Craig Wright remembers smashing Satoshi’s hard drive while on sedatives

• Craig Wright took the stand on Wednesday for the final day of his regularly scheduled testimony. He will return after a few days for at least one more day.
• Wright denied having access to an email address used to communicate with Gavin Andresen.
• Wright reiterated his claim of destroying hardware containing Satoshi Nakamoto’s private wallet keys.

Wednesday was supposed to be the eighth and final day for Craig Wright to testify in his defense in the UK High Court of Justice. The Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) is seeking an injunction barring Wright from asserting authorship or copyright claims over Bitcoin’s whitepaper.

Although he’s done testifying for a few days, the judge has already added an extra day for Wright to speak again, toward the end of the trial.

Opening formalities

During opening proceedings and prior to Wright’s arrival in the courtroom, Craig Orr, a member of Wright’s legal team, reviewed redactions from evidence. Orr found that privileged information justified most of the redactions.

Orr told the judge that some of the redactions were errors, however. Wright’s legal team had already communicated with COPA regarding the alleged errors.

Orr also requested that a judge release Wright after his testimony to provide instructions to attorneys.

Alex Gunning, a lawyer representing COPA, reviewed correspondence with Wright’s lawyers.

Mellor: Hough, any objections to that?
C: No.
Gunning: We don’t have objections either. The letter was in response to us, doesn’t respond to the particular question.
Orr: We were not in a position to answer it without further instruction from Wright.
Mellor: Good morning, Dr…

— Norbert ⚡️ (@bitnorbert) February 14, 2024

Craig Wright discusses a 2015 email

Once Wright arrived and began testifying, he began focusing on questions about an email from the domain tyche.co.uk. The email apparently discussed a work opportunity to become Tyche’s chief scientist.

Wright had previously denied writing that 2015 email, which seemed to discuss an implementation deal and possible employment contract.

He countered that he took a job at nCrypt. Tyche provided human resources (HR), payroll, and accounting services for nCrypt.

The email supposedly contained signatures from Wright, his wife, and a person with the surname Matthews. It also discussed Wright’s alleged plan to start a family.

Wright denied sending the email, saying that he was in his forties and unlikely to have wanted children at that time. He also denied that it was his signature. Furthermore, he asserted that he had not lived at that address.

Some observers think that, within 30 minutes, Wright had contradicted his own statements under oath from last week.

COPA pushes back against Wright’s claim

COPA’s attorney counterargued that Wright’s own attorneys had not identified the email signature as fake. Wright said he had told them it was from “an unauthorized source.” He claimed that someone took over the email address. In his recollection, a “compromised staff computer” had sent the email.

Wright seemed to blame “rogue ex-staff members,” including Robert McGregor whom Wright accused of threatening to pull funding from his companies and destroy his family.

COPA’s legal representatives paused Wright after accusing McGregor of threatening to pull funding, trying to keep him on topic about the email. After that pause, Wright denied having received an attachment about a draft blog post that proposed signing a new message using the private keys used to generate the Bitcoin genesis block and Block 9.

Who framed Craig Wright?

As above and as below, the overarching narrative that Wright has repeated in court this month is that he believes someone framed him. Innumerable suspicious events in Wright’s life can be explained, he claims, by recognizing that his enemies have planted evidence, sabotaged his security, accessed his computer systems, failed to fulfill their promises, and even sent emails on his behalf.

For example, when Gunning showed an email to Gavin Andresen from the evidence heard during the Kleiman vs. Wright trial, Wright said it was another “real email, from someone else.” He claimed McGregor had sent the email offering to prove to Andresen that Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto, and then told Wright that he would “look like a complete fool” if he didn’t send it.

C: [shows email from Matthews to Andresen] He writes you’ve agreed to sign, you’ll be offline while traveling. Was he telling the truth?
W: I made an agreement that if and only if the proof of my [papers etc] was done, 14 degrees, 1000s of patent ideas, if you make that public, I…

— Norbert ⚡️ (@bitnorbert) February 14, 2024

Wright also maintained that he had handed control over IT systems to McGregor, which limited his ability to do anything about subsequent emails. However, it was unclear whether McGregor controlled an internal email server or merely had access to information technology (IT) management tools like Active Directory.

Wright admitted that his wife also had an email address at the same company, but he denied that she would have ever gone behind his back when confronted with emails that she supposedly sent. He also claimed that McGregor was displeased with Wright’s association with nChain CEO and executive chairman Stefan Matthews.

Mellor: You wife had access to this email account?
W: I don’t know. She was set up with one, but it’s not going to the rcbdr (sp) email, My Lord.
C: [quotes email] Is the message Ramona delivered consistent with what you intended?
W: No, and not consistent with what she would…

— Norbert ⚡️ (@bitnorbert) February 14, 2024

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

Unfair attention on not publicly signing as Satoshi

In Craig Wright’s opinion, his enemies’ media efforts have unfairly framed him, misleading the public into believing that he suspiciously refuses to publicly sign a transaction using a known Satoshi private key.

Wright denied being aware that journalists would publish articles about the alleged proof that he had promised to provide. He said he was only aware that they would analyze the information that he provided.

He also denied that he had publicly signed any messages with one of Satoshi’s private keys. He maintained that he could have, but didn’t want to “move coin” or make his activities public for anyone to view. He has a right to privacy, after all.

Wright also admitted to reacting poorly when shown a draft blog post regarding a PGP key and a proposed transfer of bitcoin.

He questioned whether the PGP key, which had been published on Bitcoin.org in 2011 and was associated with Satoshi, was actually created by Satoshi. Wright said it was just a server key. Someone else could have created it, he explained. He also denied that a public key had anything to do with the private key in question.

He seemed to dither over whether the PGP key in question was the same one referenced by Martti Malmi in an earlier email.

On sedatives, destroyed Satoshi’s hard drive?

Wright later reiterated his claim that he had destroyed the hard drive containing Satoshi’s private keys. He didn’t recall exactly how he destroyed it except that he had smashed it. He said he had just left the hospital, hadn’t slept much, and was still feeling the effects of sedatives.

C: Moving on to your destruction of private keys. You say in Wright4 you destroyed the hard drive in 2016.
W: I’m not clear on it; I had come back from hospital and was sedated, hadn’t slept much. I know I destroyed it…
C: You didn’t express uncertainty in the witness statement.…

— Norbert ⚡️ (@bitnorbert) February 14, 2024

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

According to COPA’s attorney, Wright had admitted that he hadn’t considered the potential long-term consequences of that now multi-billion dollar decision. Wright seemed agitated right around then, saying that he didn’t intend to create “anti-government things” in the first place.

If he did destroy Satoshi’s private keys, though, he destroyed any chance of creating more signatures — something that COPA duly noted. Gunning noted that Wright hadn’t fully tried to recover the private keys, something that Wright partially agreed with: “Not fully. AlixPartners couldn’t image the on-site computers.”

At another point in the trial, a disgruntled former nChain employee noted that Wright’s long-time business partner, Calvin Ayre, has probably been paying for Wright’s litigation, as has been widely rumored.

C: [quotes witness statement] Difference between saying “I destroyed something impulsively” and “I destroyed it because [bitcoin is not encrypted etc]”
W: Absolutely not, only 2 BTC nodes control the network. AWS will give any order, My Lord, acting within the law…
C: We need to…

— Norbert ⚡️ (@bitnorbert) February 14, 2024

In summary, Wednesday was Craig Wright’s final day of regularly scheduled testimony. COPA attorneys went over several emails that he allegedly sent and Wright claimed he didn’t have access to most of the email addresses at the time those emails were sent.

He will return to the stand in a few days, after expert witness cross-examination.

Source