Craig Wright's Satoshi Lies

The final judgment on a fraudster who lied about me.

I have written a couple of times here about a subject that has very little to do with tech and nothing to do with health - the epic court case in which the Australian IT security expert Craig Wright tried and failed to prove that he was Satoshi Nakamoto. the inventor of Bitcoin.

Craig Wright with me in 2016

I say there is no connection with health, but the wellbeing of anyone who has been threatened with expensive lawsuits by “Dr” Wright for the temerity of suggesting he might not be Satoshi got a tremendous boost when in March the judge unexpectedly published an interim finding at the end of the two month hearing.

Mr Justice Mellor had been expected to hold everything back for his written judgment months ahead. Instead he appeared so exasperated by the conduct of the Australian that he gave us a sneak preview - Wright was not Satoshi, he hadn’t written the Bitcoin White Paper, or created the Bitcoin system or software. The result was that Wright abandoned most of his legal actions - or “lawfare” as they were more accurately dubbed - and people like the Norwegian crypto blogger Hodlonaut could celebrate victory in battles which had threatened to ruin them.

So when the judge’s full judgment was published yesterday there was little sense of jeopardy, but that did not make reading his blistering prose any less enjoyable. To say it is damning is to grossly underplay the thunderous invective with which he pulls apart every aspect of Wright’s case and character.

The second paragraph of a document stretching over 230 pages shows just how annoyed the judge was by the manner in which the supposed crypto genius conducted himself:

“Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly.”

His case, says the judge, is “based on documents I am satisfied have been forged on a grand scale by Dr Wright.”

And they are not even remotely convincing - “most of his forgeries turned out to be clumsy.”

Dr Wright, he says, has had many years to prepare his case that he is Satoshi but “as he faced greater and more significant challenges to his claim, he took his lies and forgery to ever greater levels.”

Craig Wright makes the foolish mistake of trying to suggest that the judge may not understand the complex technological matters involved in his case. Mr Justice Mellor, who has a Cambridge degree in engineering, retorts that “the technology involved in his case is not particularly complex or difficult to understand (compared with some of the Patent cases I have dealt with)” and accuses Wright of resorting to “technobabble”.

Neither is the judge impressed by the witnesses the Australian calls to back up his claim to be Satoshi, noting of Wright’s sister "...the key reason she drew a connection between her brother and Satoshi Nakamoto was that as a teenager he had dressed as a ninja in the local park..."

But forgive me if what I enjoyed most related to one of the witnesses called by COPA, the alliance of companies taking on the fake Satoshi - me. My witness statement related to the events in 2016 when Craig Wright attempted to prove he was the Bitcoin founder to several journalists including me, first by public signing sessions supposedly using keys belonging to Satoshi, then by promising to move a small amount of Bitcoin from an address known to be controlled by the founder.

Mr Justice Mellor provided a crisp summary of these events:

“Mr Cellan-Jones is a technology journalist who worked as such for the BBC for many years. He was involved in the 2016 signing sessions, which he addressed in his evidence. He was told that Dr Wright could prove he was Satoshi and in reliance on that he transferred bitcoin on 4 May 2016 to the Bitcoin address that Satoshi used for the first transaction, on the understanding that Dr Wright would send it back. To date Mr Cellan-Jones has not received his bitcoin back. “

The amount I sent, 0.01701 BTC was worth about £5 in 2016, over £900 today. To add insult to injury, both Wright and his billionaire backer Calvin Ayre have in recent years called me a liar and accused me of serious journalistic malpractice. The judge writes that Wright repeated these highly defamatory allegations in court:

“In the course of his answers in cross-examination, Dr Wright accused Mr Cellan-Jones and the BBC of being biased and, more importantly, of ‘splicing’ together various answers on film to create, effectively, a false record of the signing session which Dr Wright undertook with Mr Cellan-Jones. It is understandable that Mr Cellan-Jones would feel aggrieved at these allegations and would want the opportunity to address them.”

He is right - I was well aware of what had been said during the case and was looking forward to responding when I was called to give evidence. But then Wright’s team decided not to cross-examine me, effectively accepting that my written statement was true, but also leaving me seething that he had got away with traducing me. The judge appears to have understood that:

“Discussions between the parties led to an agreement that in submissions, Counsel for Dr Wright would not rely upon or repeat any of the allegations made in evidence by Dr Wright against Mr Cellan-Jones. Whilst this arrangement was procedurally efficient for this Trial, the effect is capable of being misunderstood. For this reason, I wish to make it clear that I completely reject Dr Wright’s spurious allegations about Mr Cellan-Jones and the BBC and I accept the evidence in Mr Cellan-Jones’ written statement in its entirety.”

While I am grateful to the judge for putting the record straight, I am left with a number of questions about the wider case. When someone tells lie after lie, produces forgery after forgery are there no consequences? Sure, Wright will be on the hook for a chunky amount of costs from COPA’s solicitors as well as his own, but legal bills have not been a deterrent so far. And at what point do solicitors say “enough” when a client comes up with another set of forgeries when the previous ones have been debunked, or somehow discovers a hard disk containing killer evidence at the back of a drawer?

One half of our. legal system is in crisis, with criminal cases facing record delays and young barristers dropping out because they can’t make a living without parental help. Meanwhile the civil courts are a playground for the wealthy who know that they can usually spend their opponents into submission. Not a pretty picture.