experts. Prior to the start of the trial, experts put forward by both sides had jointly concluded that many of Wright’s documents bear signs of manipulation. In the witness box, Wright claimed that COPA’s expert is “completely biased.” Presented with the unflattering findings of his own experts, Wright declared them “unskilled” or otherwise unqualified, blaming his previous solicitors for selecting them.
If he had actually set out to forge evidence, Wright insisted, citing his own qualifications in digital forensics, the forgeries would not be nearly so amateurish. “The irony is that if I were to manipulate or fabricate documents, they would be perfect,” he said. On various occasions, Wright cited his own personal testing—which Hough reminded him repeatedly was inadmissible—to explain how documents might end up bearing signs of tampering for innocuous reasons.
The fight over the alleged forgeries will be key to the trial’s outcome. “The UK court will ultimately assess whether Dr. Wright is a truthful witness,” Marsden says. “If he has submitted documents that the court finds are forgeries, it will cast a negative light on his evidence in general.”
For Wright to effectively substitute himself into the role of expert was “a risky strategy,” says Marsden, particularly given that the case turns on whether he himself has committed forgery. It is a “very dangerous path” for any defendant to “put distance” between themselves and their own experts, says Marsden, isolating them from anyone that could potentially help to support their case.
In his many hours under questioning, Wright was generally able to maintain an even temper—barring a few testy responses that let slip his frustrations—answering with a conviction that implied he was either supremely confident or extremely well-prepared. In online forums, there was broad disagreement as to the quality and effectiveness of Wright’s performance. On X, his supporters claimed that he had methodically dismantled all of COPA’s forgery allegations, whereas his critics, like blogger-podcaster Arthur van Pelt, claimed he was drowning “himself into a massive pool of lies.”
Although Wright may have come across as fluent, says Gledhill, Hough may have chosen to afford Wright “the illusion of being in control,” all the while leading him to undermine his own credibility by talking himself into knots and spilling into irrelevant tangents. “What you can get away with in a war waged in the press, on TV, or in another context, you cannot get away with in court. The rules of the arena he is playing in are different,” she claims. “Wright was not in the box as an expert, only as a witness of fact.”
With the conclusion of Wright’s initial testimony, the court will hear a further 13 days of evidence from fact witnesses for both parties and experts in forensics and cryptocurrency. Wright may then be required to return to the stand briefly to answer questions about additional documents he has provided to the court. After that, the judge will hear closing arguments and then retire to consider a ruling.
Wright’s tangle of explanations need not necessarily count against him; the judge, says Marsden, will examine each “on its own facts.” But the overall plausibility of his version of events—the likelihood that he suffered an extensive and varied sequence of misfortunes that led to the appearance of rampant forgery—will be taken into consideration. “Everything is ultimately looked at on the balance of probabilities,” Marsden says.
https://www.wired.com/feed/rss
Joel Khalili
