Craig Wright can’t name a single person who got BTC gifts from Satoshi

• Craig Wright discussed his relationship with trusts that have allegedly held Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin.
• On Tuesday, despite claiming that he sent bitcoin to hundreds of people from 2009-2011, Wright couldn’t recall a single name.
• Wright denied that Satoshi supported calling bitcoin a ‘cryptocurrency,’ despite considerable opposing evidence.

The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) comprises pro-Bitcoin companies led by executives like Jack Dorsey, Michael Saylor, Brian Armstrong, Jesse Powell, and many other wealthy Bitcoiners. It is suing Craig Wright in the British High Court of Justice.

Wright believes — or at least claims — that he is Satoshi. After he joined Bitcoin fork BSV, he began suing Bitcoin influencers around the world with UK courts quickly becoming his favorite venue due to their lower burdens of proof and plaintiff-friendly norms for attorney fees.

However, COPA members have had enough. In this month’s lawsuit — the most important of Wright’s career — COPA is the plaintiff instead of Wright. COPA wants a permanent injunction against the Australian entrepreneur asserting copyright or authorship rights over Bitcoin’s whitepaper.

Because any High Court would apply to over 180 Berne Convention countries, it would be effectively global. The stakes have never been higher.

Day 7: Craig Wright’s final full day of testimony

As the trial entered its seventh day, Wright took the stand for his final full day of testimony. As usual, he answered COPA’s questions about Satoshi’s documents and communications and, as usual, he claimed to have written and sent those as Satoshi.

COPA’s lawyer held up an email from Satoshi to early Bitcoin developer Martti Malmi in which the Bitcoin creator allegedly said, “Someone came up with the word cryptocurrency, do you like it?” Malmi answered, “It sounds good, easier to say than P2P cash.”

Wright disputed that Satoshi ever considered calling bitcoin a cryptocurrency, saying that someone else came up with the word and that Malmi included it in a document. COPA’s lawyer countered that Satoshi never seemed to have an issue with the term. Malmi also presented emails from Satoshi that seemed to indicate Satoshi had no objection.

Read more: Craig Wright pulls mystery box, calls Satoshi ‘he’ during COPA trial

Evidence revisited from Craig Wright v Hodlonaut

The attorney asked about evidence from Wright’s earlier lawsuit against Holdlonaut, another Bitcoin influencer, during which Wright allegedly asked about access to private keys in 2016.

Wright said, “On the drive, there was an algorithm that could be calculated” to unlock the drive and obtain the private keys. He said the drive could be unlocked with an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) key.

COPA spent some time picking apart Wright’s claim that there were 12 private keys in the Hodlonaut case. On Tuesday, Wright said he “made a mistake” and only had 11 keys on that encrypted drive.

Hodlonaut naturally weighed in on X (formerly Twitter) live from London, reiterating that Wright had demanded that he retract his statements. That cast doubt on Wright’s claim to be Satoshi.

This is the statement Craig and his goons demanded me to make in open court. It was the only way I could have avoided them going after me.

It was never an alternative for me to abandon integrity and become complicit. https://t.co/TByCqptBw0 pic.twitter.com/7Ai9QfacJg

— hodlonaut 80 IQ 13%er 🌮⚡🔑 🐝 (@hodlonaut) February 13, 2024

Read more: Craig Wright v COPA judge threatens to pull livestream after Hodlonaut photo

The bitcoin trusts and the Tulip Trust

Years ago when fighting the Australian Tax Office, Wright claimed to have put an enormous horde of Satoshi’s bitcoin into The Trust. Wright’s similarly-named corporations, Tulip Trust and Tulip Trading, are parties to multi-billion dollar lawsuits.

Wright disagreed that The Trust was the same thing as Tulip Trust. In Wright’s view, The Trust was supposedly an algorithmic scheme that held some slices of private wallet keys.

C: [shows transcript, asked when Nguyen became a trustee] You said that trust were holding a number of slices of early Bitcoin keys. You were asked about trust name, you said Tulip Trust.
W: True.
C: Asked what assets the trust had in 2011, you said [missed] You said the trust…

— Norbert ⚡️ (@bitnorbert) February 13, 2024

This led to a discussion on Tuesday of the Tulip Trust’s role compared to The Trust. COPA’s attorney mentioned that the Tulip Trust held shares in companies that possessed bitcoin. Wright didn’t seem to disagree with that statement.

Wright mentioned that the companies held a variety of assets including intellectual property, software, and bitcoin. He said he did not directly own all of the companies. This statement led to some back-and-forth about exactly where the bitcoin was located.

W&K Information Defense LLC

Wright claimed that a particularly important company, W&K Information Defense LLC, mined bitcoin into a trust and had agreed to transfer the bitcoin to Wright International. He clarified that Tulip Trading and Wright International were two separate companies. He also claimed that he was not a trustee for W&K Information Defense trust and, therefore, didn’t have access to the trust’s documentation or direct ownership of the bitcoin in the trust.

When COPA mentioned Dave Kleiman, an alleged former business partner of Wright, Wright maintained that a signature on the document produced by COPA had been forged. He also said that Kleiman wasn’t a trustee for W&K Information Defense trust and he had initially only added him due to pressure from having to answer yes-or-no questions about documents or be found in contempt of court.

COPA pressed Wright about those seemingly conflicting claims versus his prior statements in Florida courts. That led to some back-and-forth on whether Wright had previously had access to the relevant documents.

Verifying Satoshi’s transactions

When asked about proof that he could verify early blocks of Satoshi-era transactions, Wright denied that he had agreed to sign those transactions with the correct PGP signature. COPA’s lawyer quoted him as saying, “My view is we sign the early blocks, not move blocks.”

Wright denied that a signature was necessary to verify blocks. He also denied any intention to “move coin.” He did admit that the initial plan was to do a signing session to prove his claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto but says the session never occurred.

Then the COPA attorney played a recording of an interview with the magazine GQ. The interview in question included Wright, University College London lecturer in cryptography Dr. Nicolas T. Courtois, and GQ senior commissioning editor Stuart McGurk. During his testimony, Wright rejected the notion that Courtois could capture private keys and called him “basically a fraud.”

During this part of his testimony, Wright reiterated his claim that his companies owned the bitcoin that Satoshi mined. He also said he had only transferred bitcoin to Hal Finney and Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, a computer security specialist and cypherpunk best known for developing MojoNation and pioneering a trilemma known as Zooko’s triangle.

COPA disagreed, saying that Wright had never transferred bitcoin to Zooko. However, COPA’s attorney brought up Wright’s claim to have transferred bitcoin to hundreds of people. Wright said he couldn’t remember them all, claiming that most of them were pseudonymous.

Craig just claimed on the stand to have sent bitcoin to “hundreds of people” as Satoshi.

COPA lawyer: “Can you mention the names of some of those people”

Craig starts ranting… gets cut off by the judge who asks “Can you mention the name of ONE of those people”

Craig: “No.”

— hodlonaut 80 IQ 13%er 🌮⚡🔑 🐝 (@hodlonaut) February 13, 2024

Read more: How Craig Wright believes he will win his biggest lawsuit yet

Day 7 recap

Craig Wright’s last full day of testimony in London’s High Court ended with a discussion about the feasibility of producing a signature if Wright had access to Satoshi’s private keys. Wright claimed that he could have “produced a message digest” that would do the job.

COPA ended by producing a transcript of Gavin Andresen’s testimony for the Kleiman vs. Wright case, in which Andresen admitted that he could have been fooled. COPA’s attorney stressed that Andresen had expected Wright to produce a signature and instead got “whacky text.” Although that text briefly fooled Andresen, he later recanted his belief in Wright’s identity as Satoshi Nakamoto.

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