Recap of the first two days of the legal battle between Craig Steven Wright and the non-profit organization COPA.
A lengthy trial expected to last several weeks is underway between Craig Steven Wright and the non-profit organization COPA, whose background has been detailed in Atlas21’s report. The final judgment from British judge James Mellor is not expected to come soon.
On the first day of the trial, it was expected that each party would present their arguments. The second day saw the start of Wright’s defense presentation, as well as the examination of witnesses called by the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto himself. This latter phase will continue until Tuesday, February 17th.
At the opening of the trial on the first day, COPA presented evidence of documents forged by Wright. The list of alleged forgeries is extensive. According to the list, Wright would have backdated documents, forged files, and used software that Satoshi Nakamoto could not have used. In some cases, the forgery of documents seems evident: Wright would have used as evidence a handwritten note indicating tests to implement EdDSA signatures in the Bitcoin protocol. Such a signature algorithm was only released in 2011, two years after the publication of the Bitcoin source code.
Following COPA’s statements, Wright’s lawyers presented their arguments: the legal team of the Australian entrepreneur wanted to assert that their client shares both the philosophy of Satoshi Nakamoto and the skills one would expect from the inventor of Bitcoin.
Along with these statements, eyewitness testimonies from Jon Matonis and Gavin Andresen were presented, who allegedly witnessed a data signing process with private keys that only Satoshi Nakamoto could have.
The defense also argued that it is plausible that Wright no longer has access to further cryptographic evidence proving his identity after the Australian entrepreneur destroyed much of the evidence contained on a hard drive following a mental breakdown that nearly led to suicide.
The last part of the first day in court concerned the recent discovery of 97 documents supporting Wright’s claim. Judge Mellor accepted the request to present this evidence. For COPA, the new documents emerged only after the previous evidence had been proven false.
According to some users including Hodlonaut, the judge’s approval for the presentation of this latest batch of “evidence” can only be interpreted as a move to avoid any possibility of appeal by Wright.
As predicted by COPA’s lawyers, much of the evidence contained in the latest batch has also turned out to be false.
According to experts from both parties, 71 out of 97 documents from the BDO auditor have been manipulated and/or backdated. COPA opposed the presentation of the remaining 26 documents due to the poor quality of the previous ones.
The second day began with Wright’s defense. As his opening statement, the Australian entrepreneur claimed he had never forged a document to support his claim. Wright stated that the signs of editing on the documents suggest that they were not forged:
“If I forged the document, it would be perfect.”
