Oslo, Norway: The hodlonaut v Craig Wright No-Defamation Trial
A day-to-day report
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.
After the Kleiman v Wright trial in November 2021 — which Craig Wright lost, and where plaintiff W&K was awarded $143 million in damages including prejudgment interest — this is the second time within a year that Satoshi Nakamoto cosplayer Craig Wright had to make an appearance in a public civil trial. But this time with the substantial difference that he is taken to court by a Norwegian Bitcoin supporter with the pseudonym ‘hodlonaut’ who demanded that Craig Wright should also provide physical proof of his Satoshi Nakamoto status.
You can read how that all turned out in this trial day-to-day report.
And of course everyone was curious if it would again end up in a so-called “Chewbacca Defense” from his lawyers, just like during the Kleiman v Wright trial last year!
Monday September 12, 2022, day 1/7
Let’s start with what this lawsuit is all about: early 2019, hodlonaut had filed a so-called NDR, a Non Declaratory Relief, at the Oslo District Court in Norway with the intention of getting a ruling from this court stating that he did not commit defamation with several tweets from early 2019. In the process, hodlonaut had also demanded that Craig Wright should prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and indeed, Craig provided a lot of ‘Satoshi’ material leading up to the Oslo trial. In response to that material, Craig Wright had a 350-page forensic report from KPMG hurled back in his face, and that KPMG report will also be discussed at lenght during this trial.
At the same time, hodlonaut is being sued by Craig Wright in a London, England court for the same defamation, but only based on 1 remaining tweet. And again, Craig Wright is required to also prove here that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, as hodlonaut is using the so-called ‘truth defense’. The English case will be mentioned a few times during the trial in Oslo, but in principle it is a completely separate lawsuit from the one being discussed during the Norway trial. The Oslo ruling might, or might not, substantially influence the outcome of the English case, nevertheless.
Day 1 of the Norway trial immediately sets the tone: Craig Wright has no less than 9 lawyers, 4 of Schjødt AS and 5 of ONTIER LLP, at his side in court. Meanwhile hodlonaut only has 2 lawyers of DLA Piper Norway DA and Simonsen Vogt Wiig AS present. Later on we will learn that the 4 Schjødt lawyers were recently hired, as Craig will explain in his testimony that he changed local representation “because my previous counsel Wikborg Rein did not agree with my eye witnesses stategy”. The 5 ONTIER lawyers were flown in from England, to help Schjødt and prepare for the England case against hodlonaut.
Nevertheless, we’re going to see during the course of this trial that the 2 lawyers representing hodlonaut will be dealing adequately and excellently with Craig Wright’s team’s shenanigans. Having access to seemingly unlimited funding (cough, Calvin Ayre, cough) does not always automatically mean that the effects of the infamous ‘Craig touch’ are being lifted.
Back to the court room. In the early morning we hear a, for some slightly surprising, ruling from the judge that the court will not decide whether Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, or not. This immediately blows a hole in the CoinGeek narrative that people are witnessing the ‘Satoshi trial’.
After some start up formalities, it is first the turn of hodlonaut’s lawyers, who alternate between questionings and presentations every now and then, to tell their opening arguments. Over the course of the trial, it’s lawyer Haukaas who will do most of the talking on behalf of hodlonaut. And after a short introduction about the ins and outs of the open source Bitcoin protocol project, who is actually the real Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, and what are Bitcoin forks like BCH and BSV, the attention goes to Craig Wright, the person.
And are we in for a treat here. Everything from 2013 — when Craig Wright started his Bitcoin fraud in Australia — to the present was covered: the Australian tax fraud with random Bitcoin whale addresses that started in 2013, the Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay that started in 2014, the Tulip Trust saga that started in October 2014, the bail out by Calvin Ayre’s camp in June 2015, the raids on his home and offices by the ATO in December 2015, the Wired/Gizmodo articles a day before the raids, articles where Craig Wright was initially presented as a Satoshi candidate but those stances were quickly corrected by these media outlets after realizing that the ‘evidence’ they had received was far from watertight, then Craig Wright ‘s flight to England in the same period came into the spotlight, Craig ‘s failed signing sessions in April/May 2016 were brought up, Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen’s role in the signing sessions era, the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit that started in 2018… and let’s not forget, we also heard many damning court rulings from other lawsuits that Craig Wright has been involved in, and as the famous icing on the cake, a lot of Craig Wright forgeries — from emails to contracts to blog posts and everything in between — was also mixed into the opening arguments.
To add, hodlonaut’s lawyers didn’t forget to cite several of the more than 7,000 other tweets from the same period (early 2019), tweets in which Craig Wright was also accused of being a fraud and a fake Satoshi, or Faketoshi as many critics say. In addition, we heard several quotes from Craig’s own most spirited tweets, with the intention of making it clear to the judge that Craig himself is not such a saint either when it comes to his public performance on social media.
My guess, based on what I saw reported by some people sitting in the audience in court, tweeting live from the court room what was happening and being said minute by minute, is that hodlonaut’s lawyers have only touched 25 to 50% of the total Craig Wright fraud. Because I didn’t see anything about the 3 Bitcoin supercomputers that Craig claimed to own while the ATO found out in 2015 that none of these supercomputers ever existed in real life, I also didn’t see anything about the frauds that Craig Wright set up surrounding Professor David Rees, Mark Ferrier and his company MJF Mining, the Siemens software deal, the El Baraka scam, and also the multi million fraudulent contracts and other documents that Craig Wright forged with false Deborah Kobza signatures on them was not mentioned… There was obviously simply not enough time to cover it all.
All in all, the session of this day took an hour longer, also due to some technical problems with the venue’s equipment and the Norwegian-English translations for the public, but again, mainly because hodlonaut’s counsel could not properly squeeze in all the Craig Wright frauds. That is indeed quite a job, we just saw.
Between the lines of the opening arguments of team hodlonaut, we learn that Craig Wright at least handed over a counterfeit Bitcoin source code file and an early whitepaper draft forgery to hodlonaut in this lawsuit. We are already looking forward to the day when the KPMG forensic report will be discussed, aren’t we!?
Tuesday September 13, 2022, day 2/7
Today it was Craig Wright’s lawyers’ turn to tell his side of the story in the opening arguments. And we immediately noticed a striking element: they are trying to make hodlonaut the main character in a major commercial and social attack on Craig Wright and his brainchild BSV. Because BSV is supposedly a huge threat to Bitcoin (BTC) and the Lightning Network.
My personal perspective on that, for the shits and giggles of it:
- 1 BTC = $20,000, 1 BSV = $50
- BTC is number 1 in market capitalization, BSV number 55 and falling hard on the market cap lists since 2019
- BTC has around 150 million users, BSV only a few thousand
- BSV is, for example looking at metrics like hash rate and nodes, technically a practically irrelevant minority split from BCH (number 32 market capitalization), which in turn is a minority split from BTC
The illusion that BSV would be, or ever has been, even remotely a serious threat to BTC, is hard to substantiate with real life facts. The sole reason that hodlonaut called Craig Wright a fraud and a Faketoshi was simply because he is. We’re going to see this ‘BSV relevance’ theme come back later as the trial is processing.
Then it was bravely tried by Craig’s lawyer to portray Craig Wright as a logical Satoshi Nakamoto candidate because, buckle up, Craig has many certificates, degrees and titles (no mention of the numerous plagiarisms involved in obtaining these credentials, of course), because he is interested in Japan, and because his mother, his uncle and a few more people say so. Oh yes, and Craig Wright can, miraculously, also code according to his lawyer! Well, Craig can’t code even if his life depended on it, that has been made perfectly clear in my article “Craig Wright And The BlackNet Lie”.
In addition, Gavin Andresen ‘s blog post from May 2016 is quoted very often, and some quotes are taken from his interrogation in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, because Gavin would supposedly also agree that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.
Of course, Gavin Andresen his November 2016 blog post where he nuanced the May 2016 signing blamage with “The other possibility is he is a master scammer/fraudster who managed to trick some pretty smart people over a period of several years. I regret ever getting involved in the “who was Satoshi” game” is not cited. And Gavin also made statements later like “It was a mistake to agree to publish my [May 2016] post before I saw his– I assumed his post would simply be a signed message anybody could easily verify.” and “Given his extreme efforts to avoid releasing a public signature, I’m starting to doubt that Craig actually possesses the key he claims he has, and he did somehow manage to trick me and, perhaps, has been deceiving people for many years.”, but these statements were also not quoted by Craig’s lawyer of course.
Also, in the opening arguments of Craig’s lawyers, an attempt was made to undermine the fat KPMG report with the forgeries found in Craig’s Satoshi evidence pack that he dropped in this case. At the same time, the hilarious anecdote was heard here that it doesn’t matter to Craig Wright anymore, because he didn’t have to prove that he is Satoshi in this case anyway. That’s right, you read that correctly.
Because as the reader might remember, in the meantime, Craig had also provided, and pulled last minute before the final hearing in May 2022, falsified material about 10 conferences in the McCormack defamation lawsuit, which had cost him dearly… so I couldn’t help but sigh, then giggle, about this argument.
At the end of the day we learned that the day after hodlonaut (morning session) and Craig Wright (afternoon session) will be interrogated.
Wednesday 14 September 2022, day 3/7
Day 3 saw a very solid performance of hodlonaut who in the morning, calmly, honestly explained everything that had happened around the beginning of 2019, which people in the Bitcoin community he knew and interacted with, what actions he performed with the Lightning Torch, which online groups he was in, why he has the opinions that he publicly expressed, and overall I had the strong impression that hodlonaut was not really under any pressure during his interrogation. I can’t make anything else out of it, I couldn’t find any conflicts with my experience of what happened with and around hodlonaut since the beginning of 2019. It is my expectation that this session will leave a good impression with the judge.
hodlonaut his full testimonial (with subtitles).
Then it was Craig Wright ‘s turn, just before lunchtime, to take the stand and again Craig did not disappoint. Boatloads of nonsense about Bitcoin and his own history in Bitcoin were hurled onto the audience in the court room, and already during Craig’s interrogation the debunking on Twitter started. This was because, as said, various reporters from the court room immediately reported on Twitter what they witnessed and heard from the stand. A guy called ‘Norbert’ had quickly grown into his role as the most favorite court reporter, as he was always very fast and detailed in his reporting. Another account called ‘WizSec Bitcoin Security’ also quickly became a ‘must-follow’ due to the detailed technicalities they passed onward from the Norwegian translation studio to Twitter.
Craig Wright his full testimonial.
A few highlights of this afternoon session with Craig Wright on the stand.
Let’s kick off with the moment that, only six and a half minutes into the interrogation, Craig was asked this by hodlonaut’s counsel:
“Have you ever been charged or convicted for criminal activities like fraud or scamming?”
And Craig answers:
“I’ve never been convicted with anything in my life, no criminal offenses at all.”
Well, let’s see about that. Let’s go back to 2004. The Ryan v Wright case. Craig Wright was sentenced to 28 days in jail (in appeal changed to 250 hours community service). Why was that again?
Mr Wright’s wilful disobedience of his undertakings constituted criminal contempt, yes, you read that correctly. But when hodlonaut’s counsel brought this judgment back to the attention of Craig, he handwaived it away with the lie:
“The Wikipedia page is wrong. I was given a contempt of sort of court but it is not a conviction, it’s not a crime in Australia, it’s not a criminal offense so no, that’s not correct.”
Now let’s see what the Norway judge thinks of this clear case of perjury in her ruling, shall we?
Then this. This one was nothing short of hilarious, as Craig Wright accidentally admitted to have been creating a forgery. He did? Yes, he did. 2 hours and 47 minutes into the questioning, Craig Wright was asked about a Tulip Trust related email with attached document. Now look how that went.
Haukaas: “So if you look at page 285 it says in the middle three paragraphs down from “I acknowledge… All Bitcoin will be returned to Dr Wright on January 1st 2020”. Is this what she’s talking about or…”
Wright: “No, it’s not, this was set up the day before, uhm, if you read it, it’s written terribly, uhm…”
Haukaas: “Is this something you wrote the day before you set up the actual trust is that what you’re saying?”
Wright: “Uhm, before I started setting up the actual trust, yes, it took a little while because of corporate processes. When I wrote this I was totally drunk.”
Haukaas: “So you have written this?”
Wright: “Yes, I was completely drunk, I drank three bottles of wine. I’d just been served with a bankruptcy notice.”
Haukaas: “Okay, because it’s, it seems to be sort of sent from David Kleiman if you look at page 286.”
[15 looong seconds of awkward silence]
Haukaas: “As you’re saying that you wrote this when you were terribly drunk?”
Wright: “Yes I did.”
Haukaas: “Okay.”
Oops. And during that 15 seconds pause, Craig is undoubtedly realizing that he was just caught red-handed with yet another forged document from his forgery wholesale warehouse.
Not that we didn’t know about this forgery anyway, as it has been discussed at length in my article “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 2” in the October 2014 section.
And good to see this misunderstanding about the Tulip Trust being cleared up too during this trial.
Because for long we had thought that Tulip Trust were the Seychelles entities Tulip Trading Ltd and Wright International Investments Ltd together, but that narrative, based on a heavily backdated deed forgery (Craig Wright only obtained the company Tulip Trading Ltd in October 2014) has changed again, it appears.
Thanks, Craig.
Then, Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC reporter who ‘witnessed’ one of the signing sessions in April 2016 and who sent a little BTC early May 2016 to the coinbase address of block 9, a Satoshi block that Craig claimed to control, with the expectation that Craig Wright would immediately send it back (which of course never happened so far, as Craig doesn’t control anything Satoshi related) became aware on Twitter that Craig accused him of showing up at the signing sessions in April 2016 “with camera, against the agreement”.
Let’s see how that went on Twitter.
That’s called perjury in court language, Craig.
And it didn’t end there either, as Craig Wright also lied on the stand about Dustin Trammell, together with Hal Finney the first miner on the Bitcoin network in January 2009, and who was also privately in touch with Satoshi. Something about sharing code that never happened in real life. It appeared that hodlonaut’s counsel tried to have Dustin testify in court the next Monday, but that request was rejected by the judge, unfortunately.
She can always catch up with Dustin’s testimonial “Faketoshi Craig Wright Lies Exposed” on his blog, of course.
And Craig, that’s called perjury in court language again.
Then, when I read that Craig Wright had just stated on the stand that he had been using the Satoshi Nakamoto moniker since 2005, I couldn’t help but immediately think about a Modern Consensus interview from 2019, in which Craig declared that he had not chosen the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto before early 2008. And to prove that ‘fact’ during the Modern Consensus interview, he showed the interviewer a forged document — in which it was clearly visible that the year 2008 has been altered on the last 2 positions. So that document that Craig Wright showed to Modern Consensus in 2019 was immediately debunked as a forgery! And, of course, this Modern Consensus story is in total conflict with what Craig was declaring under oath on the stand in Oslo, that he had been using the Satoshi Nakamoto moniker since 2005.
EDIT October 1, 2022
Right after the Oslo, Norway trial, much of the material used during the lawsuit and trial became public. Among it the KPMG report that will be discussed indepth on Friday September 16, 2022, and the accompanying physical exhibits could also be found.
Now go prepare for a shocker, dear reader.
It turned out that this very same forgery that Craig Wright showed to Modern Consensus in 2019 — and was debunked on the spot — was also used by Craig as ‘Satoshi evidence’ in the package that he handed over to hodlonaut during the course of the lawsuit.
Oops. How dumb can you be, Craig?
Twitter user ‘a void (leaks)’ did a damning little tweetstorm about this forgery, that is just too good to not include in this article.
“For me, this is the coup de grâce for Craig Wright’s impostorship. There’s no more pretending he’s not a con artist. It’s the smoking gun. We have him on video holding this document and attesting to its provenance. He then submitted this PROVEN FORGERY in Oslo as Satoshi Nakamoto proof. Done.
Compare the 2019 screen cap and the submitted scan. You see they are the same, with the same wonky typeface inconsistencies. The fact that Craig proudly took ownership of this document on video makes it unique in the raft of forgeries submitted. What say you?
There are other, perhaps better examples of Craig Wright’s fraudulence, con artistry, incompetence, what have you. But this one is unique in that Craig actually went on video and said he found it in his old documents, and that it’s the origin of where he chose the Satoshi Nakamoto pseudonym.
He then, years later submitted this very document to a court of law in Norway to “substantiate that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto”.
It was decisively proved by KPMG that it is a forgery. It was backdated to fit with Craig’s own fake origin story. It was taken from a publicly available source and altered, such that the alterations are immediately apparent to the naked eye, and also make apparent their purpose.
So for me, this is the ultimate. It is a clear, indisputable, unambiguous case. He tried to prove he was Satoshi using a fake, he did it deliberately, and nobody can credibly deny it. No more excuses for Craig’s mewling apologists. It’s proven. He’s a fraud. That’s it.”
And a few days later, on October 4, 2022, another indepth evaluation of this Craig Wright forgery by StealthyExcellent popped up on Reddit.
After this interruption, let’s go back to the court room again. And so it went on and on, lie after lie passed by during Craig Wright’s interrogation… It was a very amusing afternoon. Let’s hope the judge had as much fun as the internet sleuths did on Twitter.
Thursday September 15, 2022, day 4/7
Day 4 was not a very spectacular day, to be honest. But I say that mainly because there was a lot of material being discussed that I’ve known for several years, and not many surprising new things were coming from the court room until in the late afternoon.
Nevertheless, this day we see 3 witnesses for hodlonaut performing, and 2 witnesses for Craig Wright. The 3 witnesses for hodlonaut mainly focused on the history of Bitcoin, what forks and splits of Bitcoin there have been, how Bitcoin works, why BSV is irrelevant in the big picture, they explained how simple the signing of a block address is and how that produces a publicly verifiable digital signature, and why the actions of Craig Wright in April and May 2016 made no sense at all.
The latter point mainly centered around the fact that Craig’s signature(s) were not made publicly verifiable, and that Craig his blog post about Sartre on May 2, 2016 was a complete fraud that showed nothing. We were also treated with an explanation why and how it is relatively easy to hack Electrum Wallet to build in a so-called ‘man in the middle attack’. The Electrum Wallet was the software that Craig Wright used at the time in 2016 to execute the signing sessions, whereby no one but Craig himself was allowed to touch the computer(s) used during the signing and checking procedure.
And don’t forget, even the brand new laptop that Gavin Andresen requested, which was picked up from a nearby store in April 2016 to fulfill his wish to have a neutral machine to execute the verification, was also entirely installed by Craig Wright — which took several hours instead of the expected 15 minutes — before Craig’s signature string could be checked on this apparently neutral, second machine. All of this reeks of deception and manipulation by Craig Wright, according to these experts.
Then it was the turn of witness Stefan Matthews — who helped Craig Wright out of the ATO tax fraud troubles together with Calvin Ayre and Robert MacGregor in 2015 — for Craig Wright to take the stand, which was quite the revealing session after all. Because Stefan frankly admitted that, oh what a surprise, he couldn’t show any material from the 2007–2008 era, because he didn’t have that (anymore). He also admitted that he only became aware of the ‘fact’ that Craig was claiming to be Satoshi in 2015.
Let’s have a look at how that happened exactly in 2015.
And this is how hodlonaut’s lawyer Haukaas effectively and accurately threw Craig Wright’s star witness Stefan Matthews testimonial about Craig’s Satoshi-ness into the hearsay bin in front of the judge.
Hearsay: “Information received from other people which cannot be substantiated, the report of another person’s words by a witness, which is usually disallowed as evidence in a court of law.”
Let’s also note that this must have been a big bummer for the Craig Wright fans, as Stefan Matthews told his audience on Twitter in February this year, that he had “not lost anything”. But obviously, when under oath in a court room, Stefan didn’t dare to repeat this lie, and instead he had “lost everything”.
My further thoughts right there: it strongly appears that Stefan Matthews has also been just as bamboozled as anyone else since 2014 when Craig Wright began to cosplay Satoshi Nakamoto, and Stefan has stuck with the Faketoshi saga ever since because of the substantial financial stakes that he has in the Craig is Satoshi fairy tale — and then he, perhaps, added a few details himself to make it more believable.
Substantial financial stakes you say? Yes. Because from Andrew O’Hagan’s long form article “The Satoshi Affair” we had learned that the Craig Wright camp hopes to earn billions from the false Craig is Satoshi story, when his name as the Bitcoin inventor can be connected to the many patents that ‘the inventor himself’ wrote and will keep on writing.
Then it was the turn of an old acquaintance of Craig Wright, a certain Mr. Jenkins, who is seeing Craig about once every 1.5 or 2 years. Unfortunately for Craig Wright he couldn’t say anything remarkable, except that, yes, Craig could well be Satoshi. But no further proof. No physical evidence. Again. And again a person who did not learn this ‘fact’ before 2014. Is the reader also seeing the pattern already?
A personal highlight for me was the fact that late in the afternoon the judge called BSV a “FORK”. At this stage in the trial, after Craig has been explaining BTC as an “airdrop” and BSV supposedly being the real Bitcoin, I don’t think Craig Wright has been appreciating that very much.
Friday September 16, 2022, day 5/7
And here we go! The trial day that the fireworks are starting. This will become one of my most favorite days during the hodlonaut trial. During a few short morning sessions, we see again a few acquaintances of Craig Wright testify, via a video link to the court in Oslo, that he, Craig, uhm, yes, it certainly could be, he could indeed be Satoshi Nakamoto. And again it struck me that these people had only understood of Craig’s Satoshiness since 2014 or later. Indeed, that still fits right in with Craig Wright starting his Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay in early 2014.
My theory is that Craig had planted some seeds with these people since 2014, twisting some real life events with them from the 2007–2011 era, just to make them feel like they had actually met Satoshi Nakamoto long before 2014. It’s actually a rather clever social manipulation trick of Craig Wright, when you think of it.
But because hodlonaut’s lawyers (as it appears rightly) didn’t consider this vague hearsay from witnesses without, again, any physical evidence was very relevant — so the judge will think along the same lines, is my educated guess — , so they only chatted briefly with them. This raised the opportunity to quickly move on to an individual called Dr Klin who came to explain that Craig Wright has autism, and therefore cannot lie and manipulate.
It strongly appeared to me that hodlonaut’s counsel completely neutralized Dr Klin’s medical assessment by pointing to judge Chamberlain’s judgment in the Wright v McCormack defamation lawsuit that was published on August 1, 2022:
“I have borne in mind what Dr Wright said about his autism and its effects on the way he explains things to others. But the evidence in para. 41 of Dr Wright’s first witness statement was not merely inadequately or infelicitously explained. The vice was not that it omitted explanatory background, but rather that what it did say was straightforwardly false in almost every material respect. I have found Dr Wright not to be a witness of truth.”
I can still sense Dr Klin’s embarrassment around this point.
Now buckle up, ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at the absolute highlight of the day: 3 forensic experts from KPMG will start pushing all Craig Wright’s documents from his Satoshi evidence pack that he handed over to hodlonaut through the meat grinder. Bitcoin source code files supposedly from 2008 that turned out to be recent day forgeries, old scans that appear to contain modern data, very early Satoshi emails that were demonstrably forged in 2014 (here he is again: 2014, the year that Craig Wright started to pretend he is Satoshi Nakamoto), various Bitcoin whitepaper drafts that appeared to be from 2008 if it weren’t for the fact that they contain those pesky fonts from 2015 and later to spoil the forgery fun…
So you no doubt guessed it already, literally everything that Craig Wright had handed to hodlonaut as Satoshi evidence was taken down hard this afternoon. For those interested in a more technical description of how that went on this day, it is highly recommended to read the detailed report from WizSec Bitcoin Research on Twitter.
The screenshot below with their conclusion after the epic take down of Craig’s new line of forgeries is from their last two tweets.
Let’s just guess now that Craig Wright probably didn’t have a very nice weekend after this Friday afternoon court session!
Monday September 19, 2022, day 6/7
And just when you think you’ve had the most prolific field day in your Craig Wright debunk career on Friday, then comes the Monday to blow even that out of the water. This court day could have been in a Netflix court room drama series. No kidding, I had goosebumps several times this day.
The day started again with 2 forensic experts (BDO and CYFOR, CYFOR was another expert hired by BDO) who tried to drill holes in the KPMG report in which the plethora of Craig’s forgeries had been mapped out in every painful detail. First there was some quibbling about tests that BDO couldn’t quite reproduce, then some discussion about what might be other, normal, reasons for the issues found with the various files, but then… now please go sit down with a bag of popcorn, folks… BDO and CYFOR actually mostly agreed with KPMG about their forgery findings.
Yup. BDO and CYFOR basically approved the findings of KPMG.
BDO even called the overall report of very decent quality. And we also heard a number: Craig Wright had submitted 71 Satoshi pieces of evidence to hodlonaut, and all of them, if we understand the court reporters correctly, have been rejected as being genuine. Mind you, both hodlonaut’s forensic expert and Craig’s 2 forensic experts appeared to have found consensus in this conclusion.
And what a counterfeit junk came by, we learned about several new forgeries today. For example, there was a printout of very old Bitcoin source code (according to Craig Wright), but there was a inexplicable ‘break’ in it, the code appeared not to flow logically, and a part of the code had ended up on the last page. As it turned out, in 2013, someone (cryddit for those in the know) had put very old prerelease code from Satoshi Nakamoto on the Bitcoin Forum, but due to text restrictions within the forum post, he could not contain all the text of the code in one single post, and therefore had to cut the text of the code into several pieces before posting it. In the process, things got mixed up a little.
Apparently, Craig had found that (clipped) forum post from cryddit, copied the material in his document editor, added his name as copyright holder (and presumably removed Satoshi’s, we have to check that with the KPMG report when it is released to the public), printed it and scanned it back in again. But sloppy Craig forgot to remove the ‘clippings’, and so his beautiful print could be traced literally to cryddit’s forum post from 2013! Hilarious. And incompetent, as WizSec already concluded before the weekend.
Incidentally, we also learned that Craig Wright no longer wished to base his defense on these 71 documents, and had therefore withdrawn them from the lawsuit. This most likely won’t help turn this lawsuit in his favour; the judge is well aware that these forgeries played an important role in the whole process.
Then it was time for the trial closing arguments, first from hodlonaut’s lawyer team. And boy oh boy, were we treated this afternoon on a Craig Wright fraud anecdotes overview from his Bitcoin scam career that started in 2013. Team hodlonaut, saving the best for last, was seriously in a relentless carpet bombing mood. It was literally like hearing my entire Medium articles oeuvre in a nutshell, in a court room no less. It was freaking awesome, let me tell you.
Team hodlonaut’s closing arguments session was so extremely well executed that even court reporter Kurt Wuckert Jr, an avid Craig Wright fan who works for CoinGeek (BSV’s media outlet), admitted that hodlonaut’s chances of winning this lawsuit had gone up substantially after today. My jaw dropped on the floor when I read that.
And with that said, this historic day came to an end.
Wednesday September 21, 2022, day 7/7
We now jump to Wednesday because there was nothing planned on the Tuesday before. And this is also the last day of the 7 day trial in Oslo, Norway between the hodlonaut camp and the Craig Wright camp. To be fair, after the fireworks of last Friday and Monday, this was a less exciting day.
First, team hodlonaut was allowed to finish their closing arguments for another hour, this session was mainly about their legal view on defamation and freedom of speech in Norway and how their view has been applied in other, in their opinion comparable, court cases. After this, Craig Wright’s lawyers (note again that Craig had shown up with no less than 9 lawyers during the entire trial) were allowed to make their closing statement.
There were not exactly surprises in these arguments: the eye witnesses who believed Craig might be Satoshi were summed up once again, an argument about why the KPMG report is not evidence of fraud executed by Craig Wright was weakly defended, Craig’s life story as Satoshi was reiterated, and just like hodlonaut’s lawyers they dived into existing defamation case law but from a different, opposing angle.
Surprisingly, the judge interrupted Craig’s attorney here several times (which didn’t happen during hodlonaut’s closing arguments, at least I didn’t catch it) with the question “what do you mean?” and once she was even a bit critical: “that case was not about libel at all, how did you come to bring it up here?”.
During Craig Wright’s closing arguments I was again able to record several lies (apart from the fact that Craig is not Satoshi, of course), the most prolific one, in my opinion, was that Craig claimed that Andrew O’Hagan was only hired AFTER the Wired/ Gizmodo articles from December 2015.
Nah. Not true. O’Hagan himself describes in The Satoshi Affair that he had already been approached by Craig’s camp a month BEFORE these articles!
Another lie that I caught on the fly was that it apparently wasn’t Craig Wright who had proposed the $5,000 reward for obtaining hodlonaut’s private address, but it was actually his sponsor Calvin Ayre who set up this (in most countries perceived as illegal) bounty hunt.
However, the CoinGeek announcement at the time — we are talking about April 2019 — factually stated that it was Craig Wright who was offering the $5,000, to be paid in altcoin BSV, reward!
In my opinion, they are probably trying to prevent Craig Wright from experiencing legal disadvantages from this bounty hunt action in Norway. Because, as far as I know, the linked CoinGeek article has been filed as evidence in the case, so I don’t expect Craig Wright to get away with this lie.
A third lie was about the time in May 2016 when Craig Wright promised three people (Gavin Andresen, Jon Matonis and Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC reporter, here he is again making an appearance)), to send them back the small amounts of bitcoin that they would send first to the Bitcoin block 9 coinbase address. Block 9 was mined by Satoshi Nakamoto in January 2009, and Craig Wright claimed he had at that moment private key control over that block’s public address. However, claimed team Craig, this promise of performing a Satoshi transaction was allegedly made by ‘other people’ and was certainly not coordinated or consulted with Craig Wright at that moment.
However, this was again a very blatant lie.
Because, and here comes Andrew O’Hagan’s “The Satoshi Affair” again to the rescue, Craig Wright even called Gavin Andresen during that ‘uncoordinated’ action!
Here too I’m assuming that the judge will not have missed this little but important detail, because my educated guess is that The Satoshi Affair article was also submitted to the judge as evidence by hodlonaut. But we will see about that no later than November 8 this year, because then (or hopefully sooner, the judge said) the verdict in the hodlonaut no-defamation lawsuit will come, we learned at the end of the day.
On a sidenote, I have requested the court material with a reference to the Norwegian Freedom of Intermation Act. Others did the same, I noticed. When I have received this material, I plan on doing several more articles about the hodlonaut case. One of them will be about the KPMG report(*), other articles might dive into the closing arguments of both parties. Especially on Craig’s closing arguments I anticipate doing a line by line debunk. And no, we did not really see a Chewbacca Defence from Craig’s side, as you just noticed! Within their limitations of spreading Craig Wright’s lies and nonsense, his counsel actually acted pretty solid over the course of the trial, I’ll give them that.
(*) EDIT September 24, 2022
Since someone seems to have obtained the KPMG report already, the first snippets from it are starting to circulate on social media as we speak. This is the full description of KPMG’s findings about a prerelease 2008 Bitcoin.exe that Craig Wright had forged from an existing 2009 Bitcoin.exe. It contains several obvious signature Craig Wright flaws.
“A thread summarising KPMG report of Faketoshi’s v0.0.8 Bitcoin.exe and source code files disclosed at hodlonaut’s trial in Oslo. CSW submitted two identical .exe files that were binary edited versions of Bitcoin.exe v0.1.0 claiming them to be earlier version Bitcoin.exe v0.0.8.
To support those v0.0.8 .exe files Faketoshi also submitted source code files that were modified to contain CSW’s copyright and version numbering.
“Only” 43 forged source code files with faked copyright changes were submitted by Faketoshi as Bitcoin v0.0.8 “source code” in hodlonaut’s case. Files changed highlighted in yellow.
The binary editing of the v0.0.8 files is exposed by not matching CSW’s v0.0.8 source code ui.cpp and the examined v0.0.8 .exe file. The versioning in the source code is dynamic, but in the v0.0.8 binary it is hard coded.
Additional problems with the v0.0.8 .exe files are the build time and checksum being the same with real v0.1.0 .exe embedded in the binary.
Furthermore, CSW’s v0.0.8 source code contained two release notes files mentioning compiling with MinGW GCC 3.4.4 while the binary itself tells, as seen above, it had been compiled with the 3.4.5 version of MinGW GCC. To add, KPMG could not find the MinGW GCC 3.4.4 version in its release history.
To add “credibility” CSW added a never used Genesis block hash into his v0.0.8 “code” as a comment to make it to look more legit. KPMG could not explain this, but the exact same hash is found on the Bitcoin Talk forum discussing supposed early code by Satoshi.
KPMG missed one thing, though: they wonder why odd genesis block hash without comments had been added to Faketoshi’s main.cpp file, even though they comment the old code with handwriting on top of appendix 24 coming from Bitcoin talk forum. Well, of course because it is copied from there.
Finally, CSW modified the real Satoshi’s v0.1.0 uibase.cpp file in his v0.0.8 file adding address 12STD5BhabrNpx56pWuC6wctxz3Qf2gdD7. However, compressed public key addresses were not introduced until Bitcoin v0.6 in 2012.
The icing on the cake is CSW’s v0.0.8 code containing the bug fix that Hal Finney reported to Satoshi on January 10th 2009 by private email. Yet Faketoshi’s v0.0.8 is supposed to predate the first .exe release Hal used to find the bug.”
Let’s go back to the court room. Because the judge had explicitly asked for it, we also heard how much costs plaintiff and defendant had incurred for this lawsuit: hodlonaut about €550,000 (converted from Norwegian Kroner), Craig slightly more than €745,000. The winner — and I fully trust that hodlonaut will be the winner of this case with a slam dunk on Craig Wright(*) — will be reimbursed in whole or in part, I presume.
(*) The reason is simple. One does not provide forged evidence in a legal case where one has been publicly accused of being a fraud. This simple fact alone, that the Norwegian judge will no doubt notice, makes alleged libel fall under freedom of (truthful) speech. Craig Wright has been showing for 7 years in a row that his ‘evidence’ cannot be trusted in any material sense.
To finish, a funny anecdote from this day. Craig Wright ‘s lawyer who did most of the talking today (and every other trial day too, by the way), this gentleman goes by the name Manshaus, wasn’t quite sure how to pronounce Craig’s nickname on Twitter: Faketoshi. Manshaus explained that moniker to the judge as, there you have it:
“Fuckytoshi”
So you guessed it already I’m sure, especially those knowing Twitter culture… The ‘fuckytoshi’ memes were quickly making the rounds after the trial came to conclusion.
A few after-trial considerations
Over the days of the hodlonaut trial in Oslo, Norway, we saw Craig Wright and his counsel use their own made up Bitcoin related jargon. A Bitcoin fork is not a fork but an “airdrop”, for example. This is utter nonsense. And Bitcoin (BTC) ‘airdropped’ from BCH, after which BCH ‘airdropped’ from BSV. Nonsense again. Another example: Bitcoin Core is the label that Craig gives to Bitcoin (BTC) the crypto currency. This is, of course, not correct either. Bitcoin Core refers to the group of developers working on the open source Bitcoin protocol project. In addition, Bitcoin Core refers to the most widely used and most popular reference implementation software used to connect to the Bitcoin network, and to run a Bitcoin mining node, a Bitcoin full node, and various other types of Bitcoin nodes.
In other words, Craig Wright is falsely rewriting the long-accepted Bitcoin nomenclature. Don’t fall for this, dear reader!
What we also see happening over the years, is a pattern in how Craig Wright is desperately trying to get his false Satoshi Nakamoto claim accepted.
- (Not) signing a Satoshi related block address, or at all a public Bitcoin address that Craig claims to own and control. Since 2013, when Craig’s Bitcoin fraud began in Australia, he had been repeatedly requested to sign a plethora of addresses by the ATO, but no such request, nor any attempt by Craig Wright to display a credible, publicly verifiable signature in later years, has resulted in an acceptable result.
- Craig Wright creates a lot of Satoshi counterfeits that he doesn’t shy away from using in various lawsuits. And ‘a lot’, that’s simply an understatement. There are hundreds of them. They have all been intercepted as such because these forgeries are, without exception, of very poor quality. The hodlonaut trial shows that once again.
- As a last resort, Craig Wright is deploying ‘eye witnesses’, people that he managed to deceive over the years. It is remarkable to notice that ALL these eye witnesses have only memories of Craig’s Satoshi-ness since 2014, the year that Craig his Satoshi cosplay began. Craig is now also using these eye witnesses in his lawsuits, as we noticed in the hodlonaut trial, and if we are to believe Craig according to the message below from his private Slack channel, this strategy will be expanded in the future.
Craig Wright’s fans, and those on Calvin Ayre’s payroll, are more than happy to spread this new message of ‘Satoshi Witness Testimonials’, as shown by an article on European Business Review, a site where, after payment of a fee, everyone can freely post their articles without any quality or accuracy control.
“These witness testimonies confirm that Wright is more than capable of inventing Bitcoin, that he discussed key concepts of Bitcoin and blockchain even before the Bitcoin whitepaper was released in October 2008, and that it is highly unlikely that he is manipulating people into supporting his claim as being the man behind Satoshi Nakamoto.”
Same message again, dear reader: please don’t fall for this newly created Craig Wright deception!
A final consideration is about Calvin Ayre “having seen some of the boxes of historical documents including old versions of the white paper […] printed and with his notes and coffee on them” around October 3, 2019, but then declaring on September 17, 2022 that “the documents […] were never DESIGNED for this purpose” after these very same documents have been thoroughly debunked as forgeries in court Oslo by KPMG.
DESIGNED?
Interesting slip up of Calvin Ayre, isn’t it? How would Calvin know that these Craig Wright made forgeries have been “designed”? You tell me! 🙂
Thanks for reading guys, see you next time!
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