The Battle of Bitcoin
My role in a courtroom drama over the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto
I was due in court today and I was rather looking forward to it. I was due to give evidence at the Royal Courts of Justice in the epic case which should determine whether Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin, or a fantasist and possibly a fraudster.
The case pitches Wright against COPA, the Cryptocurrency Open Patent Alliance, a group of Bitcoin developers grown tired of seeing the Australian IT expert wage courtroom warfare against anyone who dared to suggest he was not Satoshi. His libel and copyright actions have met with limited success - in his case against crypto podcaster Peter McCormack he was awarded just £1 in damages after judges criticised his “lies and deception”, while a Bitcoiner who calls himself ‘Hodlonaut’ defeated Wright in a libel case in his home country Norway.
But the apparently unlimited resources available to Craig Wright, whose biggest supporter is Canadian casino billionaire Calvin Ayre, mean that taking him on is impossible for anyone who doesn’t have a few million in loose change just lying around. Enter COPA, backed by the likes of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and with an ample warchest to fight this case.
My involvement dates back to 2016 when as the BBC’s Technology Correspondent I was one of three journalists called by a PR agency and given what seemed like an intriguing story - the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. We were each separately introduced in the agency’s Tottenham Court Road offices to a man who never seemed comfortable in his own skin, Craig Wright.
The proof he offered - signing with a private key that was supposedly the property of Satoshi - was a bit of a mystery to anyone not versed in the complexities of the crypto world but Gavin Andresen, a trusted figure in Bitcoin circles, had seen the same demo and appeared convinced. But within hours of Craig Wright publishing details of his evidence in a blogpost, the “proof” was being torn apart at a New York crypto conference.
Craig Wright then promised “extraordinary evidence” to back up his claim. He asked me, Gavin Andresen and another cryptocurrency expert Jon Matonis each to send around £5 worth of Bitcoin to the address used by Satoshi Nakamoto in the first ever transaction. He would then send it back, proving he had control of an address which had not been used to make payments since 2009.
I sent my payment - 0.01701 BTC - and waited.And waited. Nothing happened and the following day Craig published a blogpost saying “I do not have the courage” to go ahead with delivering the proof. Having written that up, and now more dubious than ever about the whole crypto world, I walked away from the story, although in 2021 it formed a chapter in my book Always On.
Meanwhile, it was not long before Craig Wright bounced back, starting a whole crypto empire with Calvin Ayre, claiming hundreds of patents, launching something called BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) and insisting that his was the one true Bitcoin and the promoters of BTC (which most of the world sees as Bitcoin) better beware because he and his lawyers were coming for them. The Craig and Calvin show even had its own media empire Coingeek providing coverage of all their battles about as fair and balanced as GB News.
I watched with amazement as he carried on as if the events of May 2016 had not happened, as if he had not offered “extraordinary” proof of his Satoshiness and then, like the bridegroom who thinks better of it on the way to the church, failed to show.
Every now and then I would take to Twitter to remind him that he still owed me 0.01701 BTC and the quick, simple way to prove his claim that he was Satoshi Nakamoto would be to send it back. Eventually he blocked me - the 21st century equivalent of putting his fingers in his ears and shouting “I can’t hear you” - but friends kept me abreast of tweets where he tried to trash my reputation.
The single worst example came in November 2022 when he claimed that I had “lost” a 60 minute interview with him and spliced together five minutes with new questions. In fact, on the day when we did the television interview he said at the start that he would only answer one question - why he had decided to go public - although I pressed on and eventually kept him talking for about five minutes. The ridiculous and offensive claim that we had spliced in different questions was bizarre - what would have been the purpose of that? When I tweeted about this, suggesting that I needed to find a cheap libel lawyer, Calvin Ayre chimed in:
“You are being dishonest in this. That is what history will record. Craig is correct.”
I responded that such a serious charge against a reporter needed evidence to back it up and invited the billionaire to identify the questions that had been spliced in to the BBC interview which sits permanently on YouTube. Answer came there none.
It struck me that Craig Wright was using the BSV platform that Calvin Ayre had given him to defame anyone who dared suggest there were holes in his story. He was also clogging up the courts with vexatious litigation and even wasting police time. In 2020 he claimed that hackers had broken into his Surrey home and stolen 111,000 Bitcoin, then worth about $1 billion, but nearly $6 billion at today’s price.
Discovering the theft, Wright did what anyone would do in the circumstances*, first destroyed the evidence by wiping his computers, then called the police. (*Well, perhaps not everyone, and certainly not in that order.) Faced with the biggest single heist in UK history, you might imagine that Surrey Police might launch a massive manhunt. But when in the months after the story broke I rang to find out how the investigation was going, the police PR department seemed strangely uninterested in helping.
Which did not stop Craig Wright starting one of his most bizarre legal cases, this time against Bitcoin developers who he said had a legal. and moral duty to reverse the transactions which saw “his” money being moved.
So when last year I was invited by COPA’s lawyers to give evidence in their case against Craig Wright, I was happy to oblige. My witness statement, which you can read here, referred only to the events of 2016 and the facts of my dealings with Craig - at no point did I give an opinion on whether or not he was Satoshi. As the trial got underway at the beginning of this month, with COPA accusing Wright of “forgery on an indsutrial scale” I was told that I was scheduled to appear in the witness box on the morning of Wednesday 21st February. I would be cross-examined by Wright’s barrister, Lord Grabiner KC, a giant of the commercial Bar with a fearsome reputation.
While I was nervous about what I might suffer at the hands of this legal titan, I was also rather relishing it - especially after Craig Wright added me to the long list of people he trashed during his week long cross-examination by COPA’s KC Jonathan Hough. He. accused me of being “very pro-BTC”, and when Mr Hough suggested that I was a highly respected journalist, replied: “He's incredibly biased.”
For anyone who knows me or has followed what I have written about cryptocurrencies over the years, the idea that I am a big fan of Bitcoin may provoke a choking fit. In Always On I use a line from Hunter S Thompson about the music business to illustrate my view of the whole crypto scene: “a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.”
I wondered whether I would be given the chance to refute Wright’s charges from the witness box. But late last week, as I was reading the tweets of one of the clutch of enthusiasts reporting every line of this trial, I came across some startling news. Lord Grabiner had told the judge that he did not intend, after all, to cross-examine me and several of COPA’s other witnesses. What did this mean - did I still need to turn up in court? No, I was told, that would not be necessary.
By declining to challenge my evidence, Craig Wright was effectively accepting that my version of events was accurate - and one the Judge Mr Justice Mellor would take into account while considering his final judgement in the case. Even if I am just a little disappointed to have been denied a speaking role in this courtroom drama that is a satisfactory outcome and one of which I shall remind the self-proclaimed Satoshi the next time he defames me.
Oh, and by the way that 0.01701 BTC which was worth about £5 when I sent it to the Bitcoin founder’s home address is worth nearly £700 at today’s market price. But somehow I suspect I won’t be seeing that again.
Lovely newsletter this week. What a story!
So fun to read this and remember my bit part in this story, because Rory called me (at 4am, he didn’t know I was in New York) to ask for my opinion on the story. I told him I’d read up and get back to him. I set about googling and trying to understand what exactly had or had not been demonstrated in Rory’s presence.
Now, the reason I was in New York was that I was atteninding Consensus 2016, a major cryptocurrency conference that is now primarily remembered for my public disclosure of my privates (sic) key management strategy. Anyway, I showered and dressed and ambled down to the Green Room to get ready for my session. As I went I was greeted with a cheerful “Hello Dave” from Vitalik Buterin, a very nice guy but also a genius who had actually invented a cryptocurrency. So I asked him what he thought about Craig’s Crypto Claim and he told me that it was (I paraphrase) bollocks. I dutifully reported his opinion back to Rory in London and went off to my session.
The general consensus at Consensus was that the journalists had been tricked. Indeed, as Rory writes, within hours of Craig Wright publishing details of his evidence, the “proof” was being torn apart at a New York crypto conference.
Happy days.