The hearings continue between the self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto and the non-profit organization COPA: the report of the last few days.
The days of Thursday, Friday, and Monday saw the continuation of cross-examination for Craig Wright. Today, Tuesday, February 13th, marked the second-to-last day of the cross-examination.
After even questioning the expertise of his own experts, Wright admitted to manipulating some documents. This admission came after COPA presented several pieces of evidence highlighting temporal discrepancies in the files and the presence of fonts not available at the time the documents were purportedly drafted. Nevertheless, Wright claimed not to be the author of these alterations, asserting that he was framed by entities seeking to accuse him of being a fraudster. Throughout the trial, Wright attributed the forgeries to various external factors, including errors by former lawyers, sabotage by disgruntled employees, unauthorized access to his computer, hacking by malicious actors, and even unspecified anomalies within the IT environment that could have autonomously altered the files.
Wright then denied being funded by billionaire Calvin Ayre to cover legal expenses, stating that he only received “a loan.” This statement contradicts claims made in the “Wright vs. McCormack” case, where the Australian entrepreneur acknowledged financial support from Ayre.
On Monday, February 12th, during a brief exchange of questions and answers between COPA lawyer Jonathan Hough and Wright regarding email communications between Gavin Andresen and Satoshi Nakamoto, Wright initially referred to Satoshi in the third person, but quickly corrected himself, stating: “He’s resp… I’m responding to bug tracking. GitHub was better for bug tracking.”
When asked about his work on the original Bitcoin code, Wright accused Gregory Maxwell of hacking his servers and attributed the attack to the loss of all his early private communications under the pseudonym of Satoshi.
As the interrogation continued, Wright also accused Adam Back, a well-known cypherpunk and current CEO of Blockstream, of not submitting all the emails exchanged in 2009 as evidence for the current case. Wright claimed that Back, during their early interactions, had not tested the Bitcoin “system” or read the white paper. He then argued that Back had violated financial services laws “by encouraging people to sell their houses to buy bitcoin, irresponsibly claiming investors could ‘get rich’.”
During Monday’s proceedings, Wright’s wife claimed to have found a box full of old documents over the weekend, which, according to Wright, would serve as definitive evidence for his case. Wright intends to present the new documents to the court despite the request being rather late.
According to the BitMEX Research team, Judge Mellor is likely to reject the attempt to introduce the new evidence.
For some, this rejection by the judge could turn into a media story favoring Wright. Even if Wright were to lose the legal case, he could always refer back to the newly discovered box and claim that the defeat occurred only because the judge did not accept his request to present the new evidence.
