Sitting and watching yet another trial between Craig Wright and plaintiffs (I’ve yet to see a single trial in person where [the litigious!] Craig Wright is the plaintiff), and it already seems much like the others—with a key difference.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys—I mean barristers or solicitors—immediately started speaking with the assumption of authority about Craig and Bitcoin because their own ideas are more popular and validated by the collectivist groups who educated them. And their rhetoric is strong and effective.
At face value, Wright’s position remains much the same as prior trials with his reliance on a litany of circumstantial evidence, being in every right place at roughly the right time and in the fields from which one might assume Satoshi Nakamoto would have hailed. And on the other side, the plaintiffs have forensic expert reports explaining that thousands of documents that Craig submitted are “all fake.”
As I sat and listened to another day of criticisms of Craig’s documents, I’m overwhelmed with the realization that yes, these 50 documents are problematic, but the literal thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of documents, all with back-dating problems, do indeed point to some sort of technical anomaly that nobody seems to be zooming out far enough to consider the vastness of.
I find myself hoping that someone—anyone—would do a deeper dive into the hacking of Satoshi Nakamoto’s email in 2014, which led to the threat to dox Satoshi while taking over the SourceForge repo and other key places where Satoshi administered. Then I pray anyone would also work on verifying that Craig’s company (DeMorgan?) servers were wiped amid an extortion attempt right around the same time in 2014.
So there is a known and verifiable data integrity problem with Craig Wright that occurred right in the same window of time as a known and verifiable data integrity problem with Satoshi Nakamoto, yet almost everyone looks at the problems with a colossal pile of digital documents from this era and completely ignores the fact that these events and the consistently bad provenance of the documents could be related. I’m not saying they
definitely are related, but it is maddening to me that nobody has sought to prove it one way or another. This could be a lynchpin…
But alas…
The opening arguments themselves were mostly benign. COPA and the BTC Devs’ attorneys said every word one would have expected them to say if they learned about the entire case from spaces on X or from a member of the Greggle on Reddit. And Craig’s attorneys kicked off with an expository on Craig’s autism and anecdotes about his qualifications and witnesses.
The only change of pace from prior trials has been the refreshing curiosity from Justice Mellor. Prior judges have seemed far more interested in maintaining the schedule or ensuring that procedural things always rose to the top. But Mellor seems particularly interested in the story itself. He has also been very kind to everyone in the room, with a warmth that glows with confidence in his office. It’s truly refreshing to see a judge not compensating for fear that perhaps he doesn’t deserve his position, and instead, he seems very confident in himself and to let the personalities be the show in his courtroom. Not only should this make for a fun trial, but it should help relax everyone in the room to get to the root goal of determining the role, if any, that Craig Wright played in the creation of Bitcoin.
To that end, Mellor was keen to allow new evidence to be entered into the court Monday, and he seemed truly empathetic to Wright’s lot in life as a neurodivergent man of high function, but poor level of emotional regulation.
My prediction is that, win or lose, it will be hard for anyone to appeal based on a notion that they were not given a fair and open chance to plead their case.
For these reasons, I am hopeful for an outcome of a definitive decision, no appeal and closure of this purgatorial chapter in Bitcoin’s history.
Stay tuned!
Watch: Exchange corruption and CZ fines, COPA trial, Mining Bitcoin and Halving
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