Craig Wright: The Fraud That Didn’t Make It To The Court Rooms. Yet.
Craig’s reputation inside court rooms is already abysmal: over the last two decades, eight judges on three different continents have been ruling everything between “Dr Wright willfully created the fraudulent documents” (Kleiman v Wright) and “having found Dr Wright not to be a witness of truth” (Wright v McCormack).
Furthermore, Craig Wright has been sentenced to jail time (although it was changed to community service in appeal) for contempt of court in Australia in 2006, and he received a severe penalty in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit in the USA in 2021: $143 million including pre-judgment interest for conversion when the Miami Jury figured out he had fraudulently overhauled the USA entity W&K Info Defense Research LLC from a shortlived IT company without any revenues in 2011 to a Bitcoin company that never existed in real life in the second half of 2013, only to fraudulently obtain court rulings for a total of almost AU $60,000,000 to further his Australian tax fraud in the 2013–2015 era.
All in all, it’s fair to say that Craig Wright is a court approved fraud, serial forger, perjurer and thief.
But we ain’t seen nothing yet. Court rooms, so far, had no idea about the full Faketoshi story. So far, Craig Wright has not been seriously scrutinized for his false Satoshi claims. That will change soon though.
Written by Arthur van Pelt
ABOUT EDITS to this article: as more material may become available after the publication of this article, it could have edits and updates every now and then. In that sense, this article can be considered a work in progress, and become a reference piece for years to come.
Intro
I’ve never made it a secret that I expect that at some point overall con artist and notorious cosplayer Craig Wright will go to jail for his shenanigans. It’s not a matter of ‘IF’ anymore, but only a matter of ‘WHEN’.
As most of my readers probably will know, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is “currently conducting a criminal investigation relating to Craig Steven Wright”. This investigation is still ongoing, and will very likely conclude in the upcoming 2 to 3 years, knowing that in many cases the ATO is taking 8 to 10 years, sometimes even more, after the first signal of fraudulent tax dealings towards the ATO, to finalize their inquiries. Since ATO’s Refund Integrity department started their first audits on Craig Wright’s fraudulent tax filings late 2013, we can hear the clock ticking louder and louder. It is my educated guess that, based on this information, Craig will be taken from the streets and put in an Australian orange suit by 2025 the latest.
Meanwhile there are also several ongoing lawsuits that will conclude in the upcoming years, lawsuits where we can safely expect that Craig Wright’s false claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto the inventor of Bitcoin will be under some serious stress, if not completely destroyed. These lawsuits are:
- ‘hodlonaut v Wright’ case in Norway (trial scheduled for September 2022)
- ‘Wright v hodlonaut’ case in the United Kingdom (trial estimated to take place somewhere in 2023)
- ‘COPA v Wright’ case also in the United Kingdom (court recently announced trial to take place in the first quarter of 2024)
- Wright v Exchanges/Bitcoin developers again in the United Kingdom, dealing with a “passing off/trademark” question (ignited in July 2022, unknown trial date)
Even the so-called ‘Pineapple Hack’ case against the Bitcoin developers that Craig Wright recently lost on its merits is still not over, as Craig appealed the judge’s decision. Presuming that Craig his appeal succeeds, we might find new and/or re-used forgeries when this case is judged on its merits — and the no doubt fraudulent exhibits that Craig Wright filed to support this lawsuit — after all, further destroying his false ‘I am Satoshi’ claim.
In the four bullet-ed cases aforementioned, the heart of the legal matter is “Are you even who you claim to be: Satoshi Nakamoto? Did you actually design and code up Bitcoin and write the Bitcoin whitepaper? Do you really have copyright, trademark or license rights on anything Bitcoin, like database, whitepaper and source code? Did you even know about Bitcoin in the 2007–2011 era when Satoshi Nakamoto was involved with creating, launching and further developing Bitcoin before disappearing in April 2011 to never return with his famous last words to Mike Hearn “I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”? Did you really mine as Satoshi Nakamoto on the Bitcoin network in 2009 and 2010?”.
Most, if not all, of my readers will no doubt answer these questions with a firm: No, Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Craig Wright even knew about Bitcoin before July 2011, and there’s also no evidence that he even touched ‘physical’ Bitcoin before April 2013. And we also know for sure that his false Satoshi Nakamoto claim only started in January 2014 to further his Australian tax fraud.
Remember what the ATO said early 2016?
“We firmly believe that Craig Wright is not the inventor of Bitcoin. Instead, he may have created this hoax to distract from his tax issues.”
The rest of Craig’s claims can be summarized as thoroughly debunked lies, conflicting hearsay evidence, laughably incompetent Bitcoin talk, no C++ coding abilities whatsoever, a totally inconsistent career line with a cypherpunk and Bitcoin developer like Satoshi Nakamoto, an utterly failed text analysis when compared with the real Satoshi Nakamoto, many timeline inconsistencies introduced by Craig Wright when he explains Bitcoin’s history, almost 150 signings of public Bitcoin addresses that Craig claimed to own in his fraudulent Bitcoin career, and let’s not forget: a mindboggling number of sloppy, backdated, forgeries made by our cosplayer in an attempt to falsely mix his own cybersecurity history with Satoshi’s cypherpunk and coding history.
As said, it’s clear as day: Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto. So there’s no doubt in my mind that all courts will come to the same conclusion in the upcoming years.
In all of my articles so far you’ve found numerous court exhibits and media quotes, with links to their sources. Mixed here and there with evidence of ‘inconsistencies’ (to put it mildly) found by a little group of internet sleuths like myself. This article will try to bring together some of the material that didn’t make it to any court case yet, as far as I know. Meanwhile the list of court cases where this material, re-packaged as court exhibits, is likely to be used as evidence of Craig’s non-Satoshi-ness has been growing.
To add, what we didn’t see happen in Craig Wright’s Faketoshi saga yet, despite several frustrated calls for it, is a class action of disgruntled BSV investors and other stakeholders against Craig Wright and his camp for all the false promises they made.
The article in the screenshot top right came to life based on two tweets of podcaster Peter McCormack. Those two tweets were mentioned as exhibits in the Wright v McCormack libel lawsuit judgment (page 7):
At 9.08pm on 28 August 2019, Mr McCormack tweeted this (Publication 14):
“I am thinking that a class action lawsuit would only be right for falsely claiming a technology is Satoshi’s Vision when CSW is not Satoshi. This has affected a lot of people. I’ll be talking to both my US lawyers and those who have been defrauded. Let’s Wright this Wrong.”
At 8.31am on 29 August 2019, Mr McCormack tweeted this (Publication 15):
“A class action lawsuit would be against:
- Craig Wright (the forger)
- @CalvinAyre (bum beard)
- @JimmyWinMedia (the snake)
All three are likely guilty of misleading investors by lying that Craig is Satoshi
and that BitcoinSV is Satoshi’s Vision. Meeting US lawyers next week.”
At all times, people thinking about class actions against Craig Wright and his camp also might want to bookmark this article for future reference.
Now let’s do a run down of a firm number of remarkable, but somewhat unknown forgeries, debunked Craig Wright lies that we have not yet seen in past and current court actions, failed predictions and false promises that would possibly support a future class action, and we’ll conclude with an extensive list of all known Craig Wright’s blatant plagiarisms.
Let’s revisit this article in 2025 somewhere to checkmark what made it to the court rooms, shall we? 🙂
- UNKNOWN FORGERIES
March 7, 2014: Craig uses Satoshi Nakamoto’s PGP key in blog forgery.
On this date we witness Craig Wright’s intention to start developing his Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay further, after hinting in January 2014 to the ATO that he is Satoshi, using a spoofed Satoshi email address, and telling Kleiman estate “Your son Dave and I are two of the three key people behind Bitcoin” in February 2014. More about Craig Wright starting his Satoshi cosplay in 2014 in “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”.
This time, however, he won’t quite say “I’m Satoshi” explicitly, no, he starts leaving little breadcrumbs on the internet for Satoshi researchers to find. Unfortunately for Craig Wright, the world wouldn’t notice his desperate attempts, and this to his growing frustration in 2014 and especially 2015. More about that in Part 3 of the Faketoshi, The Early Years series.
Twitter user Joseph P Gardling explains:
“Just to be clear what happened here: Craig created a backdated “Satoshi” PGP key in 2014 and uploaded it to the MIT keyserver. He then searched for an old blog post around the time the whitepaper was released. He then copied the PGP info from the key server into that old post.
But he didn’t realize that the MIT keyserver lists the version of its software in that PGP output. Here, it’s 1.1.4, which was released in late 2012 and integrated into the MIT keyserver in late 2013. Craig got hoisted by his own petard yet again.
According to the WayBack Machine metadata, the archive was likely initiated by a user deliberately trying to archive the page, rather than just a normal crawl. So Craig edited the post then likely archived it *himself*, sealing his fraud forever in Internet history.” — Joseph P Gardling, Twitter thread
“The “Entropy” blog post snapshot was crawled through liveweb crawler, which is initiated by users https://archive.org/details/liveweb”” according Twitter user TechMiX.
So, to recap, on March 7, 2014 Craig went to edit an existing November 2008 blog post called “Entropy”, he added Satoshi’s public PGP key to it in a PGP signing procedure, and afterwards he uploaded the results on the WayBack Machine website to make it look like Satoshi Nakamoto himself genuinely signed that Entropy blog post in November 2008.
However, typical again for Craig’s sloppiness in creating forgeries, the SKS version 1.1.4 wasn’t available before October 2012.
What follows is a snippet from my article “The Faketoshi Tale of 1Feex”, released December 25, 2021. I strongly believe that the 1Feex paper wallet forgery that Craig Wright created in June 2015 will at some point return to him like a boomerang with a licence to kill. Let’s see if, or better when, that is going to happen.
June 18, 2015: The 1Feex address is used by Craig in an escrow transaction requested by Calvin Ayre.
Now that defrauding the ATO with the 1Feex address had basically failed, one would think Craig Wright will give up using this address that wasn’t, isn’t and never will be his property or otherwise under his control.
But no. Craig has only warmed up, and he will now defraud Calvin Ayre during the June 2015 bailout with the 1Feex address. Let’s check out how that went.
As can be read above, for this escrow transaction “so we can get this moving” (meaning, Calvin Ayre will make the funds available for Craig’s bailout), a paper wallet for the 1Feex address is used by Craig Wright. This paper wallet, however, is provably a forgery that pretends to represent some $20,000,000, which is 80,000 bitcoin multiplied by $250 which was the price of bitcoin by the end of the month of June in 2015.
The most comprehensive information about this paper wallet forgery is provided by WizSec Bitcoin Research, who wrote a tweetstorm, full text with images below, with a complete takedown of this fake 1Feex paper wallet.
“A brief history of Craig Wright’s false claims to own the @1FeexV6 Bitcoin address containing 80k BTC (one of many addresses he’s claimed to own even though they belong to other people), over which he’s launched a spurious lawsuit to harass Bitcoin developers:”
“Wright claims he purchased these bitcoins in 2011 via transaction from WMIRK, a small Russian money exchanger that didn’t even deal in Bitcoin until 2013, and even then only in tiny amounts. As proof of his claim, Wright has a purchase order he says his ex-wife typed up for him.”
“In reality, the @1FeexV6 address is from one of the earliest @MtGox hacks, which has been well known and documented since long before Wright’s lawsuit.”
“An email from “Dave” dated 2012 says he created a paper wallet of @1FeexV6 along with several other Bitcoin rich list addresses. The email was debunked in the Kleiman case as being a forgery created in 2014, well after Dave Kleiman’s death.”
“Following up on this claim, Wright was showing around the following printed paper wallet circa mid-2015, seemingly in order to convince potential bailout investor Calvin Ayre that Wright’s claimed Bitcoin holdings were real.”
“Knowing Wright, “validating” this paper wallet would just involve scanning the public key and verifying that yep it has 80k BTC on it! (which you can obviously do with *any* address) Unsurprisingly, the paper wallet is a lazy forgery, no doubt hastily thrown together for Calvin.”
“It’s just a standard paper wallet generated with http://bitcoinpaperwallet.com, which Wright has then altered to look like it contains the @1FeexV6 address instead. For reference, this is how a real paper wallet for the @1FeexV6 address from this time period should have looked.”
“First, note the address text in Wright’s version. The font is wrong, it’s missing an embossing effect, and the text is misaligned. It’s just been sloppily replaced.”
“Second, note how the QR code is different. While Wright’s code also contains the @1FeexV6 address, the real wallet generator uses high-redundancy codes, whereas Wright’s looks like a basic low-redundancy code pasted in from http://the-qrcode-generator.com. It’s not even aligned properly.”
“Third, the background pattern is wrong. In 2015, http://bitcoinpaperwallet.com generated unique background patterns depending on the actual address contained. Wright’s wallet *does* contain a unique pattern, but it’s for some other address, not @1FeexV6 .”
“Also worth noting that this unique background feature was only implemented in mid-2014, placing strict bounds on when the forgery could have been created.”
“So Wright is suing people because he claims his private keys got hacked, despite previously telling his own funders that the key was in unhackable storage. Will Wright disavow this paper wallet and admit to defrauding Calvin, or insist that it’s real and torpedo his own lawsuit?”
As said, all quotes and images so far taken from the WizSec Bitcoin Research tweetstorm.
This paper wallet forgery has also been discussed in detail in a special podcast episode of “Dr Bitcoin — The Man Who Wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto”.
And so far for “The Faketoshi Tale of 1Feex”.
Early 2019: Craig Wright ramps up “The BlackNet Lie”
Although Craig’s scammery around ‘BlackNet’ has been touched upon in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit that ran from February 2018 to December 2021, he did not face any consequences for his lies and forgeries around this theme. Let’s see if that is going to happen in a future lawsuit verdict.
One of the many parties calling him out on the BlackNet lie was WikiLeaks.
April 12, 2019: Bitcoin domain paid with credit card
On his blog, in an article called “Evidence and law”, Craig Wright is making the following false claim:
“It is incredibly ironic that people think Bitcoin is in any way about anonymity. I wouldn’t stop people trying to hide behind TOR, but such is not the purpose of Bitcoin. Bitcoin was birthed using a credit card payment. The records of the same payment are required to be kept by the banking system for 25 years. It hasn’t been that long. More importantly, I claimed the expenses on my tax in the 2008/2009 tax year. You see, a domain purchase in August 2008 is within the Australian tax year, but I was audited, which ended up going to court.”
Craig is at least correct with the domain purchase (by the real Satoshi Nakamoto) in August 2008, but that is public information anyway.
Additionally, Craig shows a screenshot what purports to be his August 2008 order, apparently paid for with his credit card.
On the ‘PrivacyPros’ website we can find the debunk, however.
And as my online friend CryptoDevil (we wrote the Faketoshi, The Early Years series together) correctly observes:
“Given that @Dr_CSWright was careful to avoid showing anything more than this tightly-cropped image as ‘proof’ it is probably likely that, as is shown in the example in Art’s post, Credit Cards column also has ‘not available’ on the date he faked this ‘New Order’.”
We can safely say that if this credit card nonsense of Craig Wright ever pops up in a future lawsuit (it was rumored online in November 2021 during the Kleiman v Wright trial that Craig would finally show the credit card payment proof on a highly anticipated ‘Bombshell Monday’ but…; oh surprise, this did not materialize), it will cost the opposing party in the court room hardly any effort to debunk this ‘evidence’.
2019–2021 era: The Bitcoin whitepaper forgeries
In April 2019, Craig Wright filed a false copyright claim in the United States on the Bitcoin whitepaper and some of the old Bitcoin source code. A handful of others, including the undersigned, did the same, proving that being registered as a copyright claimant in the US is not very meaningful in the short term and doesn’t prove anything copyright related. It’s simply the registration of a claim, while “The Copyright Office does not investigate the truth of any statement made.”. Ultimately, it still needs a court procedure to determine who has actual copyright between competing claimants.
Due to the turmoil around Craig Wright’s false copyright claims, the Copyright Office — who hardly issues public statements on their website — felt the need to explain their procedures around the handling of Craig’s applications a bit further in no less than two press updates, one on May 22, 2019 and one a day later, on May 23, 2019.
As said before:
“The Copyright Office does not investigate the truth of any statement made. A registration represents a claim to an interest in a work protected by copyright law, not a determination of the truth of the claims therein.”
We also learn that Craig Wright paid $800 for ‘special handling’, i.e. having Copyright Office examine the application of the claimant within five working days after receipt of his application.
Now that ‘Bitcoin copyright’ has become a big theme for Craig Wright, we see him create several Bitcoin whitepaper forgeries. The most hilarious one even has a typo in the title!
Can we expect these Bitcoin whitepaper forgeries in a court room someday? Who knows…
November 2021: The 2007 BDO Meeting Minutes.
The following quote about this minutes document is taken from my December 10, 2021 article “Craig Wright Ordered to Pay $100 Million in Kleiman v Wright Lawsuit”.
“For starters, there were no awards for Breach of Partnership and Breach of Fiduciary Duty, as the Jury did not believe the false stories in which Craig Wright presented himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto and as having partnered with Dave in creating and launching Bitcoin. This is crucial to understand from the start.
Because, let’s have a look at the facts of this matter. Only a few pieces of presumed evidence of Craig’s Satoshi-ness were provided during trial to support this (mis)representation, and they were nowhere near convincing. For example, the Jury was treated with a (highly anticipated and broadly discussed outside court) handwritten meeting note with a BDO logo from 2007, the era when Craig was still working at that accountancy firm. In this handwritten note, the future roll-out of Bitcoin for the years 2007 and 2008 was supposedly planned and worked out in different items like coding, testing and launching.
However, such a handwritten note could have been written at any time in the years well after 2007. And in the case of Craig Wright this is a certainty, knowing his history in creating truckloads of Satoshi Nakamoto related counterfeits, of which many more were presented, and thoroughly debunked, during trial. In fact, since Craig Wright has only been building on his Satoshi Nakamoto fantasies in the years starting from 2014, it can be said with certainty that the meeting note was written sometime in the years 2014–2021. In any case, we can safely assume that this kind of “evidence” has not been very convincing to the jury.”
Then, in January 2022 with more material from the Kleiman v Wright being released, I was able to expand on the 2007 BDO meeting minutes subject. Let’s copy a piece from “Craig Wright And The BlackNet Lie” here.
“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.]
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.”
So far for “Craig Wright And The BlackNet Lie”.
Then there was also something with this Allan Granger person, the BDO partner and colleague of Craig Wright at that time, that had supposedly attended the purported meeting. Well, did he? Let’s see what he told ‘Business Daily’ in 2016.
Let’s hope this forgery will be re-used by Craig Wright in another lawsuit, so a proper forensic expert can have a look at it, and determine when it was created (my educated guess again, around 2019).
Several more of these fine Craig Wright forgeries will be discussed in the 4. BLATANT PLAGIARISMS section of this article.
2. DEBUNKED LIES
February 15, 2019: Scamming the Commodity Futures Trading Commision
3.5 years ago, Craig Wright has been lying through his teeth in front of the CFTC about his role in Bitcoin and having filed a ‘BlackNet’ project with the Australian government (to be precise: AusIndustry). Will this shameless perjury ever come back to bite him in the ass?
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.
April 6, 2019: Fibre to Bagnoo, 67 computers and Microsoft patch Tuesday
Here’s where the Faketoshi saga becomes personal. I learned about Craig Wright in 2015. The Wired (“Is Bitcoin’s Creator this Unknown Australian Genius? Probably Not (Updated)”) and Gizmodo (“This Aussie Says He And His Friend Invented Bitcoin” which was quickly followed up by “The Mystery of Craig Wright and Bitcoin Isn’t Solved Yet”) articles, where he was revealed as a possible Satoshi Nakamoto candidate, certainly did not impress with the many forgeries and inconsistencies found. Then followed by Craig’s May 2016 signing sessions debacle, it closed the curtains forever for me: this individual is not Satoshi, but simply a pretender, a con man and only one of several largely irrelevant scammers in the Bitcoin industry. So from there onward I simply ignored Craig Wright for a few years.
That changed around March 2019 when Craig Wright threatened with, then actually started his libel suits against several Bitcoiners: Peter McCormack, ‘hodlonaut’ and Adam Back. Craig Wright even had the disgusting, unethical nerves to put a $5,000 bounty on hodlonaut’s head to get him doxed. Furthermore, Craig also aimed his legal arrows at a few altcoiners: Roger Ver (once a respected Bitcoiner, but since August 2017 supporting a Bitcoin fork called Bcash that is slowly sinking into oblivion) and Vitalik Buterin (almost same story here: once a Bitcoiner, but who felt the unnecesary urge to start a slowly failing altcoin called Ethereum).
In that era of libel lawsuits I decided to gather and map out all the known, hardly known and unknown debunk information about cosplayer Craig Wright that was spread all over the internet (Reddit, Bitcointalk, personal blogs, places like that), in numerous court filings accessible on public court dockets, and elsewhere. In the process I discovered that creating a historical timeline of events really helps to understand the context of Craig’s cosplay fraud.
Around March 2019 I befriended Australian Twitter user “jimmy007forsure” who was a great help and inspiration kicking off this massive undertaking. Massive indeed, because not only are Craig Wright’s schemes large in number and convoluted, they all contain numerous lies and forgeries aimed to deceive his gullible audience into entering Craig’s alternate universe where he is ruler, law maker, judge, inventor and cosplaying time traveller.
The first ‘new’ thing to debunk that jimmy007forsure and the undersigned came across was an April 6, 2019 blog post by Craig Wright: “Two steps forward, one step back”. Our jaws dropped on the floor when we read this ‘information’ about the early days of Bitcoin. That is, Craig’s lies about Bitcoin’s history:
“Few people understand what was required in the beginning of Bitcoin. When Bitcoin was launched in January 2009, it required a series of machines to send and transmit information without fail. This is far more difficult than you can imagine.
In my ranch that I used to own in Bagnoo, Australia, I converted part of my shed and home to run computers. In my house outside of Sydney, I took my garage and ran racks of machines.
I had racks of computers in my converted shed. With the mezzanine I had plenty of space. Earlier, I spent money to have fibre laid and opened up a rural town to fast Internet (1). Few people seem to understand that the first version of Bitcoin following the genesis block fell over. The genesis block is dated to 3rd January, 2009. The first mined block occurred on 9th January.
They are both days where I travelled to my farm. I had to travel 3 1/2 hours to get there.
I ran 67 machines in a cluster (2). They were Windows servers. I managed things and coded on Windows XP, and loaded software on machines running on Windows Server 2003. The first version of Bitcoin was launched and started to run, but stopped. There were program errors in the Bitcoin code, but they weren’t the biggest problem. I needed to reconfigure the systems.
I’d started with a major miscalculation.
Microsoft patch Tuesday (3).
The original machines were a group of workstations and not a domain. When I initially installed them, I used a series of Windows Server 2003 licences. And then MS09–001.
It wasn’t actually the first problem, but it was the biggest. All of the machines weren’t running at block one. There were what I hoped to be enough. Bitcoin didn’t run on Linux at the time. I had Centos, Redhat, and Solaris machines on my network to handle DNS and sendmail, but Bitcoin ran on Windows.
The week between genesis and block one was busy. I moved away from Windows Server 2003, and set up a Windows 2008 domain. I set up a forest hierarchy with machines just outside of Sydney, in Bagnoo, and live links to a Melbourne server. I had connections to a Methodist Church just outside of California where I donated some time running their IT. I figured that since I paid for the systems sold, it wouldn’t matter if I ran Bitcoin on the server. I did the same in Tumbi Umbi in the church there. Both of them had a number of machines that I’d set up. I paid for the Internet connections personally, and donated the servers and the licenses, so I figured using them to run Bitcoin nodes wasn’t outside the scope of what I could do as it wasn’t costing them anyway.
The first reboot was an eye opener. I had configured all of the machines with the same time zones, even those in different countries. They all shut down to patch at the same time. The entire Bitcoin network stopped following the genesis block, and needed to be started again. When they came up, network services and connections were flaky, and the network forked and split, and it was a big mess to say the least. The funny thing is, the code had fewer flaws running on Windows Server than it did on XP.”
So jimmy007forsure picked up Craig’s false “I spent money to have fibre laid” and “I ran 67 machines in a cluster” stories, and meanwhile I tried to unravel the hilarious “Microsoft patch Tuesday” timeline mistake of our cosplayer. Let’s recap these three debunks. Because, as far as I know, these three thorough debunks of Craig Wright lies — by itself already completely destroying Craig’s false ‘I am Satoshi’ narrative — have not entered any court case yet, but it wouldn’t suprise me to see that happen at some point in the future anyway.
(1) “I spent money to have fibre laid”
No Craig, you didn’t do that. You only opened your mouth and out came a lie again. jimmy007forsure completely unraveled the “Fibre to Bagnoo” story as a hoax.
In December 2020, jimmy007forsure did a follow up with new information, further debunking Craig Wright’s false ‘fibre to Bagnoo’ claim.
“A few days ago I revisited this claim and dug much deeper — the story is still false. Craig claimed that due to his initiative he opened up a rural town to high speed internet and approx 50,000 people benefited. […] So if 50,000 people in the area benefited from Craig’s fibre link but the farm across the road from Craig cannot get high speed internet through conventional means, then something is VERY wrong here. I’m sure you know what that is… someone is telling lies.”
(2) “I ran 67 machines in a cluster”
Before the nothing less than epic fibre to Bagnoo investigation, jimmy007forsure first went to inquire this outrageous claim of Craig Wright about ‘his’ Bitcoin network of 67 clustered machines. To no one’s susprise I’m sure, it turned out to be completely false too. There’s no real life evidence whatsoever that supports the claim that Bitcoin needed more than a few computers to start in January 2009.
(3) “Microsoft patch Tuesday”
Let’s grab the relevant quotes from Craig Wright’s blog post and put them together, so the reader will get the right picture of what Craig is actually claiming here.
“Few people seem to understand that the first version of Bitcoin following the genesis block fell over. The genesis block is dated to 3rd January, 2009. The first mined block occurred on 9th January. And then MS09–001 [note: this is the Microsoft code number for Microsoft patch Tuesday of January 2009]. All of the machines weren’t running at block one. The entire Bitcoin network stopped following the genesis block, and needed to be started again. The week between genesis and block one was busy. I moved away from Windows Server 2003, and set up a Windows 2008 domain.”
There’s no misunderstanding here: Craig Wright claims that directly after the Bitcoin Genesis block was created on January 3, 2009 (this date is correct), ‘his’ Bitcoin network (that didn’t exist anyway, as we just learned from jimmy007forsure’s investigations) stopped due to Microsoft remotely patching MS09–001 to his setup. Then Craig continues with the claim that in the week between January 3, 2009 and January 9, 2009 he had to set up a Windows 2008 domain, and when that was finished, Bitcoin could continue to form block one on January 9, 2009 (this date is also correct, by the way).
However, this Microsoft patch Tuesday story by our Faketoshi completely falls apart with the knowledge that Microsoft only patched MS09–001 to the world on January 13, 2009.
Indeed, the global release of the Microsoft patch with the code number MS09–001 was ten days AFTER Bitcoin Genesis block was formed by the real Satohi Nakamoto, and four days AFTER Bitcoin block one was mined… by the real Satoshi Nakamoto.
Oops.
April 18, 2019: Jameson Lopp’s “How Many Wrongs Make A Wright?”
“In other articles and on social media, some people have called into question Craig Wright’s character on a personal level and tried to establish patterns of fraudulent business practices not specifically related to the matter at hand. While my research led me to examine these allegations, I decided to narrow the focus of this particular article on evidence solely as it relates to Wright’s claims that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.” — Jameson Lopp
This piece of research, a magnum opus by CASA’s co-founder & CTO Jameson Lopp, is worthy of a filing in any court case against Craig Wright where his credibility as a Satoshi Nakamoto candidate is being questioned. It’s highly recommended to read Lopp’s whole article, but allow me to quote a few highlights here.
- “Wright once said: “I am a lawyer and this [financial law] is my area of speciality,” whereas the real Satoshi, when asked about how a financial law applied to Bitcoin, said, “I am not a lawyer and I can’t possibly answer that.”
- Wright once said: “At no point have I said that Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency,” and yet Satoshi called Bitcoin a cryptocurrency on several occasions.
- He once claimed that Bitcoin’s block size was set in the block header (it’s not).
- In an interview with GQ, Wright claimed, “I haven’t moved [any bitcoins]. I have sent them to Hal Finney and Zooko and that was it. Full stop.” But in 2009 Satoshi Nakamoto sent 82.51 BTC to developer Mike Hearn.”
“Wright vs Satoshi Sleep/Activity Schedules
From examining the public timestamps on over 100 blog posts by Wright during the 2009 & 2010 time period and comparing them against over 800 public timestamps from emails, forum posts and code commits by Satoshi during the same period, we can gain some insight as to the sleep patterns of each. It’s pretty clear that Wright was generally inactive from 13:00 to 18:00 UTC while Satoshi was inactive from 7:00 to 12:00 UTC. As such, Wright appears to maintain a sleep schedule consistent with someone living in the AEST time zone (Australia) while Satoshi maintains a sleep schedule consistent with the EST time zone (North American east coast and part of South American west coast). While it’s possible that Wright was meticulously maintaining two separate schedules for each identity, Occam’s Razor suggests that the reason for the different patterns is probably because they belong to different people.”
July 2022: Satoshi Nakamoto v Craig Wright text analysis
In July 2022, inspired by a January 23, 2016 CCN article “Text Analysis Confirms Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto”, I took the effort of grabbing some examples of Craig Wright quotes, to compare them with Satoshi Nakamoto quotes. In no court case so far has such analysis ever been presented to the judges, as far as I’m aware. Will ‘hodlonaut’ surprise us in September with a full blown professional text analysis during his Norway trial? Or will COPA bring a text analysis report on the court table in the first quarter of 2024 when their trial against Craig Wright is scheduled? Can’t wait to find out if any of the following nuggets have been used in such case.
Example 1.
Satoshi Nakamoto, 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.”
Satoshi Nakamoto, February 15, 2009
“A lot of people automatically dismiss e-currency as a lost cause because of all the companies that failed since the 1990’s. I hope it’s obvious it was only the centrally controlled nature of those systems that doomed them. I think this is the first time we’re trying a decentralized, non-trust-based system.”
Craig Wright in CoinTelegraph video interview on November 26, 2018, around five minutes into the video.
Example 2.
Satoshi Nakamoto, February 12, 2009
“There isn’t an off-line mode where double-spenders are caught and shamed after the fact, because that would require participants to have identities. The owner of a coin is just whoever has its private key. Transactions only transfer ownership.”
“You do not own your bitcoin because you have a key. Just as you do not own the money in your bank account because you have a password. You own bitcoin when you have validly obtained it. The laws of property and exchange are not new. The mere possession of a key does not give ownership. In the same way that having a copy of a house key does not provide you with ownership of a house, a key does not provide you with ownership of bitcoin.”
Example 3.
Satoshi Nakamoto, February 13 2009
“[Bitcoin] can be programmed to follow any set of rules. I see Bitcoin as a foundation and first step. First you need normal, basic P2P currency working. Once that is established and proven out, dynamic smart money is an easy next step.”
“Bitcoin is a system that was set in stone. If the protocol is changed, then it shows and demonstrates it is not Bitcoin. When those involved altered the rules, they impacted their entire ecosystem — it is a centralised power structure. They defraud you when they lie about decentralisation and tell you that they have no ability to change things but then alter the rules.”
Example 4.
Satoshi Nakamoto, April 27, 2009
“Bitcoin is fundamentally designed to be able to do non-reversible transactions, and there certainly are applications that need that.”
“As an example, if a class action from a hacked exchange or an instance where the keys were supposedly lost was to occur, a freezing order could first occur censoring any transactions and then later force miners to reverse or alter transactions. The false myth of “code is law” has been propagated to hide the true nature of Bitcoin.”
Example 5.
Satoshi Nakamoto, April 23, 2011
“I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
Satoshi Nakamoto, April 26, 2011
“Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them.”
Craig Wright, January 26, 2021
“In the case of BTC Core, you cannot decide that a community now owns a project. I did not ever hand the project over. I explained that the project was based on a protocol that had been set in stone.”
Craig Wright, private Slack room, July 21, 2022
And how about this doozy? Satoshi Nakamoto firmly stating in December 2010 on the Bitcoin Forum about WikiLeaks “No, don’t bring it on. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try use Bitcoin. The heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”
Where Craig Wright 8 months later takes the utter opposite side of the real Satoshi Nakamoto when he states “look to WikiLeaks’ stupidity in selecting PayPal as a provider over BitCoin”. This quote can be found in the following screenshot, down right.
Around July 2011 is indeed the moment when Craig Wright found out about Bitcoin for the first time in his life. The comments in the screenshot above were made early August 2011 by Craig Wright on The Conversation website. And as can be seen, he didn’t spell Bitcoin right once, instead he misspelled it no less than four times!
To add, Satoshi also used the spelling bitcoin(s) (note the lower case “b” here) when it was about the currency unit of the Bitcoin protocol (note the capital “B” here), a currency unit of which the ownership is being exchanged between users using the private key of a public Bitcoin address from which the currency unit is transacted to the receiver — transactions of which the signatures are stored in the Bitcoin blockchain.
To summarize, “Bitcoin” with a capital “B” is the Bitcoin protocol itself and “bitcoin” with a lower case “b” is the currency unit of the Bitcoin protocol. But looking at Craig’s scribblings above again, don’t ask him at this point in time to understand, let alone properly use, these little but important details that Satoshi knew so well about his own invention.
Oh, and then there’s this of course. What not many people know I think, or didn’t notice so far, but Satoshi Nakamoto always wrote a double space after a period (also called ‘full stop’) in a sentence. This double-spacing is very typical for Satoshi Nakamoto.
“With the introduction of the typewriter in the late 19th century, typists used two spaces between sentences to mimic the style used by traditional typesetters. While wide sentence spacing was phased out in the printing industry in the mid-20th century, the practice continued on typewriters and later on computers. French spacing inserted spaces around most punctuation marks, but single-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons. English spacing removed spaces around most punctuation marks, but double-spaced after sentences, colons, and semicolons.” — Wikipedia
As far as we know, Craig Wright never used double spaces as a standard in any of his publicly known texts; from posts on forums and mailing lists, in chat rooms, in emails, to his articles, patents and papers; for example, compare Craig Wright’s paper “Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy” with Satoshi Nakamoto’s “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” (both published late 2008) and it becomes blindingly obvious.
Earlier I brought up the COPA v Wright case. It’s arguably the most important lawsuit involving Craig Wright where he is being attacked on his Satoshi-ness. At the same time it’s a case we don’t know much about, since there’s no public court docket system in the UK like for the Kleiman v Wright case in the USA. So we have hardly any idea about the status, the motions and exhibits filed and the — no doubt costly — intermediate battles being won and lost.
However, the moment that something pops up in the world out there, for example by lawyer Will Mackenzie, we see the internet sleuths like myself and *WuCoin* immediately jump on the material to find the discrepancies in Craig’s statements.
*WuCoin* noticed this little paragraph on page 4:
And subsequently *WuCoin* remembered this 2019 Declaration of Craig Wright from the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit:
And since *WuCoin* tagged COPA in his tweet (tip to my readers: ALWAYS tag those fighting Craig Wright in court when the info is relevant to their case), I’m pretty sure this perjury by Craig Wright will not go unnoticed in the COPA v Wright lawsuit…
This section of debunked Craig Wright lies could grow to epic proportions. There’s a saying circulating in the Bitcoin community that goes like this.
“When do you know Craig Wright is lying? When his lips are moving.”
I’m afraid there is a lot of truth in this saying.
3. FAILED PREDICTIONS AND FALSE PROMISES
Let’s bring back in memory some of the most outspoken — but failed — predictions and promises of the Craig Wright/BSV camp. Here is where I can see class actions come to fruition in the upcoming years.
I consider the most damaging, the most harmful one the misrepresentation that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, and in direct financial relationship with that false claim, the repeated suggestion that Craig Wright owns bitcoin by the boatloads, bitcoin that is locked up in some non-existing trust (Non-existing? Yes, according the ATO in 2016 and repeated by court Miami, Florida during the 2018–2021 Kleiman v Wright lawsuit:
“The totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust exists.” — Judge Reinhart, 2019)
but nevertheless, non-existing bitcoin that Craig will unleash on the market in one way or the other. Someday. Or to quote a regularly seen meme in the Bitcoin community addressing the everfailing predictions and false promises circulating in the BSV camp:
Soon™
It all started somewhere in 2018. Craig Wright first hinted, then announced — on Slack, mind you, obviously THE place to make these type of public announcements — that he would start selling “a large volume of BTC for USD”. Since Craig always claimed that his BTC was ‘locked up in an oversea trust’, we can safely presume that he’s talking about the bitcoins in the Tulip Trust here.
September 29, 2018: The Rolling Iceberg Order
From the section ‘Death Threats to BTC’, this Tulip Trust related announcement remains a classic that made a long, still ongoing trail in the BSV community and, to a certain extent, elsewhere. However, so far, this “rolling iceberg order followed by significant orders of other exchanges. It is expected that the value [of BTC] will drop significantly and will be matched by a 10x leveraged short. The sale will align to a reward halving.” never happened of course. Because Craig Wright doesn’t have, and never will have these bitcoin to execute on any ‘rolling iceberg order’.
The reward halving that Craig refers to has passed more than two years ago, by the way. Bitcoin’s halving happened on May 11, 2020. The next one will be on or around May 4, 2024, so presuming Craig Wright and his fans are still around in 2024, we might see this rolling iceberg order myth come back in the narrative again by then.
November 2018: The Fatal Flaw In BTC
This hilarious statement of Craig Wright (there is also a Fatal Flaw In Segwit variation to be found), made around the fork from Bcash that spawned the BSV knock off in November 2018, has become one of the most popular memes in the Bitcoin community. Here’s just one example, a meme made by Peter Scott-Morgan.
However, think about this. There have been plenty of people making (des-)investment decisions based on this nonsense, and other statements like the rolling iceberg order and “BSV will be over 1200 USD at 97.8% probably and BTC at market will be between 0.10 and 0.20 USD”.
May 26, 2019: Craig dumping 1 million Tulip Trust coins in January 2020
Now that Craig Wright did not follow up on the rolling iceberg order yet, it became time for a new intermediate narrative. Let’s have a look at one of the Tulip Trust related Kleiman v Wright exhibits, an email with attachment that at first glance appears to have been sent from Dave Kleiman to Craig Wright on June 24, 2011.
At second glance, however, it is a forgery created on October 17, 2014 and backdated to June 24, 2011 by “modifying the exported PDF”, according forensic expert Dr Edman, who reported on December 13, 2019:
Seven months earlier however, it appears that Calvin Ayre, no doubt having seen or being told by Craig Wright about this October 2014 Tulip Trust forgery — with the date January 1, 2020 being mentioned, see red box — is starting to rally the BSV troops.
Only to be interrupted by Craig Wright’s next Tulip Trust related narrative a few months later.
July 31, 2019: The ‘donating billions to charity’ promise
This following statement of Craig Wright was found in the Financial Times magazine, but was repeated on other places too.
“In case you haven’t yet heard, Craig Wright, the man who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, performed at FT Alphaville’s Vaudeville — the Fyre Festival of Finance — on Friday night. It was a raucous affair, that ended with Wright showing the delightful Wilton’s Music Hall crowd his middle finger and calling them “lazy f**king a**holes”. But not before he had promised to donate $8bn worth of bitcoin to charity in 2020, during what was meant to be a sermon on fraud (rather than, it is worth pointing out, a fraudulent sermon).” — About Craig Wright’s performance, FT Alphaville, July 31, 2019
We are now three years later, and nothing has happened so far. Of course not, as cosplayer Craig Wright, as said before, never had, doesn’t have and never will have any of the substantial amounts of bitcoin that he claims to have.
A likewise ‘charity’ claim was found later in December 2019 in Craig Wright’s private Slack room. Since we know that Craig Wright can’t even pay for his running lawsuits and has to take multi-million loans from Calvin Ayre with the non-existing Tulip Trust bitcoin as collatoral, we can safely predict this promise will never materialize either.
October 17, 2019: The Incredible Bloodbath
The following quote is taken from an article written by Craig Wright which was published on his Medium blog.
”So, I apologise that I’ve not been able to set everything right from the beginning, but everything now is in place so that no one will ever alter the system again. In the next 15 months you’re going to see an incredible bloodbath. Thousands of criminals, in all areas of crime who have used bitcoin or any other blockchain are going to start to bleed. It’s now time to talk because nothing can be done to stop this. Nothing can be done to me or my family that can change the path now. There is no threat, no act that can ever redeem these people will stop what is coming to get them. Bitcoin is a juggernaut and those criminals who ever thought of using bitcoin are about to be ground under its wheels.”
For the record, the deadline for that ‘incredible bloodbath’ passed one and a half year ago on January 17, 2021.
December 17, 2019: Dumping 825,000 BTC
Hardcore Craig Wright fan and Faketoshi apologist Joel Dalais appears to have missed the latest narrative twist of our con man, when we see him fall back to what Calvin Ayre brought up earlier in the year. One million BTC has suddenly become 825,000 BTC for some reason, but otherwise he is pretty firm about the timeframe when the BTC dump is going to happen: January 2020 through to May’ish 2020.
Did this dump ever happen?
Nope.
And then January 1, 2020 passed without anything happening… And Bitcoin advocate Charlie Shrem, one of the founding members of the Bitcoin Foundation in September 2012, decides to chime in:
February 24, 2021: 1Feex stolen from Mt Gox class action
Just a reminder that a (very unlikely) reason for a class action against Craig Wright is actually one of the cases he is running against the Bitcoin developers (the Pineapple Hack case that Craig initially lost, but recently he was, surprisingly, allowed to appeal). In the extremely unlikely case this appeal succeeds all the way to the end, and Craig is allowed to claim the 80,000 1Feex (and the 30,000 12ib7) bitcoin with a court order, then the combined Mt Gox creditors ‘might’ consider starting a class action lawsuit against Craig Wright about the 1Feex part of these tokens.
But in that case these creditors have to make it believable — in court — that the 1Feex address was involved in a Mt Gox hack executed by Craig Wright himself, while he had just ‘proven’ in the Pineapple Hack case appeal that he is the rightful buyer, thus owner, of these coins.
So yeah, this is all very, very far fetched, if you ask me.
Now let’s move on to my favorite section. As far as I know, no one ever brought together all the known occassions where Craig Wright committed plagiarism.
4. BLATANT PLAGIARISMS
Plagiarism is more serious than most people think. It is a criminal breach of the copyright act and is also a criminal fraud.
— Craig Wright, June 29, 2008 (found here in comments on his blog)
If you say so, Craig. Let’s find out what ‘criminal fraud’ you are. This section will cover what we currently know about Craig Wright’s plagiarisms in the Satoshi Nakamoto/Bitcoin era 2007–2022.
Buckle up, it’s quite a lot.
Around 2006: BDO employee profile
Craig Wright was employed by BDO Chartered Accountants & Advisers in Sydney in the late 2004 till end of 2008 era. He left BDO in January 2009 “taking a golden-handshake redundancy that funded me for a time”, as Craig called it himself. Since he only received AU $10,938 from BDO according page 30 here, it remains to be seen what dillution Craig Wright allows for the word ‘golden’.
His job title at BDO was CAS Manager, Computer Assurance (and don’t let Craig tell you anything else like “I had also been working as a director at the audit firm BDO”, because that’s simply not true).
But anyway, let’s get to the meat of this. Craig’s BDO employee profile from that era contained a somewhat crippled quote, riddled with typos, that appears to have been his motto at the times.
“Business Security is about managing risk,if you believe, technology alone will solve all your problems, than you have just defined your first it dilemma.”
How BDO ever allowed this incompetent word salad without proof reading in their digital realm is beyond me. I mean, not even the courtesy to correct “it” to “IT”? Come on!
But dear reader, does that sentence with a handful of signature Craig Wright typos maybe remind you of this famous Bruce Schneier quote?
Rings a loud bell, doesn’t it? And looking at both quotes, one genuinely intelligent and the other one plagiarized and horribly crippled in the process, Twitter user ‘xtranaut’ who unearthed this doozy, couldn’t help responding with a dry but savage:
“At an early stage in his career Craig Wright discovered his exceptional skill to copy someone else’s brilliant idea and ruin it.”
Another blatant plagiarism that Craig Wright himself dates back as early as 2006, found by my friend CryptoDevil.
The paper that Craig refers to is called “Requirements for record keeping and document destruction in a digital world”. And it didn’t take long before CryptoDevil found the first signs of plagiarism in this paper… Copied straight from an European Treaty published by the Council of Europe called “Convention on Cybercrime”, without giving any credits anywhere in his paper to this source.
February 2008: The Impact of Internet Intermediary Liability
Paintedfrog’s blog article “Craig Wright’s LLM Dissertation is Full of Plagiarism” cannot be missed in this overview. Paintedfrog made quite the impact with this damning reveal of Craig’s plagiarism in 2020 as, for example, CoinTelegraph devoted a whole article on it: Craig Wright Accused of Plagiarizing Law Degree Dissertation.
A few quotes from the original, must read, article. It kicks off with the infamous 2008 ‘criminal fraud’ quote that started this blatant plagiarism section, followed by a 2011 quote from Craig about plagiarism.
“Plagiarism varies in its extent. It goes from simply rephrasing the ideas of another without referencing your sources right through to the literal block copy of paragraphs of text and the theft of entire passages.
This literal copying is a form of fraud and theft. In some cases, the aim is not an accidental unacknowledged phrase but deception. The author wants to use the works of another as their own. In this “uniquely secretive form of theft” the author is asserting a level of skill, knowledge and expertise that they do not exhibit on their own. They are using the work and study of another to lift their own lack of ability. (…)
Some, and this has been attributed to many individuals state that “to steal ideas from one person is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.”.
This makes light of the damage that the fraud and deception of plagiarism causes, but more importantly, it detracts from real research. A good researcher uses the ideas of others, but also attributes the sources.”
Oh, the irony. Paintedfrog continues:
“Craig Wright completed his LLM (Master of Laws; a postgrad academic law degree) in International Commercial Law for Northumbria University in 2008. His dissertation submitted February of that year is titled The Impact of Internet Intermediary Liability. Here is a link to the 90-page paper.”
Then, with a dry introduction “The work is heavily plagiarized. Much of the text is taken — both in paraphrase and verbatim form — from other works with no credit given.”, Paintedfrog unleashes a pages long description of everything that is wrong with this plagiarized LLM Dissertation. One example:
“Hilary E Pearson, Liability of Internet Service Providers (1996)
Wright appropriated the majority of the text in Pearson’s 14 pages, making no mention of the author in his paper. He copied Pearson’s opening paragraphs word-for-word and used them in his own Introduction.”
Now please be invited to go read the rest in the full, original take down.
July 4, 2008: The IT Regulatory and Standards Compliance Handbook
On this day, Craig published a book about his field of expertise. Note that this is the exact timeframe when Satoshi Nakamoto would obtain the bitcoin.org domain, had coded up most of Bitcoin and was writing the Bitcoin whitepaper.
3.5 years later, on January 7, 2012, we find an entry about Craig Wright’s book on the plagiarism section of attrition.org:
“The book “The IT Regulatory and Standards Compliance Handbook: How to Survive an Information Systems Audit and Assessments” by Craig Steven Wright (published July 4, 2008), tech edited by Brian Freedman and Dale Liu, contains plagiarized material. While the quantity of stolen text does not comprise a majority of the book, there is enough to demonstrate systematic plagiarism, typically in the frequent bulleted lists throughout the book.”
And it appears that the moderators of the attrition website are keeping an eye out for notorious plagiarizer Craig Wright, as we can find this paragraph mixed in the article. The Sam Williams article mentioned will be highlighted later.
“[Update: 4/21/2020 It has come to our attention that Mr. Wright has been accused of plagiarism several more times. You can read more about it in “Anatomy of a fraud — A deep dive into one of Craig Wright’s plagiarized papers” written by Sam Williams in 2019.]”
Late 2008: Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy
Even this 2008 paper that Craig Wright wrote together with Dave Kleiman and Shyaam Sundhar contains plagiarism, Twitter user Tak_Horigoshi found out. As it is such a beautiful example of how internet sleuths perform their inquiries, his full January 18, 2022 Twitter thread is copied here.
“A short story. In 2008 Craig Wright used this image in a research paper called Overwriting Hard Drive Data: The Great Wiping Controversy. It’s a microscopic image of the magnetic pattern left on a hard disk track after the disk had been wiped.”
“The paper indicates that the image came from the microscopic imaging experiments Wright performed for the paper.”
“But it didn’t. The image is not from Wright’s study but rather from over a decade earlier — from a gallery of microscopic images on the Digital Instruments website (later the Veeco site when Veeco acquired DI in 1998). In Wright’s paper the image is cropped and tilted 45º”
“But let’s not jump to conclusions. Let’s check that reference no. [15] in the caption below the image.”
“Here’s the cited work “Spin-stand imaging of overwritten data and its comparison with magnetic force microscopy” in entirety. Doesn’t look like that image is in there.”
“When Wright’s paper was published he was emailing with some correspondents about his study. Fred Cohen mentioned a webpage on the topic of file deletion — which happened to show the same image from Wright’s paper. The site credited Veeco for the image.”
“Alarmed at the perceived inference, Wright denied that the image came from Veeco but rather from two earlier works he had duly cited in his paper. He was so immersed in such images that he knew at a glance exactly where this one came from.”
“So let’s just take a look to confirm. Here’s “Magnetic Force Scanning Tunneling Microscope Imaging of Overwritten Data” in its entirety. It’s not in there. He must have meant the other one.”
“”Microscopic investigations of overwritten data” in its entirety. It’s not in there either.”
“The end. The moral of the story is that Craig Wright always doubles down. He can stonewall longer than his interlocutors can maintain interest. No one is petty enough to squabble at length over something as inconsequential as the provenance of a single image in a 14 year old paper…”
Amen to that, Tak_Horigoshi.
Let’s also note at this moment in time that while no less than three separate examples of Craig Wright plagiarisms — considered ‘criminal fraud’ by the man himself — can be found in 2008 alone, the Bitcoin whitepaper (also published in 2008) still stands firmly as an original work with proper references to previous work of others.
Craig Wright learned about Bitcoin around July 2011, as that’s where we can find him mentioning Bitcoin (well, not bitcoin or Bitcoin as Satoshi Nakamoto always wrote it, but in four different misspellings like ‘Bit Coin’ as we saw earlier) for the first time in his life in public. This happened late July/early August 2011 on The Conversation website, in the comments section to his articles. Scroll up a bit for a more detailed summary of that moment.
Let’s have a look how Craig fared plagiarism wise in this era. And let’s find out, was his work, plagiarised or not, remotely or closely related to Bitcoin?
August 28, 2011: Exploiting Format Strings With Python
“Players always win.”
Twitter user ‘Joseph P Gardling’ with a little instruction how to easily find Craig Wright plagiarisms, with the knowledge that Craig Wright cannot code. The 2011 paper that he used as an example can be found here.
Note how Joseph cleverly used the Wayback Machine to get back to the era when Craig Wright commited the plagiarism.
October 28, 2011: Patent “A system, method, server processing system, and computer program product for operating a registry.”
On this date, Jamie Wilson and Craig Wright filed a patent. There’s way more to tell about Jamie Wilson, his interactions with Craig Wright in the 2011–2013 era, and this patent, but let’s only focus on the plagiarisms in the patent for the moment.
On December 11, 2015 (indeed, a few days after Craig Wright’s self-dox articles in Wired and Gizmodo) we find this post by user ‘cipherphage’ on Reddit.
“Craig Steven Wright’s Registry Patent — Heavily Plagiarized and Not Really About Bitcoin
Others have already provided links to Craig Wright’s patent, many assuming it is some how related to using the Bitcoin blockchain as a registry system. I don’t think that is necessarily the case, as the patent is already being used to support the product of a company owned by the co-author, Jamie Wilson.
From reading the patent and additional research on Your Digital File, I get the impression that Mr. Wilson may have authored the bulk of the document which describes the registry, leaving Mr. Wright to handle describing the cryptography involved. Unfortunately for Mr. Wilson, it would appear that Wright relied heavily on plagiarism.
Starting on line 447, we can see a blatant example of such plagiarism. This section describes five principles of a crypto system suitable for use in the proposed registry. Apart from the injection of a few specific implementation details, and some trivial rewording, these principles are taken verbatim from a paper entitled Fair Cryptosystems, Revisited, available in the journal Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO ’95, page 211
Line 500 gives us another example of blatant plagiarism, so poorly executed as to introduce undefined symbols into the algorithms underpinning the cryptography described. Termed within the patent as “a Recoverable Certifiable Cryptosystem”, the system described is taken wholesale, with minor modification, from another paper. In Auto-Recoverable Auto-Certifiable Cryptosystems (Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT ’98, page 23), authors Adam Young and Moti Yung describe their solution to key escrow. Wright has attempted to simplify the m-tuple REC into a fixed length, but forgets to update the descriptions that rely on the symbol m.
Line 534 describes some potential safeguards “to protect against compromise or loss of escrowed keys”. The majority of this paragraph is taken word-for-word from the Safeguards for Escrowed Keys section of A Taxonomy for Key Recovery Encryption Systems.
Things really get weird at 536, wherein Wright describes system triggers that may activate security controls. This whole section, which is seemingly completely out of place in the patent, is taken from the book The IT Regulatory and Standards Compliance Handbook, authored by one Craig S. Wright. That’s right, Wright plagiarizes himself. This shouldn’t be particularly surprising, as the book has been the subject of other plagiarism charges. Interestingly, we do see an additional example of plagiarism that Attrition missed in their analysis. Substantial portions of this section are borrowed with slight modification from an article on Oracle database auditing.
Those are just some of the examples of plagiarism I was able to quickly identify within Craig Wright’s patent. I’m sure there is more to be discovered. Based on some preliminary reading of his other technical and academic writing, I expect we will find substantial plagiarism throughout. I also suspect there may be some amount of ghostwriting performed on his behalf.”
Amen.
So was Craig’s work, plagiarised or not, remotely or closely related to Bitcoin? Not exactly, no. It will still take almost two full years before Craig Wright actually started touching Bitcoin (April 2013, Mt Gox) and started writing about Bitcoin again after his Mt Gox red pill.
Now let’s jump to the second half of 2013, the period that Craig Wright started using Bitcoin in his multi-million Australian tax fraud. Not only did he pick random Bitcoin public addresses from the Bitcoin rich list to falsely claim he ‘controlled’ them (without ever proving that in front of the Australian Taxation Office, despite multiple signing requests during their tax inquiries), he also started using existing Bitcoin work found online to copy it into his own. Of course, again, without giving proper credits to make it appear as if he was the sole author of the Bitcoin related texts.
The next two plagiarism examples have been taken from “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”
September 25, 2013: Craig sends email about Sukuriputo Okane project.
This email can be found in a June 3, 2019 post on Craig’s blog. At first glance, it’s an impressively smart looking email from a very bright Bitcoin architect-level developer. But is Craig Wright even such person?
No, of course not. He never was, and he never will be. Because at second glance, one finds out that the meat of this email is simply copied from the Bitcoin Wiki. For example, some of the text is taken — both in paraphrase and verbatim form — from the Bitcoin Wiki Contract page, set up in 2012.
The screenshot of the email from Craig’s blog:
This is, plain and simple, plagiarism, of which Craig once, in June 2008, said “Plagiarism is more serious than most people think. It is a criminal breach of both the copyright act and is also a criminal fraud.” in the comments to his blog article “Tisk, tisk, tisk…” (scroll down a little for the comments section).
And now that we’re on it anyway, this exact same text has been re-used by Craig in a (backdated to April 5, 2013) chat correspondence with Mark Ferrier to support the false MJF Mining story.
October 7, 2013: Craig’s first Bitcoin supercomputer “Sukuriputo Okane” enters the scene!
Here we find the first of several (fake) projects that Craig Wright set up to scam the ATO. ATO however was quick to find out that “much of the application is taken from internet sources, without acknowledgement” and that the examples of the R&D activities were also “taken, unacknowledged, from an internet source”.
The reader only needs to scroll back to September 25, 2013 to know what ATO is talking about.
And these are signature moves from Craig Wright again, as we will see this type of plagiarism, literally copy-pasting from internet sources, is going through Craig’s fraud career as a fine red thread. And would the supercomputer disaster stop here? Don’t count on it…
And so far for the two 2013 plagiarism examples pulled from “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”, one found by yours truly, one found by the ATO.
As Craig Wright moves forward with a false Satoshi Nakamoto claim in 2014, but failed to impress with his self-dox in December 2015 to Wired and Gizmodo and subsequently failed again with the signing proof sessions in 2016 (worthy read: The Craig Wright May 2016 Signing Sessions Debacle, In Full Context), in the process of holding up this false claim of being the inventor of Bitcoin, he also starts to create Bitcoin related papers.
Unsurprisingly, not only do these Bitcoin papers (and a blog post about Bitcoin to kick off this part of the plagiarisms list) en large fail to impress content-wise, they are heavily plagiarized too. Let’s run down a few notable examples that have been rather thoroughly inquired for plagiarisms.
As said, a Craig Wright blog article first before we head to several papers.
April 26, 2016: Generating A Bitcoin Address
For starters, let’s make the reader aware that this blog post was originally part of Craig Wright’s 2016 signing proof sessions debacle. This now-deleted blog post can still be found on Wayback Machine. Let’s take a quote from it:
“Several good Bitcoin libraries are available in several languages such as:
Here, we use several of the JavaScript libraries that are publicly available.”
Now go read Hackernoon, where JP Richardson wrote on May 2, 2016 about how he found out that his 2013 article was plagiarized by a ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ claimant.
Now note, as just one of several plagiarism examples 1. the number 2. the names 3. the order and 4. the linked online Github places of the programming languages mentioned in the following sentence found in JP Richardson’s article.
“There are a number of libraries to work with Bitcoin in some of the most popular languages: C, Java, C#, Ruby, Python, Go, and JavaScript. This article will focus exclusively on the JavaScript library.”
Indeed. Craig Wright caught shamelessly plagiarizing again.
But it will get worse. Way, way worse. Remember that Craig Wright appreciates being called Dr Wright? Let’s have a look at his Doctoral Thesis next with Paintedfrog’s May 4, 2020 blog article “Craig Wright Plagiarized Significant Portions of His PhD Thesis and Tried to Hide It”.
February 8, 2017: The Quantification of Information Systems Risk: A Look at Quantitative Responses to Information Security Issues
And indeed, Paintedfrog — we paid attention to his epic take down of Craig’s 2008 LLM Dissertation earlier — returns with a massive, massive blow again. A blow to the Doctoral Thesis that awarded Craig Wright his PhD status, that is.
And again Paintedfrog’s unraveling of another plagiarized Craig Wright paper made it to several media outlets, like BeInCrypto (Craig Wright Accused of Plagiarizing His Doctoral Thesis) and Finbold (Self-proclaimed Satoshi reportedly plagiarized significant portions of his PhD thesis).
Allow me to quote you what I think is the most hilarious plagiarism anecdote from Paintedfrog’s article. Read it, and weep. Sorry, laugh I mean. It’s about birds and their nests, and en passant another Craig Wright paper (Territorial Behavior and the Economics of Botnets) is taken down as ALSO containing the same type of plagiarism. Hi-la-ri-ous!
“Stolen Figures
At least ten different figures were stolen, most of which were deliberately modified to avoid detection. For example, Wright stole a figure from a 1982 textbook about bird nest defense and re-labeled the X-Axis to read “Time spent not defending systems” instead of “Time Away from Nest”. The hastily-edited version first appeared in Wright’s 2012 paper, “Territorial Behavior and the Economics of Botnets”. Wright created a new version of the same figure for his PhD thesis in an attempt to hide the plagiarism.”
Full version available at “Craig Wright Plagiarized Significant Portions of His PhD Thesis and Tried to Hide It”.
Next!
March 28, 2017: Bitcoin: SEIR-C Propagation Models of Block and Transaction Dissemination
This Craig Wright paper, claimed to be written on March 28, 2017 but only posted on SSRN on April 2, 2018, can be found here.
Reddit user ‘Contrarian__’ examined this paper for a bit, and posted his findings on October 29, 2018 jokingly titled “Craig Wright actually did completely original research! Just kidding, I caught him blatantly plagiarizing yet again.”. A quote:
“Here are the two uncited sources: source 1 and source 2. There may be more uncited sources, but I got bored. These two sources cover almost half of the paper.
As before, the plagiarism is blatant and intentional. He basically substituted the word ‘transaction’ for ‘infection’ and made minimal other textual changes. All the math has been stolen because Craig simply can’t do math.”
July 7, 2017: The Tulip Trust III Contract Forgery
Found in “Team Faketoshi And The Helpers”:
Lap Rock, a painting by Pieter Holsteyn II (Dutch watercolor painter & engraver living in the 17th Century), was found to be plagiarized — copied & used without giving proper credits — by Craig Wright on a backdated to July 7, 2017 Tulip Trust forgery. The forgery was created around 2019 for the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.
Twitter user “mytechmix” explains:
“He took it from this painting, grayscaled it and used it on the cover.”
July 17, 2017: The Fallacy of Selfish Mining in Bitcoin: A Mathematical Critique
Let’s jump straight into this one with a tweet from Twitter user Peter Rizun. Peter is a fine example of how Bitcoiners, big block fork fans (Peter appears to belong to this group), other altcoiners and even no- and pre-coiners — individuals without any exposure to cryptocurrencies, yet — can disagree on many things Bitcoin, but manage to seamlessly join forces when it comes to calling out con man Craig Wright.
After Peter’s tweet, this plagiarized paper reached CoinJournal on April 13, 2018 in an article by Ian Demartino called “Craig Wright Accused of Plagiarism”.
“The man who once convinced multiple media sites that he was Satoshi Nakamoto, is now being accused of stealing something other than an identity: ideas and work, i.e. plagiarism.
In July 2017, Craig Wright published “The Fallacy of Selfish Mining: A Mathematical Critique” to show that proposed changes to Bitcoin weren’t necessary and may be harmful to the coin’s security.
It depended heavily on a theorem of gambling system proposed in 2003 by Wen Liu and Jinting Wang. The problem is that Wright never cited them, and it seemingly goes further than that.”
And there we go again. Another case where the self-proclaimed Bitcoin ‘inventor’ needs other people’s work in a failed effort to impress as a Bitcoin expert.
Let’s move to a few papers of Craig Wright in which he is desperately trying to prove (but failing in these efforts) that Bitcoin, or Bitcoin Script for that matter, is Turing Complete. Craig’s struggle with this subject dates back to November 2015 when Nick Szabo, mildly smirking, suggested that Craig Wright should write a paper about the subject of Bitcoin being Turing Complete.
Around 17 minutes into the video above we can hear Craig Wright bringing up the subject of ‘loops’. And then it quickly derails…
Craig Wright: “No one seems to realize that Forth actually does loop, you have to use a separate control stack, it’s not like a lot of code forms where you actually have a single stack. Forth and Forth-like languages use a dual stack architecture so everything that we’re talking about in derived contracts can actually be done directly in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin protocol. It’s, um, just going to take time for people to understand it.”
Michele Seven (host): “Since you, since you mentioned Nick then I’m going to allow him to respond to that. Do you need your microphone though... or the water!”
Nick Szabo: “Um, no, that, I have not heard that opinion before I’ve never heard anybody call the Bitcoin Script Turing Complete I don’t believe that’s accurate.”
Michele Seven: “He just said you’re wrong. (laughing)”
Craig Wright: “The difference is the script itself isn’t. What you can do is you have in Forth a control loop so the looping function is separate to the actual loop of the script itself.”
Nick Szabo: “Yeah, I mean that’s an esoteric thing, um, if it’s not Turing Complete then it’s not a general purpose language like Ethereum regardless of, uh… But that was partial.”
Craig Wright: “But the only way of actually writing code would be to do it directly in a script that runs on the machine.”
Michele Seven: “You have another option? (laughing again)”
Nick Szabo: “Well, this would be a good topic for you to write a paper on because that’s certainly an unconventional view you have, so…”
And Craig Wright indeed went on a writing spree in the years after… But not only did he fail to prove that Bitcoin (Script) is Turing Complete, his papers about Bitcoin’s Turing Completeness turned out to be heavily plagiarized too.
October 12, 2017: A Proof of Turing Completeness in Bitcoin Script
The original of this paper can be found here. On September 5, 2019, Twitter user Zectro presented an inquiry into the plagiarisms in this paper.
October 12, 2017: Bitcoin: A Total Turing Machine
Published on the same date as the previous Turing Complete-ness related paper, this paper (found here) was also found plagiarized by Zectro.
These two tweets ignited a whole discussion thread on Twitter, with several Craig Wright apologists mingling in the online debate. Zectro interacted with most of them, trying to teach them a few things about plagiarism in the process.
Then, on September 23, 2019, Sam Williams publised a blog post “Anatomy of a fraud — A deep dive into one of Craig Wright’s plagiarized papers”. And Sam Williams, inspired by Zecto’s tweets a few weeks earlier, did indeed an ‘anatomy of a fraud deep dive’. Let’s grab a few lines and a screenshot from the article for your reading pleasures.
“To get right to it, almost the entire Wright paper was plagiarized from a 1964 paper by Corrado Böhm. The following picture shows Wright’s complete, published paper with the plagiarized parts highlighted.”
Again the tip: go read the full article.
March 23, 2018: Beyond Godel
This paper, in which Craig Wright again tries to claim something with Bitcoin’s Turing Completeness, is debunked by Reddit user, here he is again: ‘Contrarian__’, in an October 25, 2018 post titled “New plagiarism from Craig Wright — at least 40% of a recent paper was intentionally and blatantly plagiarized”.
Not only does Craig’s claim fail miserably on its merits as Bitcoin, nor Bitcoin Script, is anywhere near Turing Complete, but again a massive amount of plagiarism is unearthed. From the Contrarian__ Reddit post:
“The paper itself is completely ridiculous, but let’s ignore the fallacious conclusion and focus on the plagiarism:
From the bottom of page 5 in Wright’s paper:
Starting from the simplest primitive recursive functions, we can build more complicated primitive recursive functions by functional composition and primitive recursion. In this entry, we have listed some basic examples using functional composition alone. In this entry, we list more basic examples, allowing the use of primitive recursion:
From the uncited source:
Starting from the simplest primitive recursive functions, we can build more complicated primitive recursive functions by functional composition and primitive recursion. In this entry, we have listed some basic examples using functional composition alone. In this entry, we list more basic examples, allowing the use of primitive recursion:
Note the bizarre, double “in this entry” language.
It goes on to list the exact same 16 examples with the exact same names and symbols. Here’s how we know it’s intentionally plagiarized: he slightly rewords many of the notes on the steps. For instance:
Source:
To see that q is primitive recursive, we use equation
Craig:
We can test that q is primitive recursive using the equation:
Another instance:
Source:
where sgn(y) takes the case y=0 into account.
Craig:
In this, sgn(y) takes the case of y = 0 into consideration”
And it goes on and on and on like this in Contrarian__’s original post… As always, please go read the full posts behind the links, as I only copied a few highlights from them into my article.
March 18, 2019 blog post: Learning Script
As stated before, Craig Wright can’t code (many examples of that can also be found in my article “Craig Wright And The BlackNet Lie” in which this very same ‘Learning Script’ article is debunked in further code detail) and because of that, he desperately needs to plagiarize when he writes a more technically oriented article.
And here we found one again in “Learning Script” on his current blog website (with a copy on Medium). Please go look for the quote:
“The successor function acts to form the level-0 foundation of the infinite Grzegorczyk hierarchy of hyperoperations. Such allow the mathematical functions to be built. They include the addition, multiplication, exponentiation, tetration, and functions.”
Now what do we find on Wikipedia while Craig makes no mention of having used Wikepedia as a source?
“The successor function is the level-0 foundation of the infinite Grzegorczyk hierarchy of hyperoperations, used to build addition, multiplication, exponentiation, tetration, etc.. It was studied in 1986 in an investigation involving generalization of the pattern for hyperoperations.[2]
It is also one of the primitive functions used in the characterization of computability by recursive functions.”
Yeah. Craig found plagiarizing. Again.
June 28, 2019: Kleiman v Wright Show Cause Hearing Exhibits
On July 3, 2019 Vel Freedman, head of Ira Kleiman’s counsel, notifies the Miami, Florida court in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit that:
“Plaintiffs provide notice that they are filing the exhibits Plaintiffs that were admitted into evidence at the June 28, 2019 Show Cause Hearing in front of the Honorable Bruce Reinhart at the Paul G. Rogers U.S. Courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida. Plaintiffs attach these exhibits to this filing and have redacted these exhibits consistent with the Court’s instructions.”
And the moment the internet sleuths read ‘EXHIBITS’ in relationship to con man Craig Wright, they get to work. Sarah Jamie Lewis, tweeting on July 4, 2019, is one of them.
“The whole kleiman-wright case is a train wreck, but I find it fascinating how [Document 237–17], which seems to be a document describing how the (2011/12) trust works, rips off large portions of the Orisi docs written in 2014. Including an image.”
Sarah continues:
“Based on the transcripts I have read, I really hope netflix picks up the whole Craig Wright story and turns it into a drama, it may be the only way Wright ever pays off all his legal costs. You too would pay to watch the drama of a man so engrossed by his own ego that he agrees to pose as Satoshi Nakamoto, compounds fraud on top of fraud in an attempt to pull it off and then is helpless as his life is torn apart in multiple courtrooms across 7 seasons.
Also love these 2 identical emails apparently sent by Kleiman, one from 2011 the other from 2014. Considering Kleiman died in 2013 that is quite the achievement. Seriously, what a train wreck. I’m sure there are great explanations for the existence of all of these documents and I cannot wait to read them.”
Amen to that, Sarah.
More plagiarism in this forged Tulip Trust document was found by Twitter user *WuCoin*.
“Imagine padding your paper on the fake Tulip Trust with a plagiarised copy-paste of Mike Hearn’s Bitcoin contracts page lifted from the Bitcoin wiki and being so sloppy about it that you left Mike’s name in the text. What a giveaway.”
It appears that the Bitcoin Wiki Contracts page (where you will indeed also find “google_results_count(site:www.google.com/hostednews ‘Mike Hearn’ olympic gold medal) > 0 A bet on me doing something that I will never actually do” as *WuCoin* indicated above) is a favorite go-to place for Craig Wright, because this is already the third time that we find him plagiarizing it. Look under September 25, 2013 for two earlier examples.
Meanwhile, the discovery of heavy plagiarism in Craig Wright’s PhD thesis in May 2020 (see Paintedfrog 2017 earlier in this section) caused quite the turmoil in the BSV camp.
May 23–25, 2022: The Wright v McCormack trial
In the transcripts of this 3-day trial, we find several references to plagiarism, commited by Craig Wright. At first glance this appears a bit strange, as the case was about libelous statements of Peter McCormack, a well known podcaster in the Bitcoin industry. So how did this case made a twist to Craig Wright committing plagiarism?
To support his case, Craig Wright had come up with a list of 10 conferences where, he claimed, was rejected for a speaking slot based on Peter’s libelous statements. However, a few weeks before trial, Peter’s counsel brought in several witness statements of conference organizers that completely contradicted Craig’s evidence. Based on these witness statements, Craig quickly pulled the totality of his ‘evidence’ a few days before trial. He couldn’t help however, that the content of these witness statements was discussed during trial anyway. And here is where we find ‘plagiarism’.
“So, Professor Darwazeh then explains in 19 that the submission was rejected, your submission, at some stage between 11th February and 15th February 2019. He says, “…. it is clear from the reviews that there are many reasons [it] would have been rejected immediately and without further consideration.” He says, at 19.2, “It was extremely unusual to have any paper score a 1/5 on the quality of presentation from a single reviewer…. This is a red flag.” At 19.3, he says, Reviewer B essentially states that there has been some plagiarism.”
“Then it says, at the bottom of that paragraph: “For your information, the reviews are included at the end of this message and also available via a link”, then the reviewer’s comments. The reviewers’ comments seems to be, I do not know if they have all put their comments under one heading, but anyway, it is called “Reviewers’ Comments” and at the top of page 16 it says: “Basically, this is a good example of plagiarism. Authors combined”, and there is a link to one paper, and then a link to another, “It is highly recommended to be rejected.””
To cut a long story short here, Craig Wright’s evidence of real life harm (being rejected at conferences because of Peter McCormack’s public libelous statements) turned out to be made up from start to end. Craig was rejected at these conferences for basically two reasons: either they had never heard about Craig Wright in the first place, or when they did, his papers were rejected during blind peer reviews as utter (in some cases plagiarized) garbage.
Judge Chamberlain showed no mercy in his August 1, 2022 judgment for this three year long blatant abuse of a judicial procedure by Craig Wright.
And so far for the Wright v McCormack case.
For now, the only questions remain: what will we see of all this in the upcoming trials? Will we see old and/or new Faketoshi forgeries (no doubt, if you ask me, there’s no Craig Wright legal case so far without them)? Will they bring in a thorough text analysis against our cosplayer? Some or all of the failed promises that Craig Wright made over the years? And will the counsels of the Bitcoin developers, COPA and hodlonaut bring in Craig Wright his habit of notorious plagiarism to make a point? Only time will tell…
Let’s call it a shot here, guys. Thanks for reading, as always!
