Blogs & Articles: Craig Wright And The BlackNet Lie 🔗 2 years ago

Written by Arthur van Pelt

ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material might become available after publication of this article, it will have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, to become a reference piece for years to come.

Intro

As far as we know now, it was on June 30, 2016 in Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Satoshi Affair” when the larger audience learned that Craig Wright considered something called “BlackNet” as the roots of ‘his’ Bitcoin.

“‘Sketch it out for me,’ I said to Wright. ‘Those years before bitcoin. What was happening that would later have an influence? I want to know about all the precursors, all the previous attempts to solve the problem.’

‘Back in 1997 there was Tim May’s BlackNet …’ May was a crypto-anarchist, who had been operating and agitating in the cypherpunk community since the mid-1980s. ‘Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other in a totally anonymous manner,’ he wrote in the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto in 1988. BlackNet operated like a precursor to WikiLeaks, soliciting secret information with payments made by untraceable, digital money.

‘We all have a narcissistic hubris,’ Wright told me. He wanted to take May’s BlackNet idea further. He was also enthusiastic, in those early days, about Hashcash and B-money. The idea behind Hashcash, a ‘proof of work’ algorithm where each of a group of computers performs a small task that can be instantly verified (thus making life impossible for spammers, who depend on multiple emails going out with little to no work involved), was ‘totally necessary for the building of bitcoin’. (To simplify: it’s a bit like the system used when registering on many web services, when you’re asked to type a specified set of characters into a box. This is ‘proof of work’, something a robot can’t do, and it authenticates the transaction.) Wright said that he spoke to Adam Back, who proposed Hashcash in 1997, ‘a few times in 2008, whilst setting up the first trials of the bitcoin protocol’.”

Craig Wright, a notoriously desperate rewriter of history in which he mingles his Satoshi cosplay into all kinds of real life events — and creates numerous, many times backdated, forgeries in the process — , is seen here mentioning Tim May, who indeed originally came up with something called BlackNet in the 1990s. Note that Craig Wright is completely wrong here with 1997 though, as Tim May’s BlackNet originated in 1993.

It is also well known that Craig Wright made, and still makes, many of these timeline mistakes in his Faketoshi career. Now let’s explore all the inconsistencies in Craig’s false and totally made up BlackNet story. Prepare for a hefty read, as we’re going to do a deep dive into this subject over three main angles, all more or less intertwined with the BlackNet lie.

• 1. Designing Bitcoin
• 2. Coding Bitcoin
• 3. Writing Bitcoin whitepaper

Will there be forgeries too? Y’all love forgeries, don’t you? Yes, there will be a lot of yummy forgeries too. There’s never a Craig Wright story complete without his sloppy forgeries.

Let’s go.

Photo credit: Peter Macdiarmid/London News Pictures

Timothy “Tim” May

Let’s kick off with a brief history on Tim May. Tim was born December 21, 1951 and passed away December 13, 2018, he was only 66, almost 67 years old. Tim is one of the founding members of the cypherpunk movement, and author of The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto. Tim May wrote about BlackNet in December 1994:

”One experimental “information market” is BlackNet, a system which appeared in 1993 and which allows fully-anonymous, two-way exchanges of information of all sorts.”

And in 1997 we find Tim May mentioning the whitepaper that he wrote, of which BlackNet is part of: “Untraceable Digital Cash, Information Markets, and BlackNet”. He talked about his whitepaper during the “Governmental and Social Implications of Digital Money” panel at CFP ’97, which stands for the 7th Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference 1997 which was held in Burlingame, California, USA on March 12, 1997.

“The BlackNet Experiment

A few years ago I devised a working information market, using PGP for secure communication and digital signatures, chained anonymous remailers for untraceability, and message pools (e.g., alt.anonymous.messages on Usenet) for making contact and sending later messages. My intention was to directly demonstrate the feasibility of such markets, and to explore some of the nuances of such markets. (At no point was BlackNet actually used for espionage, though I did get a few strange offers, including an offer to sell me information on how the CIA was targeting the diplomats of certain African nations in Washington.)

BlackNet allowed fully-anonymous, two-way exchanges of information of all sorts. The basic idea was to use a “message pool,” a publicly readable place for messages. By using chains of remailers, messages could be untraceably and anonymously deposited in such pools, and then read anonymously by others (because the message pool was broadcast widely, a la Usenet). By including public keys for later communications, two-way communication could be established, all within the message pool. What was missing at the time of this experiment was some form of untraceable payment, i.e., digital cash.

As Paul Leyland so succinctly described the experiment:

“Tim May showed how mutually anonymous secure information trading could be implemented with a public forum such as usenet and with public key cryptography. Each information purchaser wishing to take part posts a sales pitch and a public key to Usenet. Information to be traded would then have a public key appended so that a reply can be posted and the whole encrypted in the public key of the other party. For anonymity, the keys should contain no information that links it to an identifiable person. May posted a 1024-bit PGP key supposedly belonging to “Blacknet”. As May’s purpose was only educational, he soon admitted authorship.”

(I should add that copies of the BlackNet message circulated widely and even appeared at some national laboratories doing sensitive work. Oak Ridge issued an advisory warning employees to report any contacts with BlackNet!)”

So what was Tim May’s BlackNet about? ChainRift Research dedicated a good read about it, and the following quote is taken from their article “Dark Markets: Tim May’s BlackNet”:

“May applied the idea in 1993 with BlackNet — though published anonymously to begin with, he later announced that he had created the market as a proof-of-concept. It combined the use of a chain of remailers (a staple of cypherpunk communications), and PGP encryption (of course) to protect the identity of the organisation in question, as well as that of any potential sellers. Its stance was made pretty clear:

BlackNet is nominally nondideological [sic], but considers nation-states, export laws, patent laws, national security considerations and the like to be
relics of the pre-cyberspace era. Export and patent laws are often used to
explicitly project national power and imperialist, colonialist state
fascism. BlackNet believes it is solely the responsibility of a secret
holder to keep that secret — not the responsibility of the State, or of us,
or of anyone else who may come into possession of that secret. If a
secret’s worth having, it’s worth protecting.

Announcing that it would be collecting inventory, BlackNet called for would-be participants to send through any information they may have on trade secrets, industrial processes, nanotechnology, drug design/chemical manufacturing, etc. Sellers were told to use remailers to publish encrypted messages to a number of forums.

In return, it offered to make payment in a number of ways — anonymous bank deposits, cash sent via snail mail or even remuneration in the form of ‘CryptoCredits’ — a closed-loop currency for use within the information market (I can only assume these credits were sold at a discount to accredited investors in a private pre-pre-sale).”

So this is the “BlackNet” that will become Craig Wright’s ‘inspiration’ for another overhaul of Bitcoin history. And to be clear from the get-go: a FAILED overhaul of Bitcoin history.

Statue of Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious inventor of Bitcoin (Copyright ATTILA KISBENEDEK/AFP)

Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin

As a refresher, before we go to Craig Wright’s made up version of Bitcoin history, what did Satoshi Nakamoto say again about the design, the development and the release process of Bitcoin and its whitepaper?

From several public posts of Satoshi Nakamoto we know that he started designing Bitcoin in 2007, he started working on the Bitcoin code in the second quarter of 2007 (roughly in May 2007), and he also made perfectly clear that he first executed the Bitcoin coding part, and only then started writing the Bitcoin whitepaper last minute, as he explained to Hal Finney on November 8, 2008:

Source: https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2008-November/014832.html

And we know Satoshi Nakamoto started coding roughly in May 2007, because on November 17, 2008 he told James A. Donald:

”I believe I’ve worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them.”

And on June 18, 2010 Satoshi Nakamoto repeated on the Bitcointalk forum, when asked ”How long have you been working on this design Satoshi?”

”Since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it. Much more of the work was designing than coding.”

Nowhere did Satoshi Nakamoto mention, or even hint, that Bitcoin had its roots before 2007, nowhere is something like Tim May’s, or Craig Wright’s for that matter, BlackNet mentioned (and that includes of course the Bitcoin whitepaper!) and we will see in the rest of this article that the order of real Satoshi Nakamoto events related to Bitcoin — design, coding, whitepaper — is totally wrong and messed up too in Craig Wright’s overhaul of Bitcoin history.

Image Credits: CoinGeek

1. Craig Wright and ‘his’ Bitcoin design: The BlackNet Lie

So what did Craig Wright do with Tim May’s BlackNet? How did he try to rewrite Bitcoin history, like he desperately tried to rewrite the history of the company W&K Info Defense Research LLC, an effort that landed him a penalty of a whopping $100 million for conversion?

First, let’s note that Craig “interacted” once, briefly, with cypherpunk Tim May during a short 24 day stint that Craig had in 1996 on the Venona cypherpunks’ mailing list. Interacted is a major bit of a stretch, though.

September 17, 1996: Craig Wright quotes Tim May.

Source: https://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1996/09/msg01451.html

Craig however failed to attract the attention from Tim May with his quote, just like Craig was completely ignored on Twitter in November 2015 by Adam Back, another well known cypherpunk, now CEO of Blockstream.

Overall, Craig Wright will probably not hold very pleasant memories about the cypherpunks, as one day later Julian Assange also kicked Craig’s ass on their platform. And after only 15 posts on Venona in 24 days, Craig disappeared from the cypherpunk platform to never come back again.

Source: https://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1996/09/msg01513.html

July 10, 2003: Craig Wright (re-)registers Spyder, TripleS, BlackNet and RedBack for R&D tax rebates, a series of projects that he started in 1999.

Looking at the registration codes in the letter (all six pages will come up in a bit for the reader to enjoy), which all end with “04”, this appears to be an indication that it’s the fourth time in a row that Craig Wright registered these projects. AusIndustry requests an annual re-registration of running projects that are eligible for R&D tax rebates. And this would indicate that Craig Wright started these projects in 1999. So let’s keep the years 1993 for Tim May’s BlackNet and 1999 for Craig Wright’s BlackNet in mind.

On page 4 of the AusIndustry letter we find BlackNet04, an “Enhanced Encrypted Network Project” with an expected completion date of June 30, 2004. The Project Technical Objective reads (with Craig’s typos corrected): “To create an easily managed secure end to end encrypted network — full definition in 2001/2002 R and D submission.”

Now that reads like something that can be used to rewrite some Bitcoin history, doesn’t it? And that’s exactly what Craig Wright will do 15 years later, starting in 2016 (see quote from The Satoshi Affair in the Intro).

July 13, 2017: Craig Wright mentions Tim May and BlackNet in Amsterdam, The Netherlands during the “iGaming Super Show”.

https://medium.com/media/68dbe51f3ae6a1a595e3caeb5b0334b0/href

After The Satoshi Affair in June 2016, it remains silent for a little over a year when it comes to Craig’s BlackNet claims.

The Netherlands had the undivided pleasure of seeing, and hearing, Craig mention BlackNet live on stage for the first time. Almost four minutes into his sunglassed speech, we can hear Craig Wright claim that he, after ‘meeting Tim May’, filed BlackNet in 1999 in Australia. The full quote goes:

“Back in 1999 I was a scurrilous government contractor as people say, and I filed, after meeting Tim May, a government project. But the government after a while considered a big boondoggle and audited the crap out of me for it. It was called BlackNet. Actually I registered a program called BlackNet and was stupid enough in the 90s to think that that wouldn’t get me in trouble. I ran that for many years until people started thinking that I was just scamming them because well when I first started the project with UNIs and everything like that I thought six years I will have all this sorted in six years time. Few PhD candidates, a few students, a few whatever else. And unfortunately it’s only this last year that we’ve actually cracked anything and we have now and we’re going to be releasing technology. We have patents actually get released next month, we have other things and most people still don’t realize but Bitcoin is actually Turing complete, and we have been running things so I want you to start daring to think where this goes. If you start thinking 5 million times the computational power what can I do with that?”

We can catch Craig here in the same “I kissed Jim Morrison in the 1990s with fish in my ear” type of lie; Craig Wright never actually met Tim May. As we just saw, he only quoted Tim once in September 1996 on a cypherpunk forum, got ignored, got asskicked by Julian Assange, left tail between his legs, and that’s all.

What comes to mind here, is another quote from Andrew O’Hagan’s The Satoshi Affair. It’s a telling anecdote about Craig’s Modus Operandi:

“Wright’s mother had told me about her son’s long-standing habit of adding bits on to the truth, just to make it bigger. ‘When he was a teenager,’ she said, ‘he went into the back of a car on his bike. It threw him through the window of a parked car. That’s where his scar comes from. His sister accompanied him to the hospital and he’s telling the doctor that he’s had his nose broken twenty or so times, and the doctor is saying “You couldn’t possibly have had it broken.” And Craig says: “I sew myself up when I get injured.”’ What his mother said connected with something I’d noticed. In what he said, he often went further than he needed to; further than he ought to have done. He appeared to start with the truth, and then, slowly, he would inflate his part until the whole story suddenly looked weak.”

Mid 2018: It appears that Craig Wright mentioned BlackNet also in an email “mid 2018” to Gavin Andresen and Roger Ver. Gavin Andresen had no idea what it was about, and in what sense ‘BlackNet was solved’. Anecdote found in a deposition on Wednesday, February 26, 2020 of Gavin Andresen in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/599/3/kleiman-v-wright/

July 14, 2018: A tweet by Craig Wright also mentions “Blacknet is solved”.

Furthermore, we see Craig Wright typos that Satoshi Nakamoto would never make:

“A new would starts.”

Recreating Satoshi Nakamoto’s linguistic style has never been in Craig Wright’s skill set, I’m afraid. We will also see in a bit that Craig Wright can’t code like Satoshi Nakamoto.

Source: https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1018192373115998208

July 16, 2018: A MemoCash post by Craig Wright mentions BlackNet. Note that 1999 now suddenly has become 1998.

Source: https://memo.cash/post/bae0e6fa945432b015dacf34522f912822cc42ddce311aa28d17515c7541aa01

October 18, 2018: Craig Wright talks about Tim May in an interview on YouTube with “The James Delingpole Channel”.

https://medium.com/media/8d39b5bee7c02a81375bfa3dbdc1362b/href

Roughly 2.5 minutes in, we can hear Craig Wright claim “I’ve been involved in the whole Bitcoin world the whole time. I’ve been involved in the nature of security and crypto currencies since the the 90s. I was sort of … I met Tim May back in the early 90s and although we have some very different ideas of sort of philosophy of all this, we have some overlaps and parallels as well, so Tim would have been a lot more like you, I guess, the crypto anarchist where I’m the terrible business economist type, companies-are-a-good person and small government but allow companies to get on with it.”

Again Craig claims he actually met Tim May ‘early 90s’, but obviously that never happened. All that happened was a 1996 quote on the Venona platform, now shifted back in time several years.

And Craig wasn’t ‘involved in the whole Bitcoin world the whole time’ either, of course. As far as we know now, Craig learned about Bitcoin around July 2011, in that same month he made a few comments about Bitcoin on the The Conversation website (and never spelled it in the way Satoshi Nakamoto did, instead he spelled it wrong no less than four times!) and in April 2013 Craig bought his first few handfuls of Bitcoin on Mt Gox.

Forward to February 2019, where Craig Wright stubbornly continues with his efforts to rewrite Bitcoin history in the most hilarious way the Bitcoin community had seen in several years. At the same time, it appears that Craig Wright felt encouraged by the passing of Tim May on December 13, 2018, to abuse his name more often, more firmly and more publicly in his scammery.

February 8, 2019: It started with somewhat of a footnote about BlackNet on Craig’s blog. 1999 is again pushed back in history another year.

”The design of what has become Bitcoin and Metanet started in 1998 with a project I called Blacknet. It was never Tim May’s version, although he was my inspiration for it.”

February 10, 2019: Craig follows up with a tweet two days later, where we start to find Craig Wright’s first forgeries related to his BlackNet claims.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20190211022636if_/https://twitter.com/ProfFaustus/status/1094654753911508992

Now let’s have a closer look at the three attachments to that tweet.

February 10, 2019: First tweet attachment.

Note that we find a few discrepancies here, presuming this is a snippet of something that was indeed created on October 23, 2001. For starters, it is unsigned, which is normally unacceptable as evidence of something. Secondly, the project overview with the PR codes appears to be created separately from the rest, as the letter font is different and the PR codes never existed in this way. A forgery created to support the tweet, it appears.

February 10, 2019: Second tweet attachment.

The second attachment to the February 10, 2019 tweet is really an interesting forgery of Craig Wright again. How do we know this is a forgery? For several reasons. Let’s start with the fact that the Australian government doesn’t have this BlackNet whitepaper. Several Freedom Of Information (FOI) requests were sent to the Australian government after this tweet, and they were all answered like this:

Source: https://twitter.com/Grinnersaok/status/1126665494205874177

Then, Craig’s ex-wife Lynn Wright, who is mentioned as co-author in the screenshot of the BlackNet paper in Craig’s tweet, was also asked (on January 13, 2020) about BlackNet by Ira Kleiman’s counsel in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit when they found a mention of BlackNet in Craig’s “evidence”, which happened to be another piece of Craig’s homework: a forged marriage decree.

Lynn however, had “no recollection of that at all”. Oops.

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/488/17/kleiman-v-wright/

Then there’s also an individual called Dave Dornbrack mentioned as co-author of the BlackNet whitepaper. When Dave Dornbrack was asked about this BlackNet paper that he allegedly was involved with, he calls Craig Wright a “fraud” and an “unbelievable bullshit artist”, and he confirmed he was never involved with anything BlackNet, or Bitcoin for that matter, with Craig Wright. Oops, again.

Source: https://twitter.com/jimmy007forsure/status/1161628937744609280

Shall we bury this Craig Wright forgery where it belongs, and move on to the next attachment?

February 10, 2019: Third tweet attachment.

With the third attachment, Craig tries to represent that his BlackNet whitepaper contains elements of the Bitcoin whitepaper. And indeed, he manages to mingle some familiar language from the Bitcoin whitepaper with, in the last sentence, “black net formation”. But as can be expected with the false claims of our Faketoshi, the debunking of this image immediately started. And it turned out, this Abstract section of Craig’s BlackNet forgery was just a reworked, wrong, version of the Bitcoin whitepaper; it contained the text of the October 2008 version Bitcoin whitepaper, instead of the August 2008 version Bitcoin whitepaper.

Or, as explained on Reddit:

“On 10 february Craig Wright tried to convince people that he is Satoshi Nakamoto by releasing an abstract of a research paper called “Black Net” that he supposedly wrote for the Australian government in 2001. The abstract is almost identical to the official Bitcoin whitepaper of October 2008. However, Satoshi had a draft in August 2008 of the Bitcoin whitepaper and when we compare the draft with the official Bitcoin whitepaper, we can see that the corrections made between August and October 2008 are also found in the Craig’s paper from “2001”. This proves again that he is a liar.”

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/apc9c1/craig_wright_caught_lying_again/

Media outlet CryptoPotato noticed the image on Reddit and published: “Craig Wright Gets Caught Lying About Being Satoshi Nakamoto (Not The First Time)”, followed by WikiLeaks tweeting the CryptoPotato article and the image, with the following message:

“The Bernie Madoff of #Bitcoin, Craig S. Wright, who keeps forging documents to make it seem that he is Bitcoin’s pseudonymous inventor Satoshi Nakamoto, caught again, this time forging a “2001” antecedent to Nakamoto’s first Bitcoin paper.”

During the conversation on Twitter about his tweet with the three images of BlackNet related forgeries, Craig Wright comes up with another set of three images in the replies.

A breakdown of these reply tweets:

Tweet 1.

”Rule 0 — Before 1
Never and I mean NEVER have a heart to heart with a group who are afraid of crypto and explain “Blacknet””

Since this undated letter is addressed to Coin-Exch, a company that was raised by Craig Wright in April 2013, went into ATO’s External Administration in December 2015 after their raids on Craig’s house and offices, and was dismantled by the ATO in March 2020, we are able to date this somewhere in the 2014–2015 timeframe. Probably not a forgery.

Tweet 2.

”And, I was audited — yearly”

Very likely a real, not forged AusIndustry letter from the first year (2013) that Craig Wright started using Bitcoin as a scam tool in his Australian tax fraud after Dave Kleiman died in April 2013. We see a meeting on June 7, 2013 being referenced.

Tweet 3.

Where Craig admits again that he picked up the BlackNet name from Tim May, and Jimmy Nguyen advised Craig to rename things to Metanet.

Here, BlackNet is mentioned in a July 18, 2017 email with apparently a July 17, 2017 attachment. The receiver is unknown, as not caught in the screenshot that Craig provided in his reply, but presuming the dates are not forged it is from the era that Craig Wright mostly communicated his ideas with nChain where he is Chief Scientist.

The Aftermath of The BlackNet Lie

Around the same time, in Craig Wright’s private Metanet-ICU Slack room where he entertains his followers with almost daily rants and the occasional forgery to test out, we find another forgery related to his BlackNet lie.

Inside a MSG (email) file that Craig throws at his fans, we can find a Spyder whitepaper (as a Word document) dated November 9, 2002. This whitepaper, clearly a recent day forgery because we can find hints to Bitcoin, contains for example text like “Digital cash” and “Not anonymous but Pseudonomy” under the section “Stage 4 — Release Phase — Leads to Blacknet integration”.

Note also that the front page of this Spyder whitepaper has a lot in common with the BlackNet whitepaper front page as posted by Craig in his February 10, 2019 tweet.

Craig Wright and metadata have never been BFFs, it appears.

At closer inspection of the metadata of the Word document, we can find clear evidence that this file dated November 9, 2002 has been ‘doctored by the doctor’, many years after the alleged date of writing and publication. Because it is, of course, impossible to create a Word document in 2002 with a text processing tool that was only available after December 2006. Then either the original 2002 Word document has been adjusted after December 2006 (knowing Craig Wright, this is the most likely option), or a new Word document has been created after December 2006. The latter is the least likely option.

February 15, 2019: Craig mentioned BlackNet again, now in front of the CFTC, but instead of 1998 as was mentioned on his blog, it had now become another year earlier: 1997.

Source: https://comments.cftc.gov/PublicComments/ViewComment.aspx?id=61969

Note that at the bottom of the screen, a PDF attachment is available for download. It contains the full text of Craig’s Faketoshi scammery in front of the CFTC.

February 18, 2019: Article Bitcoinist

Source: https://bitcoinist.com/f-off-craig-wright-not-satoshi/

The online media outlet Bitcoinist has always been a critical follower of Craig Wright’s escapades in the Bitcoin arena. And again, they do not disappoint when they report about Craig’s CFTC stunt (also note the not-so subtle hint in the URL to the article):

“At this point, Wright’s claims are becoming a farce of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian proportions. After he first ‘came out’ as Satoshi Nakamoto, and the crypto-world widely coughed *bullshit* under its breath, he let it lie.

But now frontrunning his own project Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision), his alleged ‘amendments’ to historical documents seems to be going into overdrive. Only last week he was pulled up by WikiLeaks for altering a 2008 blog-post to make it look like he’d been working on crypto back then.

Mere hours prior, he was accused of using a forged a 2001 research paper as evidence of his lineage. It was a word-for-word copy of the October 2008 Bitcoin whitepaper. It even already had amendments that he (as Satoshi Nakamoto) made from the August 2008 draft of the same document. Oops… Or perhaps incredibly prescient?”

February 18, 2019: Craig’s tweet also made it to an article by online media outlet CryptoVibes honoring Tim May.

Source: https://www.cryptovibes.com/blog/2019/02/18/the-man-who-did-not-receive-any-credit-for-bitcoin-tim-may/

”Recently, Craig Wright from Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, stirred controversy once again when he claimed on Twitter that he had filed a paper about BlackNet with the Australian government in 2001. Now, users are claiming that he is lying to the crypto world once again as they have found a similar paper from early blockchain pioneer Tim May.”

February 19, 2019: And here we find another mention of BlackNet on Craig’s blog.

”When I was working on Blacknet in 2005 and 2006, I stumbled upon what later became the solution to Bitcoin and the problems that I saw.”

June 6, 2019: Another mention of “Black net” (note the different spelling) on Craig’s blog:

”Black net started as a simple project to monetise information and create a private Internet. After the WTO’s decision, my focus changed, and I needed to implement a monetary platform. Not everyone likes gambling, but I was proud of my past and how I’d managed to get Lasseter’s Online over the regulatory requirements and to become the first licensed gaming operation anywhere in the world.”

January 13, 2020: Ready for another Craig Wright forgery?

On this day, Lynn Wright (Craig’s ex-wife) was being questioned in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. At some point, they discuss a “Divorce Decree Appendix” that Lynn never saw before, but had received from Craig Wright’s counsel one week before her deposition. Notice the immediate red flag here: Craig Wright sends something to his counsel, who provides it just before a deposition. We’ve seen Craig Wright using this trick several times before: abuse other people to give more credibility to his lies and forgeries. When this derailed in front of the ATO in 2015, his lawyer Andrew Sommer immediately terminated his engagement with Craig Wright and his companies.

Another immediate red flag is the mention of Bitcoin in combination with the dating of June 2011.

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/488/17/kleiman-v-wright/

Let’s have a look at Lynn Wright’s deposition, what they discussed about this June 2011 Divorce Decree Appendix forgery.

“BY MR ROCHE:
Q. Ms Wright, was there ever a formal settlement agreement between you and Craig?
A. Other than the one that you’ve already shown me, there is — there’s just been a verbal agreement for the — the monthly payments.
Q. And when was that verbal agreement made?
A. It was made probably about — I’m just trying to think. Probably about five years ago. And it was — it was never put through the courts or put an addendum onto the — the written agreement.
Q. What was the — how did that agreement come to be?
MS MARKOE: Objection. Relevance.
THE DEPONENT: Well, I — I’m older than Craig by about 18 years, and I think he was concerned that — and I was concerned, too, about my future, you know, like, financially and — and everything like that. So that’s why he — he came to that — that’s why — 
BY MR ROCHE:
Q. And — 
A. Yeah, go ahead.
Q. Did you reach out to him or did he reach out to you?
A. No, he reached out to me.
Q. Okay. And if we could — I believe exhibit 3 is the settlement agreement?
A. Yes.
Q. Hold on, I’m just getting it up myself. Did you have the original of this document in your possession?
A. No, I have a copy.
Q. You have a copy. Do you know who has the original?
A. I don’t know if it’s Michael Shehadie or if it’s Craig.
Q. Okay. And if you see at the top, it says “Appendix”?
A. Yes.
Q. What is this an appendix to?
A. I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know. This is all I have, these two pieces.
Q. You have a copy of it; correct?
A. Yes.
Q. And when did you get the copy of it?
A. It was sent to me by Craig’s solicitor a week or so ago. Because I — I guess I said I didn’t have any — I didn’t have a copy of it. I just had my divorce decree.
Q. Okay. And if you can go to the second page of this document?
A. Yes.
Q. Is that your signature?
A. Yes.
Q. And is that — did you sign that signature yourself?
A. Yes. It looks like it, yep.
Q. And did you sign that in pen?
A. Yeah.
Q. Okay. Who reached out to you a week ago?
A. I — I’m not sure. I can’t — I think — I think it — I may have spoken to Amanda. I guess it was during the time of — of trying to arrange this, this deposition, and something — I think somebody asked me if I had the — my divorce decree, and I — I said I had the copy — I had a divorce decree, but I didn’t have the settlement, or that I — I couldn’t find a settlement, anyway. So I think that’s when they sent that through to me.
Q. Okay. And do you have a copy of that email from — with the document attached?
A. Yeah.
Q. Okay. And that was Amanda who sent you the email?
A. I — I’m not sure who it was. It might — I think it was Amanda, but it could have been Zaharah. Somebody from that office.”

And what did Lynn say about BlackNet again?

“Q. In the “Intellectual Property” section, which is I guess about — a few more rows down?
A. Yes.
Q. On the “Craig Wright” side, right below “Spyder”, it says “Blacknet”?
A. Yes.
Q. What was Blacknet, if you recall?
A. I have no recollection of that at all. I — it’s — I don’t know. I — I could assume things, but that’s — that’s just silly.”

If the mention of Bitcoin in a June 2011 document didn’t tell the reader enough already (Craig Wright didn’t even know about Bitcoin at that moment, all his Bitcoin related forgeries have been created after Dave Kleiman died in April 2013), then read what Ira Kleiman’s counsel had to say about this Divorce Decree Appendix forgery, quoted in one of the Kleiman v Wright Orders by Federal Judge Bloom. In this Order the Omnibus Sanctions Motion of Ira Kleiman was denied, as Bloom ruled “The evidence and arguments Plaintiffs raise, in this regard, can be used to effectively persuade a jury”, which is why the lawsuit ended in a Jury Trial anyway.

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/595/kleiman-v-wright/

March 31, 2021: Even in 2021 we can still find another mention of BlackNet on Craig Wright’s blog:

”It is finally time to start explaining why I created Bitcoin. Why I spent nearly 25 years of my life, so far, on a project. To explain what ‘BlackNet’ was originally designed to be and what I transformed it into. Bitcoin represents “CryptoCredits”. The cypherpunks wanted to create a darknet market that would be completely anonymous and encrypted. It would have been a market that would have allowed Silk Road to be operable without being taken down. A system that would have allowed illicit funds to remain untraceable. One that was designed to enable assassination markets and the sale of illegally obtained information and national secrets and one that Tim May personally said could have been used to leak information about the Manhattan Project, had it been around at the time.”

Found in May 9, 2007 email to Tosh Onishi of Vantage Recruitment that Craig Wright leaked in his Slack room

September 27, 2021: BlackNet mentioned in the COPA lawsuit.

In the third section of this article, which handles everything from the Bitcoin whitepaper angle, we will find Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA) start a lawsuit against Craig Wright in April 2021.

Surprise, surprise, the BlackNet lie was being brought on the table by COPA, and in the following screenshot we can find Craig’s defense.

Let’s bring back in memory that several Freedom Of Information (FOI) requests returned “I can confirm there are no documents related to BlackNet.” from the Australian government’s FOI Team, where Craig’s counsel now claims in their Amended Defence “Dr Wright updated his Project BlackNet research paper each year that he submitted it to AUSIndustry.”.

Since it strongly appears that Craig Wright abandoned the Spyder, TripleS, RedBack and BlackNet project series after 2004 when he went to work for BDO (Craig worked for BDO as CAS Manager from November 2004 till December 2008, see image above), it is to be expected that Craig is digging his own grave again with these conflicting, if not straightforward perjurous, statements in court…

November 22, 2021: And to end this overview, during the Kleiman v Wright trial, Craig Wright gave BlackNet a few mentions too. From the transcripts:

“BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. When did you first start thinking about this idea about using tokens in the fashion — for the online gaming operation in the fashion that you’re describing?
A. I started the first thing after talking with Tim May in 1998. Tim May had been talking about a concept called Blacknet and crypto credits. The other founders of early token money that I had worked with included some of the eCash people. And what I wanted to do was find a system that didn’t have the failings of the previous ones.”

<< snip >>

“Q. Now, sir, after you finished the coding of the whitepaper in approximately March, April of 2008, was there a point at which you started working on a paper related to what you were working on?
A. There were — fragments of the paper go back to my 2002 AusIndustry filings for research and development. The first filings I had for a project I called — which was BlackNet, which — because Tim May called it that — go back to that date. So the origins of tokens and crypto credits, and some of the bits that I self-plagiarized go back that far. The later paper developed and got larger and larger and then got smaller. So yes and no. There are bits of it.”

Let’s conclude that although Tim May’s 1993 BlackNet has a little overlap with Bitcoin (but was never mentioned by the real Satoshi Nakamoto as inspiration, not in the whitepaper nor in any of Satoshi’s forum posts and emails), Craig Wright’s BlackNet has no overlap whatsoever with the Bitcoin project running from 2007 to 2011 under Satoshi Nakamoto. As far as we know now, Craig abandoned the Spyder series of projects when he started working for BDO late 2004.

For who’s interested, Twitter user Anil (@anilsaidso) did a great tweetstorm in May 2021 about the people who ‘really’ influenced Bitcoin.

“Satoshi Nakamoto cites 8 references in the Bitcoin white paper. Each one uniquely influencing the design of the Bitcoin protocol. In this thread we’ll explore what they are and why they’re important.”

To recap, Craig Wright took the name BlackNet (and the name only) as inspiration for his AusIndustry registrations in 1999, but never followed up filing anything BlackNet in the years after. And as far as we know now beginning in 2016, Craig starts rewriting history to mingle his false Satoshi claim into his discontinued BlackNet project. And as we’ve seen, he shamelessly throws many forgeries, in - and outside courts, in the mix.

2. Coding Bitcoin: Does Craig Wright even have the skills?

Now that we have debunked Craig Wright’s claim that he designed Bitcoin starting with BlackNet in 1997, wait, make that 1998, oh wait it was 1999 after all, how about Craig Wright being able to code up Bitcoin? Let’s see about that, shall we?

First, let’s have it clear that Satoshi Nakamoto was a very skilled coder according Gavin Andresen:

Source: Deposition Gavin Andresen in Kleiman v Wright

Second, let it be known that wel known security expert Dan Kaminsky once — read: around 2010/2011 — tried to hack and crack the Bitcoin code that was at that point in time mostly Satoshi’s work, but Dan failed to do so and elegantly admitted that in public.

“Ever since BitCoin appeared, I’ve been waiting for two security experts to venture detailed opinions on it: Dan Kaminsky and Ben Laurie. Dan has now weighed in, with a long, thoughtful piece on the merits and demerits of BitCoin as a currency and as a phenomenon.” — Cory Doctorow

“A few years ago, I tried to break Bitcoin, and failed quite gloriously. The system and framework itself is preternaturally sound.” — Dan Kaminsky

Back to Craig Wright. Most of my readers will know about Craig’s “Hello World” debacles, I’m sure.

But to refresh everyone’s memory, a snippet from Toshi Times’ “Craig Wright Proves He Can Code By Copy-Pasting “Hello World” Program”:

“In the replies to Calvin Ayres post, a Twitter user with the handle CowOperate said that Vitalik is at least capable of coding a “Hello World” program. Craig Wright then entered the conversation and claimed that he had taught in both C/C++ and MASM and posted a screenshot of a “Hello World” program. However, another Twitter user named Laurent Raufaste was quick to spot the plagiarism. It turned out that the code, except for some changes to the wording, had been copy-pasted from a “Hello World” tutorial for UNIX assembly programming.”

Where this example will no doubt be thrown aside by the Craig Wright apologists as a funny anecdote where Craig is playing his infamous game of 5D chess again, there is of course more damning evidence known of Craig not being able to code.

Let’s start with a video that Craig, or rather Charles Sturt University for their IT Masters programme, posted on June 24, 2015.

Comments to the video like “A non programmer reading slides. That’s what I see here .” gives already a clue for what’s coming up next.

https://medium.com/media/cc9b640dfd4fd9cb13a3581ac01c0b0d/href

Around the 14 minutes mark we pick up what Craig is lecturing. Notice how he talks a lot, but basically says nothing. His hilarious slip up, when he tries to touch on the content of the code he shows, is found in bold.

“I purposely not linked that to a directory because we’re going to go through some of this and and finding and setting up some of which I’ll send through to the guys at CSU tonight so once you’ve logged in try and find see where it is do that sort of thing and go from there. Now compiler version minus V or dash dash version and this is where we start with our first lab. So your first test is is fairly simple it’s not not terribly difficult at all. We’re going to build a little file here called test1 dot C. So we’re defining a number value at a million. We’re defining our main function. We’re going to, uhm, do a Hello World. We’re going to, uhm, it’s fairly simple. We’re just going to do that a number of times so doubling different values, I’m not going to try to explain what it does too much yet. Uhm, we’re hoping that you, uhm, don’t have too many problems there because I mean the end of the day we have a print. A for loop. Return. It should be very simple. Now if there’s more than that I can’t mean we will answer questions etcetera but it’s very simple so ICC flags we’re just doing a few RC naught C plus plus sort of compilation at the moment. We’re going to modify all of this so we want to look at our compiler options and so by the end of the week I’m hoping everyone has tried that because I’m going to go through and actually put up a recording of what you need to do if you haven’t done it. So if you can’t get through this yourself in the next couple days don’t worry there’ll be a interactive step through it video anyway so you can sit there run the compiler, watch the video, do it yourself.”

And that’s where Craig’s utter coding incompetence shows, at the ‘double sum’ line in the screenshot below.

“We’re just going to do that a number of times so doubling different values”

Screenshot from the Charles Sturt University video

In this piece of code, ‘sum’, ‘aa’, ‘bb’ and ‘cc’ are the variables (where the latter three are array variables), and ‘double’ is telling the compiler that the variables are double precision floating-point values in a 64 bit environment. This has absolutely nothing to do with the doubling of values, as Craig is trying to teach the audience.

And looking at the comments to the video again, the audience is noticing Craig’s utter incompetence with coding too.

“when he says the double type variable is for “doubling different values” is just wild”

“Omg, at 15 minutes… wow. Are you sure you know anything about a C “for” statement? What happens when you hit a pointer to a pointer? Heads will explode.”

“14:28 LOLOLOLOL he’s struggling to explain what it does. Only a super stable genius would paste code in a word processor. SMFH.”

Then, in April 2019, Twitter member Dr. Funkenstein worked out another fine example of Craig Wright not being able to code.

“A new #Faketoshi Craig Wright proof in two pictures:”

“It could have been one picture, though:”

“Note, in his [March 18, 2019 Medium post “Learning Script”] blog post, he calls it a ‘rather careful and detailed script’.”

August 25, 2021: Here we find another savage take down of Craig’s coding abilities, or better lack thereof. It is painfully unraveled by Twitter member Joseph P Gardling in a rather lengthy tweetstorm. Here’s his full thread. Read it, and weep.

“Here’s a short thread where I conclusively prove that Craig Wright cannot code C/C++ and did not write the Bitcoin code. We need only check his old blog. (Thanks to an anonymous tipster for pointing out the entry.) Here is what we’ll look at first:”

“Practically everything is wrong, but first draw your attention to line 37. This is a mark of a non-programmer. There’s no need to “just ensure” something is set if you already know it’s set. This is the kind of thing first-year students do. Keep in mind this is from 2011.”

“The really egregious part, though, is line 34. He has *no clue* what ‘isdigit’ does. He passes it a plain *integer(!!)* via scanf and expects it to … I’m not sure. Even if he knew it was supposed to take a character, it would only work for ‘0’ to ‘9’, not 0 to RAND_MAX.”

“However, we know someone was very familiar with ‘isdigit’ just two years earlier. Here’s Satoshi demonstrating its actual use.”

“To be clear, Craig didn’t write that entire snippet from the first tweet. However, he added all the ridiculous parts. The original code that he modified is here:”

“He was trying to “fix” the code, but ended up trashing it completely. Why does that seem oddly familiar…?”

“He admits the code is “messy” (it’s not — it’s completely unusable), and will give it another shot the next day. I’ll have another thread soon going over the (hilarious) problems with his next try. Hint: it involves stealing code and it *still* has fundamental errors.”

And Joseph P Gardling continues on August 26, 2021:

“As promised, the next edition of “Faketoshi Craig Wright can’t code C/C++”. We’ll examine this chunk of code. It’s his second attempt at trying to validate user input. See the end of this thread for his (even funnier) first attempt.”

“This new attempt was almost entirely shamelessly plagiarized from the following code (including the comments, which he tried to change *just enough* to avoid being detected):”

“Craig’s **sole contribution** to the code — his only substantive change — was line 51, which he completely screwed up in the most amateur way possible.

Here it is in all its glory:

if( (guess_value < -1) || (guess_value > (RAND_MAX+1)) )”

“That’s right, he changed the perfectly fine bounds in the original to be totally nonsense.

WHY LESS THAN NEGATIVE ONE? Why RAND_MAX *PLUS* 1??

Utter nonsense.”

“Plus, since the atoi function returns 0 if it can’t parse the input, any garbage non-integer input (like ‘dasdasa’) returns 0 and will be treated as a valid guess, which mostly defeats the purpose of validating the input!

He knew this because he literally tried that example!”

“In summary, Craig stole credit for something he didn’t do, and simultaneously ruined it.

BSV, ladies and gentlemen…”

Now why do some people still find Craig Wright somewhat believable when he’s talking tech? It’s the con man’s confidence game. Explained on Reddit here, supported by a very noteworthy post of Peter Rizun (according his current Twitter profile “Chief Scientist, Bitcoin Unlimited.”).

“Part of CSW’s power comes from the fact that 99+% of his listeners have no clue whether he is speaking gibberish or legitimate technobabble. I find this account from Peter Rizun informative (and as a CSW is Faketoshi believer, I find it comforting)”

“I gave him the benefit of the doubt for a long time (even though I couldn’t parse a single technical thing he ever wrote). We actually met in person once in Vancouver at a nChain office. It was this meeting that made it clear to me that he was making stuff up.

First, he told me how great my work was and suggested that we write a paper on his selfish mining findings together (as co-authors). I said something like “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong and that Eyal & Sirer are perfectly correct. But, I’d still like to try to understand your argument for why selfish mining is a fallacy.”

He walked me over to a whiteboard, and then proceeded to scribble a few blocks connected as a chain. He looked at me and said something oddly technical: “You’re obviously familiar with the properties of Erlang and negative binomial distributions.”

That’s the point I knew he was a bullshitter. He intentionally asked the question in a way designed to make me feel dumb so that I might be too embarrassed to answer ‘no.’ I responded “Not really.”

He smirked and half laughed.

I then said “but I am very familiar with the math required to understand selfish mining, let’s work together on the board.” I proceeded to try get to a point where we agreed on even a single technical thing about bitcoin mining, but it was impossible. I said “OK, let’s imagine a selfish miner solves a block and keeps it hidden. Do you agree that the probability that he solves the next block is equal to his fraction of the hash rate, alpha?”

He retorted: “Well that’s sort of true but its really just an approximation. You’re not looking at the problem from the proper perspective of IIDs.”

I replied back “What’s an IID?”

He laughed to himself again, this time louder, and told me that he had assumed my math skills were better than what I was presenting to him. He said IIDs are “processes that are independent and identically distributed.”

I replied back: “Oh, you mean like how mining is memoryless, right? Yeah, I understand processes like that. So OK forget about the hidden block, do you agree that the probability that the selfish miner finds the next block is equal to alpha?”

And again he would say something like “Peter, you obviously don’t understand IIDs and negative binomials, but I have a paper coming out soon that will help you to understand what I’m saying.” And I’m thinking to myself that he hasn’t actually said anything at all.

The conversation went nowhere for a while like this with him dropping technobabble terms like it was going out of style. At the end, we had not agreed on a single technical fact about bitcoin mining. I wondered why he drew those blocks on the whiteboard, since he never actually referenced them in the conversation, but I decided not to ask.

I can’t figure out if he’s a crank that believes he makes sense, or if he’s an actor and this is all part of some bigger con that I don’t understand.”

Then there was this occassion in August 2018 where Craig Wright made a major slip up on base58, a little but important invention of Satoshi Nakamoto that he coded into Bitcoin. Twitter member WuCoin explains.

“#Faketoshi: I coded base58 in bitcoin. Also Faketoshi: Why not use 0 in a bitcoin address?

(The purpose of base58 encoding is to exclude similar characters like ‘0’ & ‘O’ from bitcoin addresses. Satoshi is credited with inventing it, there is NO WAY he would think 0 was valid.)”

Source: https://twitter.com/hascendp6/status/1441899149662720001

No, the “Arthur” down right on the image above, replying “Holy fucking shit have you ever used Bitcoin” to Craig Wright is NOT the undersigned.

And while typing out this article on December 30, 2021, another interesting anecdote comes in hot from the press. Roger Ver, once a respected Bitcoin OG, but who now has lost all his reputation since 2015 when he started supporting Craig Wright and, since August 2017, is behind the Bitcoin Cash altcoin project that ultimately spawned the BSV altcoin in November 2018, just made the following comment a few hours ago on Reddit about why he stopped believing the Faketoshi lie in 2018.

Roger Ver his nick on Reddit is ‘MemoryDealers’.

Yes, you read that correctly.

“CSW didn’t even know that Bitcoin addresses have a checksum built in.”

Amen. What is a checksum in a Bitcoin address again? Checksum is a sort of cryptographical function in the Bitcoin code that allows verifying if a Bitcoin address is spelled correctly. It’s a utility that supports identifying typing or other errors, in order to avoid Bitcoin users losing funds by sending bitcoins to a Bitcoin address that is poorly spelled.

As Adam P Goucher (mathematician specialising in computational geometry, topological data analysis, and machine learning, known from his epic take down of Craig Wright’s bogus May 2, 2016 Sartre post) puts it in more technical terminology on Twitter:

“A checksum isn’t generally considered ‘cryptographic’ because it protects against accidental damage rather than deliberate tampering. The checksums in both base58-formatted addresses and BIP39 mnemonics _are_ based on cryptographic hash functions, but they’re truncated to 4 bytes so lose the strong cryptographic guarantees of the original hash function. It is, of course, still perfectly useful _as a checksum_, but it’s interesting that they don’t use a more conventional checksum such as CRC-32. My guess is that it’s because Satoshi had already implemented a double-sha256 function in the bitcoin source code, and it was quicker to reuse this rather than to implement a different primitive such as CRC-32.”

Of course Satoshi Nakamoto knows

Bitcoin had the checksum feature on public addresses from the very first release in January 2009, and starting with version v0.2.9, released on May 26, 2010 by Satoshi Nakamoto on SourceForge, introduced even more checksum features in the Bitcoin protocol.

And Craig Wright, the wannabe Satoshi Nakamoto, didn’t even know all this. Just like he was lying in a late 2018 CoinTelegraph Hodler’s Digest interview about Satoshi never mentioning decentralization.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Muy7pDw_rEU

Well… let’s see about that, shall we? And… oopsie! Satoshi Nakamoto actually mentioned Bitcoin being “completely decentralized” on the P2P Foundation forum on February 11, 2009:

“I’ve developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust.”

Only to add four days later that in his opinion, Bitcoin would be doomed if it was centrally controlled:

And… CUT! The narrator would stop the video tape here, and interrupt the scene with a cartoonesque figure repeatedly slapping his forehead about this overwhelming technical incompetence of our Faketoshi, before continuing with the takedown of Craig Wright’s false Bitcoin whitepaper story.

3. Craig Wright and ‘his’ Bitcoin whitepaper: The Lies, The Forgeries

So, how about Craig Wright writing the Bitcoin whitepaper? We noticed some forged material related to the Bitcoin whitepaper in the BlackNet design history section already. But there’s much, much more to tell about this subject. Let’s map out a (probably still incomplete) history of Craig’s ever failing attempts to link himself to the Bitcoin whitepaper.

For many, this independant debunk by CCN in their article “Text Analysis Confirms Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto” is of course already proof enough that Craig Wright did not write the Bitcoin whitepaper:

“IBT tapped Juola & Associates, a Pittsburgh, Pa.-based company that uses a technique known as stylometry to determine the authors of anonymous texts. Juola compared Wright’s writing with texts that are attributed to Nakamoto. The company has been tracking Nakamoto’s texts for years. John Noecker, the chief scientist at Juola & Associates, said he does not believe Wright authored the bitcoin white paper, based on linguistic texts. He used an analysis tool called Envelope that condenses millions of linguistic features the company has studied for years.”

There is however much more to say about this whitepaper subject. Let’s go.

As always, Andrew O’Hagan’s long form article The Satoshi Affair is a great guidance again, now to find the roots of Craig’s Bitcoin whitepaper lies and forgeries. In 2016, when the BlackNet lie took off as we learned from The Satoshi Affair, Craig Wright also involved Dave Kleiman in his false Bitcoin whitepaper story, unsurprisingly supported with a backdated email forgery. And that email forgery has a very interesting history… It comes in two versions!

“When I asked to see the emails between him and Kleiman, he shrugged. He said he wasn’t getting on well with his first wife when he wrote them and I assumed that meant they were full of talk about her. ‘Just edit them down for me,’ I said.

‘I don’t know if I can find them,’ he said. But I wouldn’t let it go and eventually he sent me a selection and they certainly seem to be authentic. A few of the emails were obviously the same as those quoted in the Wired and Gizmodo stories before Christmas. Wright always said these stories had been provoked by a ‘leak’, the work of a disgruntled employee of his who had stolen a hard drive. In any case, the emails he sent me show a pair of men with shadowy habits — socially undernourished men, I’d say, with a high degree of intellectual ability — operating in a world where the line between inventing and scamming is not always clear. The first email Wright sent me was from 27 November 2007, when he was working for the Sydney accountancy firm BDO Kendalls and the two men were working on a paper on ‘Cookies in Internet Banking’. ‘Next year Dave, we come out with something big. I will tell you, but not now,’ he wrote to Kleiman on 22 December 2007. Kleiman’s reply told him what he was reading — ‘Sagan, Feynman, Einstein’ — and added: ‘I hope we make an event together this year so we can “break some bread” and have a casual conversation, instead of the brain dump middle of the night email exchanges we normally have.’ On 1 January 2008, Wright closed an email: ‘Nothing now, but I want your help on something big soon.’

The subject of bitcoin came up — quite starkly — in an email from Wright dated 12 March 2008. ‘I need your help editing a paper I am going to release later this year. I have been working on a new form of electronic money. Bit cash, bitcoin … you are always there for me Dave. I want you to be part of it all. I cannot release it as me. GMX, vistomail and Tor. I need your help and I need a version of me to make this work that is better than me.’ Wright told me that he did the coding and that Kleiman helped him to write the white paper and make the language ‘serene’. With a protocol as clever as the one underlying bitcoin, you would imagine the work was complex and endlessly discussed. But Wright says they mainly talked about it by direct message and by phone. Wright had been fired from his job at BDO (the crash was taking effect) and had retired with his then wife, Lynn, and many computers to a farm in Port Macquarie. It was there, Wright says, that he did the majority of the work on bitcoin and where he spoke to Kleiman most regularly. The Satoshi white paper, ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, was published on a cryptography mailing list on 31 October 2008.

On 27 December 2008, Wright wrote to Kleiman: ‘My wife will not be happy, but I am not going back to work. I need time to get my idea going … The presentation was good and the paper is out. I am already getting shit from people and attacks on what we did. The bloody bastards are wrong and I fricken showed it, they should stick to the science and piss off with their politicised crap. I need your help. You edited my paper and now I need to have you aid me build this idea.’ Wright told me that it took several attempts to get the protocol up and running. He began to test it early in January 2009. ‘That was where the real money started rolling in,’ he told me. The originating block in the blockchain — the file that provably records every transaction ever made — is called the Genesis block. ‘There were actually a few versions of the Genesis block,’ Wright told me. ‘It fucked up a few times and we reviewed it a few times. The Genesis block is the one that didn’t crash.’”

No mentioning of Microsoft patch Tuesday fucking up Genesis block, Craig? Oh wait, that was a debunked lie of three years later, got it.

Seriously though. Make no mistake now. Over the course of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, ALL the Dave-Craig-Bitcoin related emails were found to be backdated forgeries.

ALL OF THEM.

Now let’s go back to the roots of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. In their very first filing (of the Complaint papers that were served to Craig Wright on February 14, 2018), we find the mention of a March 2008 email on page 12, which is supposed to contain the text “I need your help editing a paper I am going to release later this year. I have been working on a new form of electronic money. Bit cash, Bitcoin…”. The footnote (8) refers to the December 8, 2015 Gizmodo article. Of course, we recognize this email from The Satoshi Affair too.

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/1/kleiman-v-wright/

Following the Gizmodo trail, it doesn’t take much effort to find this email in the public domain, with a Gizmodo watermark.

Source: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/knlyk7dpjqucpmiojhs8.png

This very same email also ended up in the Kleiman v Wright case, as part of a filing of exhibits related to a Craig Wright’s deposition.

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/270/3/kleiman-v-wright/

Note though that this email is sent from the ‘information-defense.com’ domain (visible in both the Gizmodo and the Kleiman v Wright version), a domain that Craig Wright only obtained on January 23, 2009.

Oops.

Source: https://domainbigdata.com/information-defense.com

However, on May 14, 2018, in their Amended Complaint, we find Kleiman’s counsel rephrasing the March 2008 email. It appears that Ira Kleiman was sent a “copy” on March 6, 2014.

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/24/kleiman-v-wright/

Unfortunately, at the moment of writing this email has not been made public (yet) in the CourtListener court docket. Might be related to Ira Kleiman’s promise on March 7, 2014 to delete or at least encrypt these emails after reading?

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/17/kleiman-v-wright/

However, from the emails shown above, and the trial transcripts, we know that this “copy” of the ‘editing Bit cash whitepaper’ email was sent to Ira Kleiman on March 6, 2014 from the ‘rcjbr.org’ domain, a domain that Craig Wright only obtained on November 2, 2011. So there’s another oops, again.

Source: https://domainbigdata.com/rcjbr.org

EDIT February 17, 2022 Begin

The RCJBR.org version of this email was actually filed in Kleiman v Wright, but hard to find because of redaction of the domain. Now added for completion and more context.

Source: Page 102 of https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/550/4/kleiman-v-wright/

And here we notice something interesting. The title of the email “Defamation and the difficulties of law on the internet” actually refers to a mailing list entry that Craig Wright started on March 5, 2008 on the SECLISTS.org website.

Source: https://seclists.org/basics/2008/Mar/42 (Archive Today: https://archive.fo/TELEg)

On March 12, 2008 Dave Kleiman replied on the SECLISTS.org mailing list with the “Hats off to you Craig,” post. That was the last reply in that public thread, and Craig used this email as the basis for his “I need your help editing a paper I am going to release later this year.” email forgery.

Source: https://seclists.org/basics/2008/Mar/147 (Archive Today: https://archive.fo/B13mW)

Also note that Craig Wright made a blog entry on his private blog “Cracked, inSecure and Generally Broken” with the same content on March 5, 2008.

Source: https://archive.fo/udHpC

Now let’s revisit one of Craig Wright’s depositions in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. A deposition where Craig goes to great lengths to find excuses of the “the dog ate my homework” type when it comes his email addresses, specifically the RCJBR.org one that he used to email with Ira Kleiman in March 2014. Link to this deposition at the end of the quotes.

“Q. Dr. Wright, I am going to upload into the drop box what you produced in this litigation as defense 115950; do you have that up?
(Exhibit Defense 115950 referred to)
A. Yes.
Q. Dr. Wright, do you recognize this as an e-mail chain between yourself and Ira Kleiman?
A. I see that it is an e-mail purporting to be from Ira Kleiman to myself.
Q. On or about March 11, 2014?
A. I see that date on the e-mail.
Q. Go down to e-mail on Friday March 7, 2014 from you on the fourth page?
A. I am on the fourth page.
Q. You see the e-mail says: “Ira, what is true?”
A. No, I see text that you are purporting is an e-mail.
Q. This is a copy of an e-mail that you produced to us?
A. No, it is documents that come from machines that my lawyers were given. You are saying that it is from me. It is not from me.
Q. Do you have any reason to believe these correspondence are not genuine?
A. Yes.
Q. What are those reasons?
A. I have seen this before.
Q. Why is it not genuine?
A. A series of e-mails from various people have been edited. I have noticed these — I will not go into discussions with my lawyers — but analysis has been done on several e-mails and there are edits made to multiple e-mails from me, both on the hotwire account that I was no longer able to access in April as well as purporting to be from myself, coming from a Brisbane address when I was not there.
Q. This is an e-mail RCJBR from 2014, not from either of those accounts, so why do you believe this e-mail is not genuine?
A. (1) that is not what I just said. I didn’t say only hotwire, I said hotwire and others, so you cannot say not from any of those accounts because that is not correct. (2) this is not an e-mail, this is a part of an e-mail stream that comes from Ira.
Q. Dr. Wright, you produced this to us, that is why it is Bates labeled DEFAUS 115933.
MR. RIVERO: Objection.
MR. FREEDMAN: I do not think there is much utility in us discussing this. Do you see in the e-mail where it says “I had math skills and some coding that frankly was crud”.
A. What I see is a document seized from Australia after I had left Australia. This is a document on machines that had nothing to do with me. What you have seized is evidence that people in Australia were falsely accessing and altering e-mails, people who later ended up fired, and basically you are saying e-mails that you purport to be real being held between people who had sought to shut down my companies, that were captured in Australia when I was no longer in Australia, when my computers were not in Australia that have been given to you, and you are saying that they are from me when there was no way I could have sent them.
MR. RIVERO: I am going to preserve an authenticity objection, but you need to answer the questions about the documents. So, if go ahead and answer the question, I will assert and preserve an authenticity objection to the use of the documents. Please answer the questions.
A. I see a sentence that I did not type.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. You can see the sentence where it says “Dave could edit his way to hell and back”?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you not agree with that statement now?
MR. RIVERO: Objection to the form.
A. No, I do not agree with that sentence.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Did you type that?
A. I did not type that.
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Somebody else saved this e-mail?
MR. RIVERO: Objection.
A. This is not an e-mail from me, this is a machine copied from an Australian employee.
Q. What is the name of the Australian employee?
A. I do not know, I do not know which machine this comes from, I haven’t been given anything more than a number.
Q. Do you see where it says Satoshi was a team?
A. I see that.
Q. You just told me Satoshi was not a team?
A. Satoshi was not a team.
Q. Why are you contradicting yourself?
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
A. Again, you are seeking to have me lie by saying that Satoshi was a team when Satoshi was not a team. As I have said, this is not what I sent. You did not get this from me, you got it from an ex-staff member in Australia after I had left the country from a machine I did not own.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Actually we got this from you. Let us go to the second part of that sentence where it says “without the other part of that team, he died”. Do you see that?
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
A. I see that and I will state that, no, you did not get this from me, you got it from my counsel.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Why did you write “without the other part of that team, he died” if previously you just emphasized to me that Satoshi did not die when Dave died?
A. Because I did not write that sentence.
MR. RIVERO: Objection to form, argumentative. Please answer.
A. As I said, I did not write that sentence.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Where did your counsel get these documents if they did not come from you?
A. I believe that they were captured from Australia, I do not know the exact machines that they got them from. I did not, I was not involved with all the sources that they got them from.
Q. Did you have any e-mail communications with Ira?
A. I had some, yes.
Q. Is this one of those e-mail communications you had with Ira?
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
A. No, seeing as I did not type this e-mail it was not one of the ones I had with Ira.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, did Dave Kleiman write the Bitcoin code?
A. Dave Kleiman could not code.
Q. Dr. Wright, I am uploading to the drop box two different files, control 1268220 and control 1277609.
(Exhibits control 1268220 and control 1277609 referred to)
Q. How am I supposed to know which communications you had with Ira were real and which ones were not real?
A. If you are going to ask me about the things that I said I did not or did not do, then that is what generally you would do as part of your job. If I say no, I didn’t have that, then I say no, I didn’t have that. You could also analyze some of the documentation and where they came from and sources, and things that did not come from my computers would not be something that I would trust.
Q. The only way for us to know if this is a real document is if you say that is accurate.
MR. RIVERO: Objection. Can you say which document? I have lost track of the number we are talking about.
MR. FREEDMAN: DEFAUS 115950.
MR. RIVERO: The same one.
MR. FREEDMAN: The same one Dr. Wright — -
A. Yes.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Are you saying the only way for us to know if a document is real is if you say it is real?
A. That is not what I said, nor implied.
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. How else aside from your say-so can we know — how else can we know, besides from your say-so that a document you have produced to us is real?
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
A. The document my counsel have produced from various sources and what you would have is e-mails from Ira Kleiman and you would have to start analyzing some of those. The ones received, etc. Even then you would have to analyze the source and other such things. You would not pick e-mails that I had supposedly given you in a stream. You would pick the original, as Mr. Ira Kleiman had, and start forensically examining that, looking at the source, the IP address, where it was done, showing that I was in that location or whatever else, which is not this.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Are you aware that you are listed a custodian for this document?
MR. RIVERO: Sorry, I could not hear the question.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Are you aware that you are listed as the custodian for this document?
MR. RIVERO: Object to the form.
A. No, I do not — —

[<<snip>>]

Q. The e-mail we looked at which was previously DEFAUS 115950 also came from Craig at RCJBR.org e-mail account. We are now in 2017, almost three years later, and you are still claiming that someone else is writing this e-mail, is that accurate?
MR. RIVERO: Objection, mischaracterizing the testimony. Dr. Wright, answer that if you can.
A. Again, you are making the Craig@RCJBR.org[note: email address partly redacted in the transcript, but from the context we know it is RCJBR.org] means that it came from the account. You are mischaracterizing how e-mail works, you’re failing to understand or accept that it is very easy to spoof and forward e-mail or even that this has been analyzed and that I have seen anything showing that it came from me.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. This is not your — —
A. Sorry, I did not hear.
Q. Is this e-mail fake?
A. Looking at a PDF does not allow me to say this e-mail is fake. Someone could have jumped on or hacked my machine, I do not know that. I do know that we have a complaint with the UK police about a hacking at the moment that has occurred, and I also know that I cannot say whether this is a doctored copy of an e-mail or a hacked e-mail from a PDF.
Q. Did you send this e-mail?
A. No, I was not communicating with Ira Kleiman.
Q. Do you still have the e-mail address Craig@RCJBR.org?
[note: email address partly redacted in the transcript, but from the context we know it is RCJBR.org]
A. I have recently re-enabled that.
Q. When did you not have it?
A. It was disabled at the end of 2015,
I do not remember exactly when it was re-enabled.
Q. Was Dave one of the three key people behind Bitcoin?
A. No.
Q. I am uploading to the share file Kleiman 8178.
(Exhibit Kleiman 8178 referred to)
A. It is still loading.
Q. Page 1.
A. The e-mail is up.

Q. Do you see an e-mail in the middle page February 11, 2014 from craig.wright@hotwirepe.com? [note: email address partly redacted in the transcript, but from the original email we know it is hotwirepe.com]
A. No, I do not see the e-mail I see the text that purports to be that from a forwarded document, craig.wright@hotwirepe.com[note: email address partly redacted in the transcript, but from the original email we know it is hotwirepe.com] was a joint CEO account.
Q. Do you see where it says “hello Louis, your son Dave and I are two of the three key people behind Bitcoin”?
A. Yes, I see that.
Q. Did you type that?
A. No, I did not.
Q. Who typed it?
A. If it was sent directly from my e-mail account, possibly Angela.
Q. Angela who, what is her last name?
A. Demitrio, she was my EA, I apologize if I am pronouncing it wrong, it has been many years.
Q. Why would she have typed that?
A. She was my EA. I had requested people to reach out to Louis Kleiman; Uyen Nguyen had found Louis’s contact details and I had requested my staff to send an e-mail contacting him saying that Dave had shares in Coin-Exch, that his estate basically needs to transfer and that Mr. Kleiman, David Kleiman, was very important to me, he had been my best friend and to reach out to his family.
Q. Angela came up with the idea that “Dave and I are two of the three key people behind Bitcoin”; is that your testimony?
A. No, that is not what I said.
Q. Did you tell Angela to write those words or the sub-state to those words?
A. No, I did not.
Q. Where did she understand to write that?
A. My guess would be speaking to Uyen Nguyen, possibly other people at the organization at the time.
Q. Dr. Wright, I believe the record will reflect that at your first deposition I handed you this e-mail and I asked if you recognized it. You told me it was a printout of an e-mail and then I asked you “did you write” and you responded “I typed that”. Is that your testimony?
A. That is a mischaracterization. You asked me a particular sentence. You did not say whether I typed that e-mail. You said a particular sentence — literally one sentence in this e-mail — and say “did you type that”. In discussions with my lawyers, I typed that exact sentence. When discussing between Amanda — -
MR. RIVERO: Dr. Wright, please do not talk about discussions with your lawyers. Please answer.
A. Without going into the discussions, we had — I just need to formulate how I say it without saying my discussions — I had pointed out evidence that my lawyers — I keep hitting discussion points. I discussed that sentence and I typed that sentence. I did not type the whole e-mail. As you know, and as you have pointed out yourself several times, I am overly literal. You asked me had I typed that sentence. Yes, I have typed that sentence.
Q. Did you mean it when you typed it?
A. I meant to type what I typed when I was discussing evidence with my counsel. I did not mean that I typed that e-mail.
MR. RIVERO: Dr. Wright, I have to be careful that you do not waive privilege. Do not discuss communications with counsel.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, I want to understand what exactly it is you are telling me. I asked you, and it says “hello Louis, your son Dave and I” — let me back up. I am going to read from the transcript for you.
A. Please do.
Q. “Q. Do you recall reaching out to Louis Kleiman in February 2014? A. I do not remember the exact date but some time around then, yes. Q. I am handing you what we can mark as plaintiff’s exhibit 2, this is documentary 83–23, do you recognize this e-mail on the second half of page 2? A. I recognize the printout of the e-mail. By Mr. Freedman Q. It says ‘hello Louis, your son Dave and I are two of the three key people behind Bitcoin’. Did you write that? A. I typed that. Q. Who is the third person? A. It is one of those things. Ms. Marko. Okay. Dr. Wright is not in a position to answer that question. We will provide a full some explanation to the court in camera.” Do you recall that back and forth?
A. Which is exactly what I just told you. I recollected my deposition correctly — 
Q. I just asked if you recall the testimony. Please keep your answer to what I am asking you.
A. I am. Would you like me to answer or do you want to interrupt me again?
Q. Go ahead, please answer.
A. It was exactly what I just told you. My recollection was completely correct of the first deposition. You asked me did I type that sentence? That is a question literally meaning have I ever typed that sentence. In a response to my lawyers where I said in the e-mail sentence — which I will not discuss because my lawyer will object — I typed that sentence. So, the correct answer to “did you type that
2 sentence?” Yes, because did “you type this” is not the e-mail, it is a sentence. You did not say “did you type or did you create or did you produce that e-mail?”
Q. In response to my showing you an e-mail and asking you whether or not you typed a sentence of it you purposively misled me to think that you had just typed one sentence of it in a conversation with your lawyers but you did not mean to answer that you had actually typed that e-mail?
A. You are again misconstruing my answer. I have put you on notice that I have Asperger’s, I have autism, I am literal, this is, under the American Disability Act, a registered disability. I have a disability. I am utterly literal. You have in this case pulled me up saying “you are a very literal person, Dr. Wright”. You have many times made that statement. You recognize the complete literalness of my answers. You asked me, as a disabled person under the American Disability Act, whether a disability I have is a problem for you, and you are accusing me of lying because I do not look people in the eye, because that is part of my disability, you are accusing me of lying because well basically I literally answered the exact question that you asked me, literally. Is that what you are saying? Are you saying you are objecting because of my disability and the fact that I literally answer?
Q. Dr. Wright — 
MR. RIVERO: Do me a favour, just answer the questions. I forgot what the question was, but just answer the question.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. We will move on. Did you write that sentence in an e-mail to Louis Kleiman?
A. No.“ — Craig Wright, Vel Freedman (deposition March 16, 2020)

EDIT February 17, 2022 End

Another hilarious moment about this RCJBR.org version of the email arrived during the Kleiman v Wright trial in November 2021. Because although forensic expert Dr Edman stated in one of his reports that all Craig-Dave-Bitcoin emails appear to be forgeries (and when asked by Ira’s counsel during trial: “For all the forgeries we’re going to examine today and tomorrow morning, have you seen any evidence that any of those forgeries were created by anyone but Craig Wright?”, Dr Edman answered: “I have not.”), it appeared that this March 12, 2008 email from the rcjbr.org domain was not specifically contested over the course of the lawsuit.

Yet.

So who debunked this email in the end, during trial, while questioning Dr Edman, because they needed to prove that there was no Bitcoin partnership between Craig Wright and Dave Kleiman?

You guessed it: Craig’s own counsel debunked Craig’s own forgery!

Kleiman v Wright trial transcript November 16, 2021

Now what does this tell us, these two variations on the same forgery theme? It appears as if Craig created this email forgery first in March 2014 on his rcjbr.org domain, send it to Ira Kleiman, but in 2015 he realized the monstrous timeline mistake, so he recreated the same forgery on the information-defense.com domain (but made AGAIN a, less obvious, timeline mistake in the process) for the Wired/Gizmodo dox package that they received in November 2015.

In a September 2021 COPA filing we find Craig Wright claiming the email was sent from ridges-estate.com

Isn’t it funny to notice how Craig’s hackers change the domain of that infamous March 2008 “I need your help editing a paper” email depending the situation (Ira Kleiman 2014, Wired/Gizmodo 2015, COPA 2021)? But all fun aside, again, make no mistake about who created these forgeries. Dr Edman mentioned it already, there is no evidence that anyone else but Craig Wright created all the forgeries. Of course, Dr Edman speaks for Ira Kleiman who has relentlessly been trying to prove fraudulent activities by Craig Wright.

But who doesn’t remember Magistrate Judge Reinhart’s ruling with many credibility findings, credibility findings which were affirmed by Federal Judge Bloom in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, one of which was: “Dr Wright willfully created the fraudulent documents.”, as it was found that only Craig Wright had, repeatedly, all the means, motives, incentives and opportunity to create the ‘fraudulent documents’?

May 2019: Craig Wright files copyright claim on Bitcoin code and whitepaper

This event caused quite the turmoil, including a, temporary, firm price jump of the BSV altcoin. Online media outlet Decrypt kept their feet on the ground though, and reported in their May 21, 2019 article Craig Wright files copyright claim for Bitcoin white paper: “Craig Wright insists the US Government now ‘recognizes’ him as the author of the Bitcoin white paper. But he’s merely filled out an application form. […] A closer look, however, reveals that there is no “government agency recognition” of Wright’s supposed credentials — registering a copyright, it turns out, is something anybody can do and involves no official oversight.”

And indeed. Even Copyright Office, recognizing the turmoil in the market, couldn’t help releasing no less than two press statements about Craig Wright’s claim registrations.

“In a case in which a work is registered under a pseudonym, the Copyright Office does not investigate whether there is a provable connection between the claimant and the pseudonymous author.”

August 22, 2019: Craig Wright doubles down, and uploads a forgery of the Bitcoin whitepaper on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) website.

CoinDesk on that event:

“Similarly, Wright’s posting of Satoshi’s white paper on the SSRN is unlikely to give his claim to have invented bitcoin any more validity, but seems to be an attempt to populate the web with authoritative-looking instances of his claim.

Some commentators have further claimed[note: link to beautiful tweetstorm by Twitter member jimmy007forsure] that the metadata of the paper posted by Wright has been altered to display a different date of creation.”

In April 2021, the non-profit organization Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance (COPA), raised by Jack Dorsey’s Square company but now representing over 30 Bitcoin industry members, filed a lawsuit against Craig Wright after his counsel started to send letters around(*) in which Craig threatened to start enforcing his false copyright claims.

(*) “Wright’s representatives sent Square a cease-and-desist notice dated Jan. 21, 2021, demanding that Square stop hosting the white paper on its site. At the time, COPA sent back a legal response on behalf of Square, which boiled down to this: Prove you’re Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the white paper first. It does not appear Wright responded with the requested proof by the Feb. 19 deadline COPA set.” — CoinDesk

“Today, COPA initiated a lawsuit asking the UK High Court to declare that Mr. Craig Wright does not have copyright ownership over the Bitcoin White Paper. We stand in support of the Bitcoin developer community and the many others who’ve been threatened for hosting the White Paper.” — COPA tweet.

November 2021: Bombshell Monday!

But first this. It appears that around May 2019, just having started his libel suits against several Bitcoin community members like Adam Back, Peter McCormack and hodlonaut, Craig Wright needed new and/or additional “evidence” of his Satoshi-ness, more in line with the true Bitcoin history, in which Satoshi started with Bitcoin in 2007. From here onward, we find Craig creating fresh, new forgeries that pop up in the lawsuits that he’s involved with.

For example, from the Kleiman v Wright trial period in November/December 2021 — the day with Craig Wright on the stand was famously dubbed ‘Bombshell Monday’ — we learned about this meeting notes forgery, by its appearance created by Craig Wright in 2019 but backdated to August 2007. Craig obviously didn’t dare to mention a more specific date, as that could lead to an inquiry where the result ends up being: the other attendee, Allan Granger (when will Craig learn to spell his name right?), wasn’t even in office that day, let alone in his “Room”!

During the Kleiman v Wright trial, Craig Wright was questioned about this forgery by his own counsel on November 22, 2021 morning session. A long list of shameless lies followed.

“BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. Sir, can you tell us what — just as to the nature of the documents, are these — is this a form from the BDO — used at the BDO Seidman company?
A. Yes, it is. It’s a minute — meeting minutes note from BDO when I was employed there.
Q. Whose handwriting is on this document?
A. It’s mine.
Q. And the date, sir?
A. August ‘07.
MR. RIVERO: Your Honor, I’d move the admission of Defendant’s 164.
THE COURT: Is there any objection?
MR. FREEDMAN: No objection, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Admitted into evidence.
(Defendant’s Exhibit 164 received into evidence.)
MR. RIVERO: If we could show the jury Defendant’s Exhibit 164.
BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. Now, sir, please explain — first of all, let’s just look at the form itself. This has, at the very bottom — 
MR. RIVERO: Mr. Reed, if you could pull out just the Quill logo, so that we could see it.
BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. What is that?
A. That’s the logo from a company called Quill. They’re a — they’re large in UK and Australia. That logo is not the current one. They changed it in ‘08.
Q. So sir, is this a document that was used internally at BDO or was it a form document?
A. It’s the internal meeting notes.
Q. Okay. But my question is not that. My question is — I understand that’s internal meeting notes. But was the form itself — not the writing — was it something that the business was providing or something you brought from outside?
A. It’s stationery from the company.
Q. Okay. And so this stationery from the company would have: “Minutes.” And then states: “Meeting venue, attendees” — apologies — it just has a sort of fill-in-the-blank kind of thing; is that right?
A. Yes.
Q. All right, sir. And this — where did this occur? Where did this meeting occur?
A. This occurred in Allan Granger’s office. He had a meeting room like with a side thing as a partner. I had a meeting between him and myself. I’m not sure if this particular meeting I had some of my staff actually there or not. It doesn’t seem to be. They are not noted.
Q. And did you make notes of this meeting?
A. I put down a project timeline that was agreed. Allan let me go off and do my project partly in work time, partly on my own. And gave me deadlines, and I agreed to those deadlines.
Q. What were you proposing to Allan Granger — by the way, let me make sure I understand. Are these notes the agenda that you want to talk with Allan Granger about or are they the result of your discussion with Allan Granger?
A. They’re the result. This is what we agreed to.
Q. What were you describing here to Allan Granger?
A. So basically, on line 1, I had a deadline to finish the code by August ’08. I’d already started coding and already had some of the code from Lasseters.
Q. Yeah. Dr. Wright, are you proposing something to do with what becomes later Bitcoin?
A. I am.
Q. All right. When you say in line 1: “Finish code,” and you put a date, what do you mean by that note?
A. I mean I agreed to finish the main code of Bitcoin by August 2008.
MR. RIVERO: Okay. If we could again — see the document again. Thank you, Mr. Reed.
BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. What is the second entry: “Finish POC”? What does that mean?
A. Effectively, what I’m doing is the proof client, so the working system. So that that will enable — that’s not POC. That’s “doc.” Sorry. That’s: “Finish doc.” It’s my handwriting. When you said: “POC,” I was thinking of the other — no. This is: “Finish doc,” which would be the whitepaper, by October 2008.
Q. Got it, Dr. Wright. Okay. So that’s not P-O-C. It’s D-O-C?
A. Yeah. Sorry.
Q. What about entry 3?
A. Entry 3 is: “Run up of the test system,” which were nodes in the computer room for the company in Sydney. At that point, there had been test systems using equipment in BDO.
Q. Let me ask you a question. The entries up to now had a “C” in this third column. This one has “AG.” What does that refer to?
A. Allan Granger. Allan was one of the partners. He was the partner in charge of the computer operations at BDO Australia-wide. And without his sign-off no access to the network would be possible.

[Note: this all isn’t mentioned on Allan his BDO profile page from the time.]

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20060923174744/https://www.bdo.com.au/insidepage.asp?SectionID=2&SubmenuID=241&SubcatID=211#

Q. And — got it. Let’s look at entry 4.
MR. RIVERO: Mr. Reed, we may have to show just below it. I think this goes outside of the box. Yeah.
BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. What is this in reference to?
A. “Set timechain in action.” The original name I gave to Bitcoin was timechain.
Q. All right. Let’s look at entry 5. What does this mean: “Have P2P”?
A. It goes over to the next line too. It should be: “Have P2P eCash.”
Q. What does that mean?
A. The concept here — as I said, eCash was a very centralized controlled system that allowed it now to be fragile. So using peer-to-peer — I know that looks like “D,” but they’re actually my “Ps” — eCash would be a distributed system where, after an initial issue, the distribution of all the tokens would be done by a contract. So this is what that’s referring to.
Q. Okay. And then let’s look at the next entry. What does this mean?
A. “As paper.” So that would follow — so it’s documenting.
Q. Okay. And then, sir, there’s a reference on line 7 with your initial to: “Write paper.” What is that a reference to?
A. That says that the final paper would be then documented after the code in the July, August time frame.
Q. Okay. And then if we can just look at the next line. What does this mean?
A. That should continue with the next one as well. But the graph model I wanted to propose to the University of Newcastle, where I was doing a master’s degree in statistics — I wanted to do the modeling of the network for Bitcoin as a thesis. Unfortunately, it got rejected. But the idea here — my team
was there and I worked with Ignatius Payne, who was one of my staff members, who was a network — sort of like — not networks as in networks, but network mathematics. And he helped me with coding some of the mathematics behind this.
Q. And sir, let me ask — 
MR. RIVERO: Mr. Reed, if we can just see the whole document.
BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. Let me just go back to that first line. Had you or had you not started coding at the time of this meeting?
A. I already had, yes.
Q. When did you start coding the Bitcoin blockchain?
A. In the beginning of ’07, although I had already had some of the code from earlier with Lasseters software.
Q. And what language did you code in?
A. It’s C++, but the script language that’s built in is actually based on Forth.
Q. And sir, I’ll come back to put us in August of 2007. But when approximately did you finish the coding, whatever that means in this context?
A. I finished the coding a bit earlier than this. It says August, but it would have been by about March or April. What I hadn’t chosen was the graph model parameters. So I didn’t know how many tokens that — the final 21 million that I decided, I didn’t know that I would have 10 minutes as a block time. I didn’t know how the difficulty would change. So basically, I’d done a random program allowing me to plug values in, so I could then play with the software and see how it would work.
Q. And that was — that without the variables that — those other factors that you just talked about, that was approximately done by March or April of 2008. Is that what you’re saying?
A. Yes.
Q. Sir, what — BDO did not accept ultimately this proposal for their participation; isn’t that right?
A. No. And I got enough people with their backs up that when the financial crisis happened they were very happy to give me a redundancy package. And some of the — Allan was very unhappy, but some of the other staff were very happy to see me go.
Q. When was that, when you were out at BDO?
A. I took the redundancy in December of 2008.
Q. And just — the financial crisis you’re talking about, is that the financial crisis that some may recall from the early Fall of 2008? Is that what you’re referring to?
A. Yes.
Q. Now, sir, had you — prior to this time, had you formed any relationship — did you have any friends in the time up to this August of 2007?
MR. FREEDMAN: Objection. Relevance.
THE COURT: Sustained.
BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. Had you formed a relationship with David Kleiman?
A. I used to talk to him on the phone occasionally and we emailed online.
Q. And did you invite David Kleiman at any time in 2007 to assist with the coding of Bitcoin?
A. No. He couldn’t code.
Q. How many lines of code did you write for the Bitcoin blockchain?
A. All up — that’s a difficult question because there are probably about 32,000, but I pruned a lot. I had had the poker software still in the original version. So there’s stubs from that. And I also had a digital marketplace where I was trying to experiment on that. So both of those were removed from when
I put it live.
Q. So my question is: How many lines of code were in the released blockchain?
A. Between 15 and 16,000.
Q. Did anyone help you prior to March, April 2008 in writing code?
A. Not before that date, no.
Q. Was David Kleiman ever involved in anything to do with the coding, or debugging, or anything like that of Bitcoin up to the time of its release in approximately January 3, 2009?
A. No. Sorry. 2009?
Q. Did I say 2009? Yes. 2009. Yes, sir.
A. I’d asked him to look at the paper. I don’t remember exactly when. That was after I asked Don, my uncle, to look at it.
Q. Right. Sir, I’d ask you to listen to my question. I asked about coding.
A. Coding, no. Sorry.
Q. Now, sir, after you finished the coding of the whitepaper in approximately March, April of 2008, was there a point at which you started working on a paper related to what you were working on?
A. There were — fragments of the paper go back to my 2002 AusIndustry filings for research and development. The first filings I had for a project I called — which was BlackNet, which — because Tim May called it that — go back to that date. So the origins of tokens and crypto credits, and some of
the bits that I self-plagiarized go back that far. The later paper developed and got larger and larger and then got smaller. So yes and no. There are bits of it.
Q. Okay. So my question is: Did you start preparing a paper as to the work you had done after March or April of 2008?
A. So I took that other, basically, group of documentation and then produced a large handwritten paper, first of all. And then continued and then after advice from Don — 
Q. Sir, please just — 
A. Yes.
Q. — answer my question and then I think this will go more smoothly. Sir, let me just go back on one subject. Other than David Kleiman, did anybody help you to code the Bitcoin blockchain before its release on approximately January 3, 2009?
A. Yes.
Q. Who?
A. There are a number of people from the various mailing lists. The main person was Hal Finney.
Q. And sir, I’m referring to the time period before release.
A. Yes. I’d sent not the whole code, but fragments of code to Hal. And Wei Dai, way before this, like in the middle of the year, had sent me code for like some of the cryptographic algorithm, SHA and ECDSA.
Q. Who was Hal Finney?
A. Hal Finney was one of the people who worked on the PGP team and he was an older programmer from America.
Q. Who is Wei Dai?
A. Wei Dai is a professor over here. I’m not sure what university he’s with now.
Q. Now, sir, what was the first — the paper that we’ve been talking about, was it called a whitepaper?
A. Yes. Whitepaper is pretty — 
Q. Why?
A. Basically, whitepaper is a prepublication technical description document.
Q. And when did you have a first draft of the whitepaper? Approximately, what month and what year?
A. If you’re considering the handwritten one, it would be about March of ‘08.
Q. Did you reduce that to a typed version?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. And approximately when did you do that?
A. That would be April, May ‘08.
Q. How long was that typed version?
A. The first version was about 40 pages. The second version was 20. And then — 
Q. Sir, I’m asking about the first version.
A. The first version was about 40 pages.
Q. Who, if anyone, did you share that version with?
A. I shared that, first of all, with Don, my uncle, and Max, a cousin. I also shared a copy — I showed it to a person called Zoren Illievich and a couple other people from universities I was with.
Q. Who is Zoren Illievich?
A. He’s a person who does a lot of government contract work in Canberra, Australia.
Q. And when you say: “Don and Max,” are you referring to Don and Max Lynam?
A. Yes.
Q. And did any of these people, Don, Max, Zoren, or whoever else it is you shared the first version with, make any comment as to that first version?
A. Verbal ones. The main thing I got was it was too long, too convoluted, and too complex.
Q. Who said that to you?
A. Don, Max, Zoren. I think everyone.
Q. What did you do in response — by the way, did you share that version with David Kleiman?
A. Not that version, no.
Q. What did you do in response to the comments you got on the first version of the paper?
A. I pruned it very heavily and cut down the number of pages.
Q. Was there a second version?
A. Yes.
Q. And how long was that one?
A. Probably 20 pages, if I have to remember on that one.
Q. Approximately, when was that prepared? When was that ready?
A. April, May of the same year.
Q. And who, if anyone, did you share the second version with?
A. I would have given that to Gareth Williams. I also gave it to some people at the university I was with in Newcastle, Australia. My wife at the time. And I showed people at BDO at that stage as well.
Q. Did you share that version with David Kleiman?
A. Not that version, no.
Q. Okay. And what, if any, comments did you get as to the second version?
A. Still too complex, too much math.
Q. And what did you do in re — when did you — approximately when did you receive those comments?
A. Around the same time. I sent it back to people and they looked at it, they flicked through it. They said: “It still needs more out.”
Q. And was Don Lynam in the second round?
A. Yes.
Q. And what did you do in response to those comments?
A. I cut it right back to about 10 pages at that stage.
Q. When was that?
A. That would be about May, still of ‘08.
Q. And what did you do with this third version?
A. That was then tidied up quite — at that stage, there were a lot of different versions floating around because I’m not terribly neat and tidy when it comes to how I store my files. And I have different versions of the same, so it wasn’t just one and I tried with a few differences. I didn’t delete them
when I made the change, so I’d just make a change and save. And I had a number of versions that were between nine and 10 pages.
Q. Who did you share that with?
A. One of those went to Wei Dai. One of them went to Gareth Williams, Zoren, some of the people at uni, Allan Granger, Don. Dave Kleiman got a copy. Let’s see. Wei Dai got a copy. Adam Back got a copy, and there are a few others as well.
Q. From that point, were there further comments?
A. Not a lot, no. There were a couple I discussed with Wei Dai. He was more interested in how the code would work. Wei pointed me to a project he had been running called b-money. Wei discussed how b-money was very similar to what I was talking about, but he thought that my project wouldn’t scale. So he thought it would fail.
Q. Did David Kleiman have comments — Kleiman have comments on your paper at this point?
A. We talked about it over Skype, and he thought it was exciting. And he basically told me: “This is great. You’ve been working on this sort of stuff for ages,” and asked about when it’s going to be released, that sort of stuff.
Q. Did he make comments?
A. Not of any real detail, no.
Q. And did he make any proposed — did he transmit any proposed edits?
A. He pointed out some sort of typos and formatting problems that I had when we talked over the phone. There were some line breaks because of the software program I was using at the time that were wrong and a couple other problems like that. Other than that, no.
Q. Sir, over that Summer of 2008, did you work on a different paper, called the Data Wipe Fallacy paper, with David Kleiman?
A. Yes.
Q. And who else worked on that with you?
A. Shyaam.
Q. Who is Shyaam?
A. Shyaam is a friend of mine that was a student once.
Q. And was that — was that project — was that completed, that whitepaper?
A. It was.
Q. Was it submitted?
A. It was. It was published and I presented it at conference in India.
Q. What was David Kleiman’s role in the preparation of the Data Wipe Fallacy paper?
A. He did some editing. He was meant to do a bit more, but he was ill at the time.
Q. Now, sir, let me just ask: When is the whitepaper — the Bitcoin Whitepaper released? Is that Halloween 2008?
A. I had a FTP site on upload.ie in Australia. That was — it hosted it going back till May. So it was technically there, and I pointed people out to the link, like Wei Dai and things, in May. But I formally released it and publicly told everyone, not just individuals, on the 31st of October.”

Craig Wright also didn’t hesitate to bring up a blatant lie about his tax returns in 2008/2009.

“BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. Sir, this is a — this is an individual tax return for 2009?
A. It’s an individual tax return for me personally and any business income that I associated for the period of the 1st of July, 2008 to the 30th of June, 2009.

<< snip >>

BY MR. RIVERO:
Q. Now, sir, it says — it reflects at Page 10 of your return “total current year capital gains,” and there’s an amount of 2,235,000, I assume Australian dollars. What is that about?
A. So I sold from my personal trust company into my other companies the rights to the database in Bitcoin, to the Bitcoin I was mining, and all of the software I’d developed. So I did a personal sale and then not claimed but was taxed on. So I filed with the tax department an income increase of $2 million and paid the tax on that. So effectively, I said my software for Bitcoin was worth 2.2 million for all my expenses so far, and then I paid the tax on the 2.2 million that I said I earned by selling it to my company.”

Source: https://www.rochefreedman.com/attorneys/velvel-freedman/

Now watch Vel Freedman, head of Ira Kleiman’s counsel, bring nuclear Armageddon on Craig’s shameless lying during the November 22, 2021 afternoon session . It starts with the BDO minutes forgery, continues with the 2008/2009 tax returns and ends with Craig Wright’s suggestion that his ex-CFO Jamie Wilson, who worked for Craig Wright from January 2013 till October 2013, had been forging his emails from Wooloowin, Australia.

“MR. FREEDMAN: Absolutely. I was just looking at that. Ms. Vela, can you please pull up Document D-164 on the screen. Ms. Vela, can we get D-164 on the screen, please. And I believe this is in evidence. If we can — perfect. Thank you.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, do you recall testifying about this document at — at — during your direct testimony?
A. Yes.
Q. And, Dr. Wright, you’re familiar with metadata. You are a forensic expert; correct?
A. I have been in the past, yes.
Q. And this particular document that we’re looking at right here is a scan of a paper document; correct?
A. On the screen, it is, yes.
Q. You can even see the little binder holes in the left-hand side of this document; right?
A. Yes.
Q. And that means that the only metadata, that hidden computer meta- — can we put that back up, please. And that means the only metadata or the hidden computer data about this particular document is from what the scanner added onto it when it was scanned into a computer file; correct?
A. No.
Q. Because when you create a handwritten document, Dr. Wright, there’s no computer data associated with that; correct?
A. Not necessarily. That’s incorrect.
Q. So is it your testimony that when you write with a pen and paper on a piece of document, you create metadata?
A. No.
Q. So when this document was created by you, whenever that was, there’s no computer data associated with that; correct?
A. Not correct.
Q. And it only gets computer data associated with it once it is scanned and put into computer files somehow; correct?
A. No. There are printed dots.
Q. There are printed dots on it. Okay. Have you had an expert come and talk to you about the printed dots?
A. Not about printed dots, no.
Q. This document — the printed dots will tell you about only the part of the document that was printed when it was first printed; right? When it was blank; correct?
A. Yes.
Q. And there is no metadata associated with your handwritten annotations on this document; correct?
A. Technically, no, that’s not correct.
Q. And you realize, Dr. Wright, that by producing a handwritten document like this, you have prevented Dr. Edman from examining whether or not it’s a forgery through metadata; correct?
A. No.
Q. There is nothing that could have stopped you from drafting that document six months ago, writing “August ‘07” on it, scanning it into a computer, and producing it to us; isn’t that correct?
A. No, that’s wrong.
Q. Dr. Wright, in your direct testimony, you talked about setting up 69 computers costing $600,000. Do you recall that?
A. That’s not accurate in what you said, no. What I said was 69 computers plus other equipment.
Q. $600,000 in equipment?
A. 636,000 approximately, yes.
Q. To set up Bitcoin?
A. To — sorry?
Q. To set up the operations of what became Bitcoin?
A. In part.
Q. And $11,000 in electricity?
A. Not entirely.
Q. Per month?
A. That was my personal expense.
Q. And do you recall during cross-examination, I asked you about whether you and Dave kept your Bitcoin partnership a secret, and you responded that “At least 3- or 400 people knew that I was Satoshi in Australia” and that you registered Information Defense and recorded it with the Government?
A. Yes.
Q. You also testified that, “I had claimed Bitcoin in June 2009 as an asset. The tax office said there was no value to this thing called Bitcoin. It is a hobby. I claimed expenses of 2.2 million in setting up Bitcoin. The tax office said it is a sham because this stuff thereby is never worth anything.” Do you recall that?
MR. RIVERO: Objection, Your Honor. Objection, Your Honor. It’s just publication of prior testimony.
THE COURT: The — 
MR. RIVERO: I’m sorry, Judge. It’s just publication of prior testimony. It’s neither impeachment nor a question.
THE COURT: Overruled.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Do you recall that?
A. Yes.
Q. And that was on behalf of Integyrs and Information Defense; right?
A. I mentioned those companies, yes.
Q. Dr. Wright, do you know that the Australian Tax Office found that the audit reports for those entities contains no reference to Bitcoin whatsoever?
MR. RIVERO: Objection. Beyond the scope.
THE COURT: Overruled.
THE WITNESS: I disagree.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please bring up P-320. It’s in evidence. Let’s go to Page 52, and let’s zoom in, please, on Paragraph 275.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. “Dr. Wright has stated that he mined the 1.1 million Bitcoin and tried to sell the rights to it to Information Defense and Integyrs and that the ATO disallowed his personal deductions related to mining and did not accept the transfer to the two companies.”
MR. RIVERO: Judge — Judge — 
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. “He has conversely stated that it was mined by Information Defense and Integyrs. The ATO audit report for these entities contains no reference to Bitcoin.”
MR. RIVERO: Objection, Your Honor. The direct specifically avoided discussion of any controversy — 
THE COURT: I understand. If you’re saying that it’s outside the scope of — of direct, I — there was testimony with regard to Bitcoin. The Court will allow it.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Do you see that, Dr. Wright?
A. I see that.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you bring us to Page 50, and can you zoom in on Paragraph 260?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. “We dispute Dr. Wright’s contention that the ATO audited and disallowed deductions related to Bitcoin mining on the basis that Bitcoin mining was a hobby and that he tried to transfer equitable interest in Bitcoin to related companies. The audit report contains no references to Bitcoin.” Do you see that, Dr. Wright?
MR. RIVERO: Same objection.
THE COURT: The objection is noted. It’s overruled.
THE WITNESS: I see that line.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please bring us to Page 25, and can we zoom in on Paragraphs 140 through 142, please. 140 to 142.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. “The taxpayer contends that the following adverse ATO audit outcomes where the ATO disallowed Dr. Wright’s deductions for Bitcoin mining, disallowed the sale of rights to Bitcoin he had mined to Information Defense and Integyrs. Dr. Wright transferred his 1.1 million Bitcoin to David Kleiman, a U.S.-based friend and business associate of Dr. Wright who died in April 2013.” “The taxpayer has provided a blog post as evidence of his intention. ATO forensics advises it is possible to backdate blog posts. We note that the audit record of these entities do not refer to any transactions involving Bitcoin.” Do you see that, Dr. Wright?

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/885/8/kleiman-v-wright/

MR. RIVERO: Your Honor, may I have a standing objection?
THE WITNESS: I see that line.
THE COURT: You certainly may.
MR. FREEDMAN: Is our — is our audio working now?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Okay. Dr. Wright, I asked you about your direct testimony about mining at Bagnoo, Lisarow, Tokyo, Malaysia, and churches. Do you recall a few moments ago I asked you about that?
A. Yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, please play us Clip 110.
(Video was played but not reported.)
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you play Clip 112, please.
MR. RIVERO: Can we have the cites?
MR. FREEDMAN: Yes. For the record, it is — hold on. I actually don’t know. 196, 9 through 13, same deposition. Ms. Vela, please.
(Video was played but not reported.)
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please bring up P-2 — P-002 on the screen.
THE CLERK: Is that in evidence?
THE COURT: It’s in evidence.
MR. FREEDMAN: It is in evidence, yes. Can we please publish.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, do you recall Mr. Rivero asking you about this email?
A. Yes.
Q. You testified about RCJBR when he asked you about it. Do you recall that?
A. Yes.
Q. You said that you had registered RCJBR sometime after this email was sent; right?
A. It’s public information, yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please play Clip 111 from Dr. Wright’s deposition. That’s March 16th, 2020, Page 152, Lines 13 through 21.
MR. RIVERO: One moment before you put that up.
MR. FREEDMAN: It’s a party — party deposition. We’re allowed to play it; right, Your Honor?
THE COURT: You are.
MR. FREEDMAN: Please play it, Ms. Vela.
(Video was played but not reported.)

[On a sidenote: Just before the Kleiman v Wright trial started on November 1, 2021, Craig Wright made the claim he was ‘director at BDO on partner track’. This remains to be seen, though, as Craig isn’t mentioned anywhere on the BDO website with such title. He was ‘CAS Manager’. Vel Freedman did not discuss this during trial.]

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20060923174744/https://www.bdo.com.au/insidepage.asp?SectionID=2&SubmenuID=241&SubcatID=211#

MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please put P-856 on the screen. Can you zoom in on the relevant portion?
Yeah. Thank you.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, this purports to be an email from yourself to yourself on April 16th, 2014, with a message that purports to be from David Kleiman. Do you see that?
A. I see that, but I don’t see the email address. So I can’t comment on that. Sorry.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please put up P-807 side by side with P-856.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, on the right side of the screen is P-807. That’s also in evidence. These two emails are virtually identical except the one on the right appears to come from Dave Kleiman and go to Uyen Nguyen — oh — two years earlier or so. Do you see that?
A. Yes, I do.
Q. You were in the courtroom when Dr. Edman opined that both of these emails were forgeries; correct?
A. I was.
Q. I want to focus on P-856, the one that has your email addresses on them. Okay?
A. It doesn’t have my email address. Sorry.
Q. Is your email — your name on the top; right?
A. It has “Craig S. Wright” and “Craig Wright,” but I don’t use “Craig Wright” for my email at all.
Q. Do you recall, Dr. Wright, that Dr. Edman showed us that this email’s header noted it originated from a particular IP address; correct?
A. No. Sorry. I don’t recall.
Q. Well, that was the 58.160.32.123 IP address that you discussed this morning in your direct; correct?
A. Yes, I remember that email. That’s the email address.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you put P-856.1 on the screen, please. Let’s leave these side by side for now. Thank you. And it’s in evidence, P-856.1. And Line 51, Ms. Vela. Can you highlight that for us? There it is.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. 58.160.32.123; correct?
A. That’s what it says, yes.
Q. And I’m sure you recall, Dr. Wright, that Dr. Edman used something called Geo IP to trace that IP address to Eastern Australia; right?
A. He put it into a tool. He didn’t actually really do it himself, but yes. Yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, let’s bring — let’s put down on the right side P-856.1, and let’s bring up Geo IP Lookup, P-856.2.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. There it is again, 58.160.32.123; right?
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, actually, under the “IP Address” column, the first one, if you don’t mind.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Do you see that?
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can we actually zoom in a little bit? It’s kind of small. Maybe just — yeah. Thank you.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Do you see that?
A. Yes.
Q. And you lived in Eastern Australia; right?
A. I’ve lived in Eastern Australia, but as I said, I lived in Sydney 900 kilometers away.
Q. So the document says, “Wooloowin,” and you’re saying that’s about ten hours’ drive from you in today’s highways; right?
A. About that today. Back then, longer.
Q. And, in fact, in your direct today — in your direct testimony today, you suggested to us — or you testified to us that Jamie Wilson lives near Wooloowin; right?
A. He has two properties, one in Post Code Area 2074, one in 4030. Oh. Sorry. 4074 and one at 4 — I’ll start again. One in 4074 and one in 4030.
Q. And so it is your testimony that — well, did you send this email, P-856, that’s on the left-hand side of the screen?
A. No, I did not.
Q. Did Jamie Wilson send it?
A. I can’t say. That IP address is associated with Jamie Wilson. I don’t know whether he sent it.
Q. Is it associated with you?
A. No, it is not.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you put down P-856 in the left-hand side of the screen? Let’s put down the call-out.
Yes. Now, let’s move P-856.2 with our IP address on the left to the left, and please bring up P-160 on the right.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, do you recall you testified in this court before this jury and under oath that this was an email from you to Ira Kleiman on April 24th, 2014?
A. I said I remembered an email and that I directed emails to be sent. I don’t recollect whether that’s the actual email because I can’t see an email address or anything. So — 
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can we show the witness and counsel Trial Day 7, Page 54, Dr. Wright’s testimony? I’m
looking at Lines 7 through 16. Lines 7 through 16. Thank you. May I proceed?
THE COURT: You may.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, on Day 7 of trial, I asked you the following questions. You gave the following answers.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please bring up P-160, and let’s go to Page 1.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. And right in the opening, “This is an email from” — I made sure we could publish it to the jury. I said, “Dr. Wright, this is an email from you to Ira Kleiman on April 24th, 2014?” “Answer: Yes.”
MR. FREEDMAN: Thank you, Ms. Vela. You can put down the trial transcript. Ms. Vela, we’re looking at the PDF of P-160. Can you pull up the — oh. And can we publish to the jury, please. This is already in evidence.
THE COURT: You may. It’s in evidence.
MR. FREEDMAN: We’re looking at the — the PDF of P-160, but the parties’ ESI agreement calls for production of
natives. Can you bring the native of P-160 on the screen, please. Now, Ms. Vela, can you make sure that we can see the email headers associated with the native file, please.
MR. RIVERO: Judge, I do not believe the document on the right-hand side is marked as an exhibit in this case, and I don’t think it’s — 
THE COURT: Can you identify the document on the right?
MR. FREEDMAN: It’s P-160. It’s the native file of P-160. The parties in the ESI agreement called for production
of native files and PDF files, including metadata associated with those files like email headers.
MR. RIVERO: Judge, that wasn’t my — my point was that obviously the document on the left has a plaintiffs’
exhibit number. The one on the right does not and has never been identified in any way.
THE COURT: Let’s identify it now, please.
MR. FREEDMAN: Okay. It will be P-160.1.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-160.1 marked for identification)
MR. FREEDMAN: Your Honor, we can’t stick a label on a native file, but — 
THE COURT: All right. 160.1. You may proceed.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please bring up the native file again. Your Honor, since we’re marking it as a separate document, I’d like to move P-160.1 into evidence.
THE COURT: Any objection?
MR. RIVERO: One moment, Your Honor. No objection.
THE COURT: All right. Admitted into evidence.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-160.1 received in evidence)
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you make sure we can see the email headers of this document, please. Ms. Vela, on the left-hand side, the P-160 PDF, can you replace it with our Geo IP Lookup? That would be P-856 — no. No. On the left-hand side. So let’s leave up the native with the headers on the right.
MR. PRITT: No. No. You’ve got to take it down and then put it back up.
MR. FREEDMAN: Oh. Okay. Got it. Learn something new every day. Okay. Perfect. And can you highlight the IP address for us on the left-hand side, the one from Wooloowin, Australia?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, I’m looking at the email header from the email you testified was from you to Ira Kleiman, “Received From CraigASUS.” Do you see that?
A. I see that line.
Q. And right underneath it, 58.160.32.123. Do you see that, Dr. Wright?
A. Yes, I do.
Q. You testified this morning that IP addresses don’t change unless you personally sign off on them, didn’t you?
A. No. That’s actually misstating what I said. Sorry.
Q. Dr. Wright, you sent this email to Ira Kleiman, and you sent the forgery, Number 6, didn’t you?
A. No.
Q. That’s your IP address, isn’t it, Dr. Wright?
A. No. I don’t use BigPond, and I didn’t use BigPond at that stage.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you put the native of P-160 down for us, and can you bring up the native of P-156,
which is in evidence? Let’s call this P-156.1, please.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-156.1 marked for identification)
MR. FREEDMAN: Your Honor, we move for the admission of P-56.1 — P-156.1 into evidence.
THE COURT: Any objection?
MR. RIVERO: No objection.
THE COURT: Admitted into evidence.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-156.1 received in evidence)
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. An email from yourself to Ira Kleiman, Dr. Wright. That’s already in evidence. Do you see it?
A. I do.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you show us the email headers?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. “Received From CraigASUS,” and right underneath it, Dr. Wright, 58.160.32.123. Do you see that match with the Geo IP Lookup; Dr. Wright?
A. Yes, I see the IP in Wooloowin.
Q. It was not Jamie Wilson. It was you that sent these emails; isn’t that correct?
A. No. On that day, I was in Sydney at a meeting.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please put down P-156.1, and let’s bring up P-157 in native form. Your Honor, we’re going to mark it as P-157.1 and move for its admission.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-157.1 marked for identification)
THE COURT: Any objection?
MR. RIVERO: Without objection.
THE COURT: All right. Admitted into evidence.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-157.1 received in evidence)
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you show us the email headers?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, we are looking at P-157.1 that is already in evidence, and the email header says, “Received From CraigASUS.” Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. And, again, Dr. Wright, 58.160.32.123. Do you see that?
A. I do.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you put down P-157.1 and bring up P-727, which is also in evidence? We’ll mark this P-727.1, Your Honor, and move for its admission.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-727.1 marked for identification)
MR. FREEDMAN: P-727.1.
THE COURT: Any objection?
MR. RIVERO: Judge, I thought — I don’t see P-727. Is this the document here?
MR. FREEDMAN: On the right side is P-727 in its native form.
MR. RIVERO: No objection, Judge.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you show us the email headers, please.
THE COURT: Hold on. Without objection, admitted into evidence.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-727.1 received in evidence)
MR. RIVERO: Judge, I thought there was — I thought there was a 727. Is this 727.1?
THE COURT: This is 727.1, native file.
MR. RIVERO: Oh. Thank you.
MR. FREEDMAN: May I proceed, Your Honor?
THE COURT: You may.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, on the right-hand side, we have P-727.1, which is an email from yourself to Andrew Sommer, your lawyer, and Ira Kleiman that is already in evidence. Do you see the email headers?
A. I do.
Q. This is “Received From Craig C. Wright.” Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. The email that sent it is Craig@RCJBR.org; right?
A. That’s what it says, yes.
Q. Ramona, Craig — what’s the J?
A. Josh.
Q. Josh, Ben?
A. Yes.
Q. Rachel?
A. Yes.
Q. And, Dr. Wright, again, 58.160.32.123. Do you see that?
A. I certainly do.
Q. This email, you sent; correct?
A. Like I said, I instructed a lot, and I sent others. I don’t remember every particular one, but if I didn’t send, I instructed ones.
MR. FREEDMAN: Thank you, Ms. Vela. Can you put that down and please bring up P-733-point — the native of P-733. Your Honor, we’ll mark this as P-733.1 and move for its admission.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-733.1 marked for identification)
MR. RIVERO: No objection.
THE COURT: All right. Admitted into evidence.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit P-733.1 received in evidence)
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you show us the email header from P-733.1?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Again, Dr. Wright, from RCJBR.org; again, from CWright; and again, 58.160.32.123. Do you see that, Dr. Wright?
A. I do.
Q. Each document matches the Geo IP Lookup of the document you claim Jamie Wilson might have sent; isn’t that correct?
A. It certainly does. They’re all matching Wooloowin, yes.
Q. Including emails you sent; correct?
A. As I said, if things had been forwarded or otherwise done, I don’t know, but I instructed emails or sent emails with those contents.
Q. From Sydney?
A. Yes.
Q. Are you aware, Dr. Wright, that in this litigation, you have produced over 75 emails from you that contain that exact same IP address?
A. No. What I produced were staff computers, and they had emails.
MR. FREEDMAN: Your Honor, may I have a moment to consult?
THE COURT: Certainly.
MR. FREEDMAN: Your Honor, we have no further questions.”

Now let’s go back to Craig Wright’s minutes forgery. We see an individual called Allan Granger being mentioned, who was indeed Craig’s colleague/supervisor at BDO during Craig’s stint there from late 2004 to end of 2008, and who was later connected to Craig’s shortlived company DeMorgan as “Audit Committee”.

Source: https://archive.ph/fMnc8

Allan Granger is also known from a damning quote in the Herald Sun, just after the ATO raids on Craig’s house and offices in December 2015:

Source: https://heraldsun.com.au/business/inventor-of-digital-currency-bitcoin-likely-to-be-an-australian-it-expert-and-entrepreneur-probe-finds/news-story/a7ebeae416e43764f75eea1012d964f8

And as can be expected, memes immediately start flying on Twitter…

Source: https://twitter.com/PeterScottMorg1/status/1473271533737062401

Now this contradicts a little much with Craig’s claim earlier during trial, right? If even Allan Granger, who on behalf of BDO refused to put time and money into Craig’s Bitcoin project in 2007, and in 2015 worked for Craig Wright’s Bitcoin companies, but didn’t know that his boss was in fact Satoshi Nakamoto… Then who are these ‘400 people’?

“At least 3- or 400 people knew that I was Satoshi in Australia”

To make matters even worse, even Craig Wright’s ex-wife Lynn wasn’t aware that Craig was Satoshi Nakamoto. How Craig managed to keep 400 people in check to not tell this ‘secret’ to his then-wife will probably always remain a mystery…

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/488/17/kleiman-v-wright/

So are the BDO minutes a recent day forgery? Of course. Very likely created after April 2019, but before October 3, 2019 when Calvin Ayre for the first time started mentioning the now infamous “white paper with rusty staples”.

Which was by itself already a conflict with earlier lies about the Bitcoin whitepaper:

Source: https://twitter.com/CalvinAyre/status/1131218337332125696

As this was Craig’s made up story in September 2017 on IRC:

Source: https://twitter.com/jimmy007forsure/status/1212175633607884802

But this was in stark conflict again with what Craig Wright had told Calvin Ayre (and Stefan Matthews on the CC) on June 20, 2015:

Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/511/6/kleiman-v-wright/

But this doesn’t really fit in the timeline of the ‘January 2011 Venezuela’ anecdote from Craig Wright’s blog, about which Craig told under oath in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit that around that time “no one else, other than Dave [Kleiman] and Mr. [Gareth] Williams, knew at that point that I was definitively Satoshi or what I’ve done”.

And how do we fit in this mess what Stefan Matthews told Andrew O’Hagan in 2016, that he ‘didn’t really know for sure’?

Quote found in The Satoshi Affair:

“One night I went to have dinner with Matthews on my own. We met in the restaurant at the back of Fortnum & Mason, 92 Jermyn Street, and he seemed incongruous among the red banquettes — a large, bald Australian with a rough laugh and wearing a plaid shirt, keen to tell me everything he thought useful. Matthews seemed a much more affable character than MacGregor, both upfront and very loyal, without perhaps seeing how the two might cancel each other out. One of the tasks of the eager businessman is to make himself more sure of his own position, and Matthews spent a lot of time, as did MacGregor, selling the idea of Wright as Satoshi rather than investigating it. They drafted me into telling the world who Wright was, but they didn’t really know for sure themselves, and at one point their seeming haste threatened to drive a wedge between us. It seemed odd that they would ask a writer to celebrate a truth without first providing overwhelming evidence that the truth was true. I took it in my stride, most of the time, and enjoyed the doubts, while hoping for clarity.”

By the way, did we just go from 400 people to 2 people in-the-know that Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto back in the days? I guess we did, didn’t we? Or actually it’s the other way round timeline wise: where Craig claimed a few years ago that only 2 people knew about him being Satoshi Nakamoto, recently, during the Kleiman v Wright trial in November 2021 he now claims that up to 400 people knew about him being Satoshi Nakamoto back in the days. Inconceivable, as Judge Reinhart would say.

Anyway, the false USB story needed to be corrected, which finally happened in February 2021 when Calvin Ayre had received the latest memo about the USB stick that Stefan Matthews was supposed to have:

Source: https://twitter.com/hascendp6/status/1361411565472342016

And there we go, Bitcoin’s Holy Grail, the ultimate collector’s item undoubtedly worth millions of dollars: an early Bitcoin whitepaper without Satoshi’s name on it on an USB stick… is simply LOST. Oof.

UPDATE February 25, 2022

When Stefan Matthews was asked about this USB with Bitcoin whitepaper event on Twitter, he replied “I didn’t “lose” anything.”. So it appears he either never had it (which is a fact) or he wasn’t updated about the latest spins in the USB story…

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20220225185612/https://twitter.com/TurkeyChop/status/1497239570492137501

Anyway. Fact is, Stefan Matthews, who recently went on record in several interviews to make the most outrageous claims about ‘knowing’ how Craig Wright was working on Bitcoin in 2007 and 2008, is being discredited by Craig Wright himself like clockwork. Stefan’s credibility is therefore questionable, to say the least. Some might even say he’s simply lying through his teeth.

Lastly, a special mention goes to the hilarious Bitcoin whitepaper forgeries that Craig Wright created around 2019–2020. A few examples. On his personal blog we can find a Bitcoin whitepaper forgery where he deleted the credentials of Satoshi Nakamoto, and added his name instead.

Source: https://craigwright.net/bitcoin-white-paper.pdf

On another Bitcoin whitepaper forgery, Craig Wright completely deleted the name Satoshi Nakamoto and his credentials, to replace it with his own name. This version was available on the SSRN website for a while around 2019, but was withdrawn after it was found to be a forgery. Still available at the link to the WayBack Machine below the image though.

Source: WayBack Machine

The hilarious “Peer-to-eer” forgery by Craig Wright circulated for a while also. It is still available at one of the BSV related websites, link can be found below the image.

Source: https://buybsv.com/uploads/2021/04/bitcoin-white-paper.pdf

TL;DR, or Management Summary

Remember what Satoshi Nakamoto said in November 2008?

”I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper.”

And then what he said in June 2010 when asked ”How long have you been working on this design Satoshi?”:

Since 2007. At some point I became convinced there was a way to do this without any trust required at all and couldn’t resist to keep thinking about it. Much more of the work was designing than coding.

We can conclude that Craig Wright’s BlackNet has nothing to do with Bitcoin’s design process. We can also conclude that Craig Wright did not write the Bitcoin whitepaper. We have seen Craig Wright creating numerous forgeries again, instead, to only prove his Faketoshi-ness. Again.

We’ve also seen Craig Wright declaring under oath that only 2 people knew he was Satoshi Nakamoto up till January 2011, and then two years later declaring under oath that up to 400 people knew he was Satoshi Nakamoto. IN THE SAME LAWSUIT, MIND YOU. And hilariously, Craig Wright is thoroughly debunking his ‘friend’ Stefan Matthews in the process. Stefan, who’s hope it was, once upon a time, to become billionaire with the reveal of Craig as Satoshi.

And lastly, we can conclude that Satoshi Nakamoto started coding Bitcoin in or around May 2007. While Craig Wright can’t even code at all.

The End. Thanks for reading.

Julian Assange is right again, you know.