The Tulip Trust Diary

130 min readAug 20, 2024

A deep dive into Craig Wright’s most infamous Potemkin Village.

Written by Arthur van Pelt
ABOUT EDITS AND UPDATES 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, to become a reference piece for years to come.

Intro

During a podcast recording for “Dr Bitcoin — The Man Who Wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto” in October 2023 I somewhat jokingly said to my friend, script writer and co-host Mark Hunter “I should perhaps do an article about all this Tulip Trust stuff!”.

And actually I should, I realized after we recorded the episode (of which I will include the full transcript at the end of this article as bonus material).

Because not only is the Tulip Trust scam of Craig Wright the largest financial fraud — estimated at 1 million bitcoin, which makes for $60 billion at the moment of writing — in his false impersonation scheme, the information about Craig Wright’s Tulip Trust is also pretty much spread everywhere over the internet; mainly the online court docket of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit on CourtListener, and from there a lot of this information has reached several of my articles to enlighten them with Tulip Trust anecdotes.

Also others like long time Craig Wright debunker Sam Williams had already broken down several aspects of the Tulip Trust in his September 2019 article “The Tulip Trust is fake.”. A must read article for fans of my often rather indepth work, as Sam is cut from the same cloth!

A snippet from his article:

“The PGP signature was supposedly created on January 17, 2008 using an email address of craig@integyrs.com. However, the domain integyrs.com did not exist until April 26, 2009. The business itself was not registered until May 11, 2009.”

But so far, never did I write an extensive, indepth overview of everything Tulip Trust. That is going to change today. And for a change, I will tell the Tulip Trust story from Craig Wright’s perspective, as if his numerous forgeries were not exposed as such, and things really happened in the way that he wants us to believe. So this diary will run from the Bitcoin years 2009 to today. Where needed, I will of course tell the reader if he/she’s looking at a Craig Wright forgery or not.

But before we take a deep dive into Craig’s fairy tales around his Bitcoin assets, let’s bring back in memory some of the known facts from the early days of Craig Wright’s fraud career in Bitcoin. These facts have not been disputed, let alone that they have been debunked, by Craig Wright or any of his apologists.

February 2011: Dave Kleiman raised W&K Info Defense Research LLC (W&K) in Florida, USA as sole shareholder, and together with Craig Wright they try to land four IT/cybersecurity projects at The Department of Homeland Security (DHS). All four proposals were rejected by DHS though, and in 2012 W&K dissolved without ever making any revenues (and hardly any costs either, for that matter).
July/August 2011: Here is where Craig Wright learns about Bitcoin, and where he writes about Bitcoin for the first time in his life. Not once did Craig spell ‘Bitcoin’ correctly though. We can find in the ‘Comments’ section to an article that he managed to get published on The Conversation media outlet that he used the following spellings — spellings that the real Satoshi has never used in public: BitCoin, Bit Coin, (Bit Coin) or bit coins (see screenshot below).

Late 2012: Craig Wright is developing plans around a ‘Bitcoin Bank’ concept, together with his wife Ramona Watts and future CFO Jamie Wilson.
2013: Craig Wright sets up the Hotwire group of companies.
April 2013: Craig buys his first few handfuls of bitcoin on Japanese exchange Mt Gox. As it happens, this is a few days before his ‘friend’ Dave Kleiman passes away in the same month. As far as we know, Dave Kleiman never knew anything about Bitcoin, let alone did anything with Bitcoin, in his whole life.
July 2013: After Dave Kleiman’s death, Craig embarks on a pretty massive Australian bookkeeping — and tax fraud quest in which he starts using Bitcoin as a scam tool to try defraud the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) by filing fraudulent GST and other tax refund and rebate requests. It all starts with Craig Wright picking random Bitcoin public addresses from the Bitcoin rich list in the second half of 2013 and falsely claiming “that’s mine”, followed by pretending to have been an early Bitcoin miner.
Between July 2013 and November 2013 Craig also managed to fraudulently obtain two New South Wales Supreme Court rulings, in which he was awarded almost AUD 60 million in total. During the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit in 2018–2021 we learned that a fraudulent “Conversion” of two claims related to Dave Kleiman’s company W&K had taken place during this period in 2013, and Craig Wright was ordered to pay Ira Kleiman (current representative of W&K) $100 million in December 2021. In March 2022 another $43 million in prejudgment interest was added by the court in Miami.
Non-existing Bitcoin supercomputers are also becoming part of Craig Wright’s Bitcoin fairy tale in 2013, and they would become part of his fraudulent Satoshi Nakamoto cosplay in 2014.
Early 2014 the Craig Wright Bitcoin fraud saga ramped up with Craig pretending to be the inventor of Bitcoin: Satoshi Nakamoto. This false claim will be completely smashed to pieces in a lengthy May 2024 judgment plus appendix by Justice Mellor(*), however. As said in the previous bullet, deceased Dave Kleiman had become part of Craig’s fraudulent schemes without his knowledge during the second half of 2013, but Craig did not hesitate to involve the Kleiman estate early 2014 too.

(*) The summary chapter of Justice Mellor his judgment is simply too good to be missed. It is copied here in full:

SUMMARY

Dr Craig Steven Wright (‘Dr Wright’) claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto i.e. he claims to be the person who adopted that pseudonym, who wrote and published the first version of the Bitcoin White Paper on 31 October 2008, who wrote and released the first version of the Bitcoin Source Code and who created the Bitcoin system. Dr Wright also claims to be a person with a unique intellect, with numerous degrees and PhDs in a wide range of subjects, the unique combination of which led him (so it is said) to devise the Bitcoin system.

Thus, Dr Wright presents himself as an extremely clever person. However, in my judgment, he is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is. In both his written evidence and in days of oral evidence under cross-examination, I am entirely satisfied that Dr Wright lied to the Court extensively and repeatedly. Most of his lies related to the documents he had forged which purported to support his claim. All his lies and forged documents were in support of his biggest lie: his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Many of Dr Wright’s lies contained a grain of truth (which is sometimes said to be the mark of an accomplished liar), but there were many which did not and were outright lies. As soon as one lie was exposed, Dr Wright resorted to further lies and evasions. The final destination frequently turned out to be either Dr Wright blaming some other (often unidentified) person for his predicament or what can only be described as technobabble delivered by him in the witness box. Although as a person with expertise in IT security, Dr Wright must have thought his forgeries would provide convincing evidence to support his claim to be Satoshi or some other point of detail and would go undetected, the evidence shows, as I explain below and in the Appendix, that most of his forgeries turned out to be clumsy. Indeed, certain of Dr Wright’s responses in cross-examination effectively acknowledged that point: from my recollection at least twice he indicated if he had wanted to forge a document, he would have done a much better job.

If Dr Wright’s evidence was true, he would be a uniquely unfortunate individual, the victim of a very large number of unfortunate coincidences, all of which went against him, and/or the victim of a number of conspiracies against him.

The true position is far simpler. It is, however, far from simple because Dr Wright has lied so much over so many years that, on certain points, it can be difficult to pinpoint what actually happened. Those difficulties do not detract from the fact that there is a very considerable body of evidence against Dr Wright being Satoshi. To the extent that it is said there is evidence supporting his claim, it is at best questionable or of very dubious relevance or entirely circumstantial and at worst, it is fabricated and/or based on documents I am satisfied have been forged on a grand scale by Dr Wright. These fabrications and forgeries were exposed in the evidence which I received during the Trial.

For that reason, this Judgment contains considerable technical and other detail which is required to expose the true scale of his mendacious campaign to prove he was/is Satoshi Nakamoto. This detail was set out in the extensive Written Closing Submissions prepared by COPA and the Developers and further points drawn out in their oral closing arguments.

At the same time, it is right to record that Counsel for Dr Wright put forward the best case which could possibly be presented for Dr Wright in their written and oral closing submissions, constrained as they were by the evidence I heard in this Trial.

However, at the conclusion of closing submissions I felt able to and did announce the result of the Identity Issue, namely whether Dr Wright is the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto i.e. the person who created Bitcoin in 2009. Having considered all the evidence and submissions presented to me during the Trial, I reached the conclusion the evidence was overwhelming. At that point, I made certain declarations (because I was satisfied they are useful and are necessary to do justice between the parties), as follows:

First, that Dr Wright is not the author of the Bitcoin White Paper.
Second, Dr Wright is not the person who adopted or operated under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in the period between 2008 and 2011.
Third, Dr Wright is not the person who created the Bitcoin system.
Fourth, Dr Wright is not the author of the initial versions of the Bitcoin Software.

I also indicated that any further relief would be dealt with in my written Judgment (to the extent possible). I extended time for filing any appellant’s notice until 21 days after the form of order hearing to be appointed following the hand down of this Judgment. I made an Order to give effect to what I stated at the conclusion of the closing argument, which contains the above declarations and directions. Finally, I stated I would give my detailed reasons in a written Judgment which would be handed down at a later date. This is that Judgment containing my detailed reasoning.

I should point out that the conclusion I reached and explain in this Judgment is the product of a highly iterative process. I have had regard to a very large number of pieces of evidence. Each piece had and has to be evaluated on its merits but also in the context of what other pieces of evidence appear to show. The period between the conclusion of the evidence and receipt of the lengthy Written Closing Submissions, along with my detailed consideration of the written and oral closing arguments, allowed me to reflect on the totality of the evidence. It is true that most of the evidence has concerned COPA’s allegations of forgery. Ultimately, those allegations are just one factor which I took into account in reaching my overall conclusion. It was essential to step back from all the detail, to identify the various factors which supported Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi and those which went against it.

Satoshi Nakamoto was and remains a pseudonym. Although this is not of any significant weight in my overall conclusion, my personal view, having heard all the evidence in this Trial, is that it is likely that a number of people contributed to the creation of Bitcoin, albeit that there may well have been one central individual. It would therefore be accurate to refer to Satoshi as he/she/they to reflect the possibilities, but unwieldy. I will therefore refer to Satoshi simply as ‘he’, but it is a shorthand for he/she/they.

Here I summarise the competing factors, starting with the factors which are alleged to support Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi:

His unique combination of skills, knowledge, qualifications and interests in various concepts which combined to result in the creation of Bitcoin.
The evidence from his business associates and family which is consistent with his claim (albeit largely circumstantial).
The evidence from the ‘proof’ sessions in 2016.
The very substantial body of evidence comprised in Dr Wright’s own witness statements.
The content of his Reliance Documents which he emphasised was more significant than their metadata.

It is relevant to point out that all of these factors are significantly affected not only by COPA’s allegations of forgery but also the evidence of a large number of witnesses called by COPA who I judge to have given entirely independent and unbiased evidence.

As for the factors against Dr Wright being Satoshi, I divided these into two categories:

First, the attributes and behaviour which one would expect Satoshi to exhibit and prove (on the assumption that he would set out to prove he was Satoshi — on which see below), and those he would not. Under this head, the principal points are:

First, Satoshi would be most unlikely to have any real difficulty in proving he was Satoshi. For example, he would be able to present some insight or knowledge from the very early materials which no-one but the creator of Bitcoin would know — perhaps something hidden in the Genesis block. Or he would have been able to transfer Bitcoin out of some of the very early blocks which are generally accepted to have been mined by Satoshi, to prove that he owned those Bitcoin. He would not have lost every private key to those early blocks.
Second, I do not believe that Satoshi would ever have resorted to forgery in his attempt to prove he was Satoshi. He would not have backdated documents or altered the clock on his computer(s), for the simple reason that there was and is no need for him to do so. (For completeness I add that, in the very unlikely event that he did engage in some forgery, upon that being discovered, he would own up and explain why it was he had been driven to forgery. He would not have engaged in yet more forgery or engaged in technobabble in his attempts to justify it).
Third, the contemporaneous materials written by Satoshi, including the White Paper, the posts and his email exchanges with individuals, convey an impression of a calm, knowledgeable, collaborative, precise person with little or no arrogance, willing to acknowledge and implement ideas and suggestions from others who had shown an interest in Bitcoin.
Fourth, due to his collaborative and non-confrontational nature, I consider it is most unlikely that Satoshi would ever have resorted to litigation against the Developers. Satoshi would have recognised that differences in views led to the hard forks in the Bitcoin Blockchain and moved on.

Second and by contrast, the attributes and behaviours which Dr Wright has exhibited and which were proved to my satisfaction in this Trial:

Dr Wright is an individual with some strong views about Bitcoin and details of its implementation. However, I was struck by the fact that all of his knowledge and supposed insights could well have been obtained by careful study of the publicly available materials relating to the early years of Bitcoin. In my judgment, in none of his evidence did he reveal any insight or knowledge unique to Satoshi.

Furthermore, in his evidence, Dr Wright made significant errors which Satoshi would never have made, even after this length of time. Some of these relate to Satoshi’s interactions with individuals not previously made public. Others relate to technical matters which Dr Wright simply got wrong but which Satoshi would not have got wrong. Dr Wright has had many years to prepare to prove that he was/is Satoshi.

I have concluded (in the detailed findings I make below and in the Appendix) that, as he faced greater and more significant challenges to his claim, he took his lies and forgery to ever greater levels. I explain this in much greater detail below.

The picture painted by Dr Wright in his evidence was, in essence, that he was solely responsible for creating Bitcoin, that he was much cleverer than anyone else, that anyone who questioned his claim or his evidence was not qualified to do so or just didn’t understand what he was saying.

In my judgment, the arrogance he displayed was at odds with what comes through from Satoshi’s writing. In short, in his writing and attitude Dr Wright just doesn’t sound or act like Satoshi.

Ultimately, I consider it is likely that the real Satoshi would never have set out to prove in litigation that he actually was Satoshi and certainly not in the way that Dr Wright attempted to do so.

I recognise that Dr Wright will disagree with my findings and this Judgment and, true to the form he displayed on numerous occasions during his oral evidence as regards the expert evidence, he may well allege that I didn’t understand his technical explanations or other aspects of the technology.

There are perhaps four main points to note in response:

First, to the extent that I have made errors, the Court of Appeal is well qualified (a) to detect them and (b) to correct them.
Second, the technology involved in his case is not particularly complex or difficult to understand (compared with some of the Patent cases I have dealt with). Indeed, the more complex areas of technology in this case did not concern Bitcoin or cryptography but the evidence which exposed his forgeries.
Third, if he does make such accusations, I will remain reassured that I am in good company, along with the experts who gave evidence in this case, both those instructed by COPA and those instructed by Dr Wright’s team.
Fourth, this Trial was Dr Wright’s opportunity to explain everything, to make his technical explanations clear to me. He had the benefit of numerous procedural indulgences regarding disclosure and additional evidence. Furthermore, on more than one occasion during his cross-examination, I made it clear that it was important he ensured I understood the point he was trying to make. I was left with the clear impression that he simply engaged in technobabble precisely because he was not able to put forward any coherent explanation for the forgeries which had been exposed, and yet he could not bring himself to accept that he was responsible for them.

Yes, that was three times “technobabble” in just the summary of the judgment alone.

And now that we have set the stage, here is where we pick up ‘The Tulip Trust Diary’ as Craig Wright wants you to believe it all happened around this fictional trust.

The 2009–2010 era: The Panama Trust

The more informed reader will probably immediately think now: “Panama? Wasn’t Tulip Trust something Seychelles?”. And yes, that’s correct. We will later learn that Tulip Trust is firmly connected to Seychelles, and not Panama. But I’ll explain what Panama is doing here.

When Craig Wright started his Bitcoin fraud career in the Summer of 2013, as described a few paragraphs up, he had not yet set up any trusts related to ‘his’ Bitcoin assets that he claimed to have developed, mined or that he otherwise claimed to have obtained. Instead, Craig claimed multiple times in 2013 that he had full ‘control’ over all his Bitcoin assets, among them his bitcoin tokens. Let’s take one example of such claim, that we can find in an email from September 2013.

September 23, 2013: Craig claims to control a little over 1 million Bitcoin.

And notably, at this point in time, these “little over 1 million Bitcoin” (which were allegedly the mined Bitcoin, we will learn during an ATO hearing on February 26, 2014) are also not locked away in inaccessible, encrypted, multi-layered Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme files.

Instead, Craig had “control” over them, he claimed. Interesting, isn’t it?

This ‘control’ is also confirmed by another source. Because, what did former Hotwire CFO Jamie Wilson — who worked with Craig Wright for the larger part of 2013 — tell Ira Kleiman’s lawyer Vel Freedman during his deposition on November 8, 2019?

“Q: Mr. Wilson, I am handing you what has been marked as defense, sorry, as Wilson Exhibit 10. It was produced in this litigation as Defense Australia 113043. If you take a look, do you see the e-mail at the top of the page, this is a — do you recognize this as an e-mail that Craig sent to you?
A: Yes.
Q: It also went to Roger Manu of Rubik?
A: Correct.
Q: In it Craig says, “XBT Bitcoin is a currency. There are 11 million Bitcoin. Look at the exchange rate in XE.com.” And then, “We control what is, all up, a little over 1 million Bitcoin.” Do you see that?
A: Correct.
Q: Do you recall receiving this e-mail?
A: Yes.
Q: Did you believe by receiving this e-mail that Craig controlled over 1 million Bitcoin?
A: Yes.
Q: Was this statement that he controlled, all up, a little over 1 million Bitcoin consistent with other statements that Craig had told you?
A: Yes.
Q: Did Craig ever tell you that this over 1 million Bitcoin was locked in a file that he could not access?
A: No.” — Vel Freedman, Jamie Wilson (deposition November 8, 2019)

So to summarize, in this era (second half of 2013), Craig Wright starts using Bitcoin as a scam tool to defraud ATO in three different ways.

He picked several handfuls of random Bitcoin public addresses from the Bitcoin rich list and falsely claimed they were his. This way, Craig pretended that he was able to finance his business activities in Australia. ATO requested several times that Craig should prove his control by signing a message on these public addresses, but Craig managed to duck these requests for as long as he lived in Australia. He needed to, of course, because he never had any control over any of these addresses.

In July/August 2013 Craig Wright also dropped two made up claims against (dead) Dave Kleiman’s (dissolved in 2012) W&K company in New South Wales Supreme Court (NSWSC). In these two false claims Craig introduced Bitcoin mining activities by W&K and Bitcoin source code activities by him for W&K. Both these things never happened in real life, and were created from thin air by Craig Wright. There have never been any Bitcoin related activities performed under Dave Kleiman’s W&K moniker. The only activity that W&K ever performed under the helm of Dave Kleiman, with help of Craig Wright, was, as said earlier, trying to land four cybersecurity/IT projects at Homeland Security (DHS) in the United States early 2011, which failed as all four projects were rejected by DHS, and Dave’s company W&K dissolved a year later. But since NSWSC did not perform any truth finding in 2013 on Craig Wright’s false claims supported by forged and backdated evidence, he managed to obtain a paper-only value of almost AU $60,000,000 in Bitcoin Intellectual Property in November 2013. As most of my readers will know I’m sure, this fraudulent ‘overhaul’ of W&K in July-November 2013 by Craig Wright, with the aim to defraud the ATO, was punished in December 2021 with $100 million (after which prejudgment interest of another $43 million was added in March 2022) in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. This lawsuit is running from February 2018 till today, including an appeal that Ira Kleiman recently lost, and a still ongoing debt collection trajectory by W&K/Ira Kleiman. Because unsurprisingly Craig Wright did not pay a penny yet of his outstanding debt.

These paper-only values of Bitcoin addresses, Bitcoin source code and Bitcoin mining — with added false claims about multiple Bitcoin supercomputers, banking software deals with Siemens and El-Baraka, etc — was then used in Craig’s Australian companies to set up a fraudulent bookkeeping within otherwise empty companies, aiming to falsely obtain tax refunds from the ATO.

Want to know more about this era in the Craig Wright cosplay saga?
Please be invited to go read the ‘Faketoshi, The Early Years’ series of three articles (written with my friend CryptoDevil), starting with Part 1.

And all these three things have a relationship with the Tulip Trust. In Craig’s fairy tales about this trust, the Bitcoin whale addresses will end up in this imaginary trust, Dave Kleiman will be — retroactively — involved in the forming of the trust by Craig Wright, and during the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit we will hear what the judges think of the Tulip Trust. More about that later.

So Craig Wright has now — also retroactively — connected himself to Bitcoin code development, Bitcoin mining and boatloads of physical Bitcoin. The next step in 2014 will be that he falsely connects himself to the inventor of Bitcoin and him designing, coding and launching Bitcoin in January 2009. In the impersonation process Craig will create a mindboggling number of forgeries, and he will come up with the most fantastic fiction stories.

However, in the meantime, Craig’s fraudulent tax refund requests did not go unnoticed by the Refund Integrity department of ATO, and already in 2013 they started to audit Craig Wright’s companies. Under growing audit pressure of ATO late 2013, which continued in 2014 including halting of tax refund payments which caused Hotwire to go bankrupt in April 2014, it also became necessary for Craig to put ‘his’ Bitcoin assets ‘offshore’.

Hotwire: Announced in February 2014, bankrupt in April 2014.

As a result, Craig started to come up with (blind) trusts in his explanations, and they were supposedly located all over the world. UK has been mentioned, Seychelles, Belize, Singapore… And Panama. And Panama sticked for a while.

Until it didn’t.

August 11, 2014: ATO hearing

August 2014 is the first time, as far as we know now, when a trust in Panama is being discussed during a hearing with the ATO. A

So here you have it, a trust in Panama not established by Craig Wright, but set up in 2011 — indeed, not 2009 — for the benefit of the research he is doing. This supposed trust held 1.1 million Bitcoin and software, we learn a bit later in the hearing:

Craig Wright: “You have the right to… something.”

Indeed. If only this fictional ‘something’ existed outside Craig’s fantasy.

For some reason, Craig Wright stuck to the country of Panama for a while in 2014 during the ATO audits. And not afraid to back down on a lie on other occasions, during the early stages of the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, Craig did the same; he came up with a Panamanian trust, but now backdated to 2009 instead of 2011.

April 2019: The Email Forgery Incident (taken largely from ‘Your Honor, The Dog Ate My Homework!’)

In April 2019, Craig Wright filed an email exhibit dated December 20, 2012 in which Panama is being mentioned. It’s unclear if a trust in Panama is referenced where the ‘assets’ have been hold, but it seems so.

The following mockup of 3 images (2 top, 1 bottom) explains what happened.

Sources for the image mockup above:

* CourtListener (Exhibit)
* Reddit
* CourtListener (Notice Of Withdrawing Exhibit)

For those who want to know the full story of that Craig Wright made forgery above, this is about an alleged email dated December 20, 2012 from Dave ‘Klieman’ that was quickly withdrawn by Craig when it was figured out by a Reddit user named ‘Contrarian’ that it was indeed a Craig-made sloppy forgery.

Here is how this incident was discussed in court during a Motion Hearing before Federal Judge Bloom on July 10, 2019. And of course, a hack comes up as an excuse!

“However, if the Court wanted to go further, the initial email was filed by Dr. Wright. And it wasn’t until the public outcry — you know, Your Honor, the fact is this case is highly watched by the media and the cryptocurrency community, and they watch what’s going on. There’s an interest in the case for a variety of different reasons. And the filings are dissected at times by various members of the public. Dr. Wright filed this email with no intention of saying anything about the fact that he knew it was a forgery. The public exposed it as a fraud. And hours after the public had exposed it as a fraud, and it went viral on news sites, on Reddit, on Twitter, Dr. Wright withdrew the exhibit because he could not verify the time frame in which it was sent. Now, again, this was just another pattern of Dr. Wright saying one thing and then pivoting again. But the Plaintiffs have laid out in their original motion how that document really was forged. And not only was it forged, but the basis of that forgery was an email Dr. Wright sent from himself to himself six minutes before he created the PDF of that email. And then, Dr. Edman has gone through how he has changed the text from Craig Wright to Craig Wright to be Dave Ira Kleiman to Uyen Nguyen. And then he changed the time period in which it was sent from 2014 back to December of 2012. Of course, he also changed from it being from Craig Wright to Craig Wright to being to Dave Kleiman. And in so doing, misspelled “Kleiman.” There’s no way Dave Kleiman misspelled his own name. And then, of course, he dropped the PGP signature into the bottom of the email, which was meant to kind of be the finishing touch in the forgery because everybody knows ncryption can’t be beat, except it turns out what Dr. Wright didn’t know is that PGP signatures contain hidden time stamps. And again, the Internet was the one that originally came up with this, but they demonstrated it and it was verified by Dr. Edman and sworn to in an affidavit to this Court, that — you know, I don’t understand all the science behind it. But converting hex to decimal and then identifying the right range, it gives a number, which is then converted from the amount of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970. Turns out the PGP signature was actually created March 12th of 2014, almost a year after Dave Kleiman was dead, and two weeks before Uyen Nguyen had to file her filings in Florida to reinstate W&K. I mean, the timing is just too coincidental. And then the second email Plaintiffs have not yet had Dr. Wright — sorry — Dr. Edman examine, which is the one where Dave Kleiman says: “Oh, thank so much for accepting the directorship.” As the Court is familiar with the transcript, Dr. Wright was confronted with a lot of forged evidence, allegations of forgery. Judge Reinhart has not made a determination yet on that issue. And as part of that analysis, we became more familiar with the modus operandi of the Defendant and Dr. Edman was then able to look again at Exhibit F, which is that second email that says: “Thank you for acting as a director.” And looking at it, has now again submitted last night to the Court showing that, in fact, that document is sourced from the original forged document of Exhibit A that was withdrawn by the Defendant. It contains the same document ID, which is the metadata tag that shows that these documents are revisions of the same document. And Dr. Edman again showed what was changed. The time was changed. And it’s really a powerful thing to look at to see all the characters that were changed. And then he changed the entire body of the email again. And again, when confronted last night with the fact that that email was also a forgery, the Defendant withdraws the exhibit again. It’s just — Dr. Wright just puts up whatever he can. And when it’s forged, he says: “Oh, you know, all right. I’m just going to withdraw it,” or “Oh, somebody hacked me,” or “Oh” — you know, some other ridiculous excuse. So those two emails are really important not just because they are evidence of forgery and they go to credibility, but also because those two emails are the foundation on which all of Uyen Nguyen’s filings are premised. Those are the ones that gave her authority to act for W&K. But those are forgeries, which means there is zero evidence to show Uyen Nguyen had any authority to act for W&K at all. And she didn’t. It was a complete forgery and a fraud.” — Vel Freedman

Amen to that, Mr Freedman. Let’s continue with Magistrate Judge Reinhart.

“Sadly, Dr. Wright does not write on a clean slate. As Judge Bloom recently noted in denying Dr. Wright’s Motion for Judgment on the Pleadings, Dr. Wright has taken directly conflicting factual positions at different times during this litigation. DE 265 at 10 (“[T]he record is replete with instances in which the Defendant has proffered conflicting sworn testimony before this Court.). As discussed below, that behavior continued before me. Dr. Wright has a substantial stake in the outcome of the case. If Plaintiffs succeed on their claims, Dr. Wright stands to lose billions of dollars. That gives him a powerful motive not to identify his bitcoin. As long as the relevant addresses remain secret, he can transfer the bitcoin without the Plaintiffs being able to find them. After all, Bitcoin is an anonymous cybercurrency.

Similarly, Dr. Wright had many reasons not to tell the truth. Most notably, Dr. Wright might want to prevent the Plaintiffs (or others) from finding his Bitcoin trove. Alternatively, there was evidence indicating that relevant documents were altered in or about 2014, when the Australian Tax Office was investigating one of Dr. Wright’s companies. Perhaps Dr. Wright’s testimony here is motivated by certain legal and factual positions he took in the Australian Tax Office investigation and from which he cannot now recede.

There was substantial credible evidence that documents produced by Dr. Wright to support his position in this litigation are fraudulent. There was credible and compelling evidence that documents had been altered. Other documents are contradicted by Dr. Wright’s testimony or declaration. While it is true that there was no direct evidence that Dr. Wright was responsible for alterations or falsification of documents, there is no evidence before the Court that anyone else had a motive to falsify them. As such, there is a strong, and unrebutted, circumstantial inference that Dr. Wright willfully created the fraudulent documents.

One example is the Deed of Trust document for the Tulip Trust. Among the trust assets identified in the purported Deed of Trust creating the Tulip Trust on October 23, 2012, are “All Bitcoin and associated ledger assets transferred into Tulip Trading Ltd by Mr David Kleiman on Friday, 10th June 2011 following transfer to Mr Kleiman by Dr Wright on the 09th June 2011. This incles [sic] the 1,200,111 Bitcoin held under the former arrangement and the attached
conditions.” P. Ex. 9 at 2. Notably absent from the list of trust assets is any encrypted file, software, public or private keys. The Deed of Trust states that the parties forming the Tulip Trust are Wright International Investments Ltd and Tulip Trading Ltd. Id. at 1. There was credible and conclusive evidence at the hearing that Dr. Wright did not control Tulip Trading Ltd. until 2014. P. Exs. 11–14; DE 236 at 88–96. Moreover, computer forensic analysis indicated that the Deed of Trust presented to the Court was backdated. The totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust exists. Combining these facts with my observations of Dr. Wright’s demeanor during his testimony, I find that Dr. Wright’s testimony that this Trust exists was intentionally false (11).

Dr. Wright’s false testimony about the Tulip Trust was part of a sustained and concerted effort to impede discovery into his bitcoin holdings. Start with Dr. Wright’s deceptive and incomplete discovery pleadings. He testified at the evidentiary hearing that at least as early as December 2018 he knew that he could not provide a listing of his bitcoin holdings. Yet, the Court was not told this “fact” until April 18, 2019. I give Dr. Wright the benefit of the doubt that prior to May 14 the Plaintiffs were seeking information that went beyond a list of his bitcoin holdings on December 31, 2013. After the May 14 discovery hearing, however, Dr. Wright was aware that the Court expected him to provide Plaintiffs with sufficient information so those bitcoin holdings could be traced.

Nevertheless, having failed to hold off discovery on legal grounds, after March 14, Dr. Wright changed course and started making affirmative misleading factual statements to the Court. His April 18 Motion argued for the first time, “In 2011, Dr. Wright transferred ownership of all his Bitcoin into a blind trust. Dr. Wright is not a trustee or beneficiary of the blind trust. Nor does Dr. Wright know any of the public addresses which hold any of the bitcoin in the blind trust. Thus, Dr. Wright, does not know and cannot provide any other public addresses.”This pleading was intended to communicate the impression that Dr. Wright had no remaining connection to the bitcoin. It was also intended to create the impression that the bitcoin themselves had been transferred to the trust (12). Dr. Wright almost immediately made irreconcilable statements about the Tulip Trust. The April 18 Motion stated it was a blind trust and he was not a trustee. His sworn declaration three weeks later stated that he is one of the trustees of the Tulip Trust. The trust can hardly be considered “blind” (as represented in the April 18 Motion) if Dr. Wright is one of the trustees. At least one set of these representations about the trust and Dr. Wright’s status as a trustee necessarily is intentionally misleading.

(11) Although I am only required to make this finding by a preponderance of the evidence, I find clear and convincing evidence to support it.

(12) Although the pleading was not verified, it was signed by Dr. Wright’s counsel. By signing the document, they certified that “the allegations and other factual contentions [in the pleading had] evidentiary support.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 11. The sole source for that evidentiary support would have been Dr. Wright, so the Court finds that he provided the information contained in the April 18 Motion.”

And on January 10, 2020 Federal Judge Bloom did not hesitate to confirm the damning findings, including the debunking of Craig’s false hack claims, of Magistrate Judge Reinhart a few months earlier.

“The Court has also reviewed the transcripts from the Evidentiary Hearing held by Judge Reinhart and agrees with his credibility findings relating to Defendant.”

May 8, 2019: Craig Wright’s Declaration in Kleiman v Wright

Here we find Craig Wright mentioning Panama again:

May 13, 2019: Craig Wright’s Declaration in Kleiman v Wright

This Panamanian trust was supposedly called ‘0133224d’ as we learned in another Declaration of Craig Wright a few days after May 8, 2019. How ‘0133224d’ relates to the much longer redacted name in the screenshot above is unclear at the moment of writing.

Craig Wright also mentioned this trust name in a deposition, discussing both his May 2019 Declarations, on June 28, 2019.

“Q: But it resulted in coin appearing under your possession, as I understand the word “coin” to be?
A: No, it was not under my possession. I mined directly into an algorithm that was owned, and I had set up the Trust 0133224D, was constructed in 1997 in Panama. That was — that is now no longer in existence. That trust —
MS. MCGOVERN:
Dr. Wright, please just answer the question with respect to the Bitcoin that you mined in the relevant time period. That was the question.” — Vel Freedman, Craig Wright

Faketoshi Fun Fact: The name of this Panamanian trust appears to be a combination of Craig’s Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) Service Number “O133224”, which was appointed to him in August 1989, and the discharge code “D” (MEDICAL) that Craig obtained in October 1990 when he left the RAAF.

Source for images mockup (PDF top right on): RecordSearch.naa.gov.au

“The few months I was unemployed after I left the military because of a confict [sic] of interests I earned money by doing whatever I could get (even though I am an engineer I have worked in a petrol station).”.

Does a “conflict of interest” sound “medical” to the reader? Probably not, is my educated guess.

But let’s not derail too much now. Apparently, when Craig Wright started to realize that Ira Kleiman’s counsel would leave no stone unturned in their research, he backtracked completely on the Panamanian trust (as it, of course, didn’t exist). And that’s what we see happening here, in a deposition on March 18, 2020:

BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q: Did you ever mine Bitcoin into a Panama trust?
A: No, I did not mine Bitcoin into a Panama trust.

And there you have it, Craig Wright caught lying in court again, under penalty of perjury in false declarations and during depositions under oath, as summarized by team Vel Freedman in their epic Omnibus Sanctions Motion:

And with this epic take down of another series of Craig Wright lies and forgeries, let’s close the Panama trust chapter. Be assured that the ATO also did not accept the existence of this trust, or any trust for that matter. More about that later.

Source: The Australian, January 21, 2016

Insightful article by The Australian, January 2016. With the Australian Taxation Office nailing it when it comes to Craig Wright being Satoshi Nakamoto:

“Australian authorities are understood to firmly believe Mr Wright is not the creator of Bitcoin and that he may have created the hoax to distract from his tax issues.”

This is the first time, as far as we know now, that an official body — not being individual Craig Wright criticasters like the undersigned, or public journalistic media — calls out the lie that Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.

The 2011–today era: The Seychelles based Tulip Trust

We now move to a trust that has found the most notority in the Bitcoin community, and elsewhere: the Tulip Trust. In the upcoming section, the reader will learn that the Panama trust and the Tulip Trust are having some overlap timeframe wise, as Craig Wright is not always able — and this is a massive understatement — to keep a story straight.

In summary, we have just seen Craig Wright first lying about the Panama trust to the ATO as the only trust in existence, then he will change this story during Kleiman v Wright that it was a predecessor to the Tulip Trust, then it wasn’t anymore, and meanwhile he had already introduced the Tulip Trust to the ATO in 2014. This convoluted web of lies by Craig Wright settled, for now at least, around the following timeline:

No trust in the period 2009–2010
A trust vehicle called Tulip Trust starting June 2011
A follow up trust called Tulip Trust 1 starting October 2012
A follow up trust called Tulip Trust 2 starting July 2017

So let’s have a look at the relevant forgeries, sorry, ‘evidence’ known so far.

Remember, W&K was raised February 14, 2011 by sole owner Dave Kleiman

March 27, 2011: Backdated from June 2014, blog post “Rant”

The backdated “Rant” post (as said, created around June 2014) on Craig Wright’s blog is particularly interesting because it contains the oldest — in the sense of backdated, of course — hints to “trust” and “2020”, which are items that will come back several months after June 2014, namely in October 2014, when Craig is trying to give the Tulip Trust some more ‘body’ with several forgeries and an empty shelves’ company from the Seychelles.

Source: Craig Wright’s blog on Wayback Machine

Of interest here is the line “It sells for $5,000 now.”. Note again that Craig Wright (back)dated this blog forgery to the year 2011 in or around June 2014.

Why is this interesting? Because a few months earlier, according the ATO report just after March 17, 2014, this same amount of $5,000 was used in the same Intellectual Property context, but outed on a different occasion, and it is planted a year further back in time. As said, this is signature Craig Wright: he just can’t keep a storyline straight. And we quickly realize why that is: because at some point it becomes impossible for him to remember all the lies told when, where and how.

Also note that W&K didn’t exist in ‘the 2010 income year’, which is the tax year 2009/2010 in Australia. W&K was, as shown before, raised February 14, 2011 by Dave Kleiman which makes it at all times technically impossible to “transfer IP to” in or before June 2010.

ATO will find numerous of these inconsistencies.

June 24, 2011: Tulip Trust email Dave Kleiman (a backdated forgery)

Let’s have a look at one of the Tulip Trust related exhibits found in the Kleiman v Wright court docket. It’s an email with a PDF 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:

During the hodlonaut trial in September 2021 in Oslo, Norway, Craig Wright was asked about this email-plus-attachment forgery. And a very remarkable moment followed: Craig accidentally admits that he created this forgery.

July 21, 2011: Declaration of Trust (a forgery)

Let’s have a look again at Craig Wright’s full “under penalty of perjury” May 13, 2019 Declaration in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit.

We see many Tulip Trust documents mentioned, except for one. And that is the so-called ‘Declaration of Trust’ which is dated July 21, 2011. Related to that document there is also an ‘Incorporation Form’ by Abacus (Seychelles) Limited, from the same date. We know that from the “PLAINTIFFS’ AMENDED TRIAL EXHIBIT LIST”:

Unfortunately this document/these documents has/have never been filed, not before the trial and not after the trial, as far as we know.

However, we see this document pop up in another lawsuit: COPA v Wright. It is one of the Craig Wright made forgeries found in this case, and it is in detail described in the Madden Top 50 report as item number 35.

A full copy of this Madden Top 50 report with added information can be found in “Faketoshi And The Madden50”.

Here we only take item 35 from this Madden Top 50 report:

“(35) ID_001925 Declaration of Trust

The document purports to be a declaration of trust dated 21 July 2011 relating to Tulip Trading Ltd.

Reasons for Allegation of Forgery

The document has been backdated. [PM14 at 147]
The document contains internal metadata recording an “editedScannedDoc” action indicating that it was first scanned from hard copy and then digitally edited. The edit took place on 24
November 2015. [PM14 at 132–133 and 135]
Dr Wright sent this document as an attachment to an email later on the same date the edit took place, 24 November 2015. [PM14 at 108]
The document contains graphical artefacts indicating that it has been edited by replacing text in the document after it was scanned and converted to editable form. The graphical artefacts are invisible or nearly invisible in standard conditions and can be made out only when the contrast of the document is increased. [PM14 at 117–133]
The document is apparently an edited form of ID_001530. The created date of ID_00001530 is 23 October 2014. The document ID_001925 contains two different unique identifiers embedded in its internal metadata. The presence of two different such unique identifiers is a characteristic of editing a PDF. The document from which it was apparently created, ID_001530, does not display this characteristic. [PM14 at 137–143]
Dr Wright has disclosed what appears to be an intermediate document within the same chain of editing. ID_001323 is a PDF created from a DOC file. The date of ID_001323 is 8 November 2014. The author of ID_001323 is given in its internal metadata as ‘craig.wright’. [PM14 at 144–146]
The document refers to a trust declared in the name of “Tulip Trading Ltd”. Tulip Trading Ltd was not owned by Dr Wright in 2011. It was purchased by Dr Wright in 2014 as an ‘aged shelf company’. It would not have been possible for a trust to be declared in respect of Tulip Trading Ltd in July 2011.

Reasons for Inference of Dr Wright’s Knowledge / Responsibility

The document bears Dr Wright’s name.
The document bears Dr Wright’s passport number.
Dr Wright has disclosed three versions of this document bearing identical handwritten signatures but different, edited content.
The edits were done on the same day and in a similar manner as the edits made to ID_001930.
The effect of the tampering is to appear supportive of Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto and the related claims he has made (in other litigation) to be the beneficial owner of large quantities of Bitcoin through a trust (i.e. giving the appearance of Dr Wright having owned large quantities of bitcoin since before 2012, consistently with his claim to have mined bitcoin as Satoshi Nakamoto), contrary to fact.
In his evidence in these proceedings, Dr Wright relies on his purported mining operations in support of his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto. [Wright 1 at 115–121]
The document originates from a DOC file in which Dr Wright is recorded as the author.
Dr Wright sent this document as an attachment to an email on the same date that the edit took place, on 24 November 2015. [PM14 at 108]
The document is derived from a PDF file that records its author as “craig.wright”. That document itself is created from a precursor DOC file. No precursor DOC file has been disclosed in these proceedings.
ID_001930 was created by scanning with a Toshiba e-STUDIO2555C scanner. The same scanner was used to create a large number of documents disclosed by Dr Wright in these proceedings, including ID_001925, ID_001930 and all of documents ID_001936 to 1957 inclusive [PM14 at 173–175, 177, 192]. Of those documents, several bear independent indicia of tampering, and 13 of them bear Dr Wright’s handwritten signature.
The effect of the tampering is to appear supportive of Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto and the related claims he has made (in other litigation) to be the beneficial owner of large quantities of Bitcoin through a trust (i.e. giving the appearance of Dr Wright having owned large quantities of bitcoin since before 2012, consistently with his claim to have mined bitcoin as Satoshi Nakamoto), contrary to fact.
In his evidence in these proceedings, Dr Wright relies on his purported mining operations in support of his claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto. [Wright 1 at 115–121]
The document originates from a DOC file in which Dr Wright is recorded as the author.
Dr Wright sent this document as an attachment to an email on the same date that the edit took place, on 24 November 2015. [PM14 at 108]
The document is derived from a PDF file that records its author as “craig.wright”. That document itself is created from a precursor DOC file. No precursor DOC file has been disclosed in these proceedings.
ID_001930 was created by scanning with a Toshiba e-STUDIO2555C scanner. The same scanner was used to create a large number of documents disclosed by Dr Wright in these proceedings, including ID_001925, ID_001930 and all of documents ID_001936 to 1957 inclusive [PM14 at 173–175, 177, 192]. Of those documents, several bear independent indicia of tampering, and 13 of them bear Dr Wright’s handwritten signature.”

So far for this forgery, exposed by forensic expert Madden.

Now let’s immediately move to the next one!

October 24, 2012: ‘Deed of Trust’ (aka Tulip Trust 1, a forgery)

This deed, supposedly between Wright International Investments Ltd and Tulip Trading Ltd, was formed as a ‘Declairation [sic] of Trust’, just one of a number of telltale Wright typos from this deed.

For your reading pleasures, all five pages of this firmly backdated forgery where Craig wants you to believe that the Tulip Trust is formed (and nevermind that Craig only obtained the company Tulip Trading Ltd in October 2014, not October 2012 or earlier — more about that later):

This Tulip Trust 1 document is mentioned in Craig Wright’s May 8, 2019 Declaration in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Here, Craig explains how the ‘Deed of Trust’ is set up and who are the trustees (page 2, point 5 and onward).

Unfortunately there are several blackened out sections in this document, done before filing, as ordered by court Florida for, mostly, privacy reasons.

In a June 28, 2019 Kleiman v Wright deposition of Craig Wright we can also find some useful information about this ‘Deed of Trust’ forgery. The fact that Craig is desperately trying to duck responsibility for creating the document is telling again.

“Q. All right. Dr. Wright, can you look at paragraph 5 of your declaration?
A. Which one?
Q. The May 8th declaration, Plaintiff’s Exhibit 4.
A. Yes.
Q. You say in June of 2011 you “took steps to consolidate the Bitcoin that I mined with Bitcoin that I acquired and other assets.”
A. Yes.
Q. And then you say that in 2 — October of 2012, the formal trust — excuse me, a formal trust document was executed.
A. Yes.
Q. So when you say that — sorry, Dr. Wright. Let me pull this back up here. Okay. So in October of 2012, you executed a formal trust document. And I want to hand you — is this the document that you executed — the formal trust document you executed in October of 2012 — sorry, that was executed in October of 2012?
A. This is not the trust document I did. This is companies involve- — that I was involved with.
Q. Dr. Wright, if you can switch back to Plaintiff’s Exhibit 1, which is your May 13th declaration.
A. Yes.
Q. Can you take a look at paragraph 5 of it for me.
A. Yes.
Q. What document are you referring to when you say “I attach to this declaration the trust document dated October 23rd, 2012, which is referenced in paragraph 5 of my May 8th, 2019 declaration as two of Trust 1.”
A. It’s quite possible this document that I was given.
Q. Dr. Wright, you swore this is true based on your personal knowledge. What do you mean “it’s quite possibly”?
A. There is another document from the next day that was also issued that I signed.
Q. Dr. Wright, I think you’re referring to paragraph 6 of the May 13th — of the May 13th declaration, which says “I attach this document, the trust document — I attach to this — sorry. Strike that. “I attach to this declaration the trust document for Tulip Trust 2, which is dated October 24, 2012 and is referenced in paragraph 18 of my May 8th, 2019 declaration.” So, going back to paragraph 5 that identifies an October 23rd, 2012 date as Plaintiff’s Exhibit — what are we up to here — 5, Plaintiff’s Exhibit 5 —
MS. MCGOVERN: Which is it?
MR. FREEDMAN: The one that starts of “Deed of trust between.” Bates No. Defense 50985 through 50989.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 5, Document that starts off “Deed of Trust between,” Bates labeled Defense 50985 through 50989 was marked for identification.)
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Is Plaintiff’s Exhibit 5 the October 23rd, 2012 trust document referenced in paragraph 5 of your May 13th declaration?
A. I did not create the document, and I did not sign it.
MS. MCGOVERN: Answer the — just listen to the question. He’s asking whether that — this agreement is the agreement that’s referenced in your declaration. That’s the question.
THE WITNESS: To the best of my knowledge, yes.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Who created this document?
A. I don’t actually know. I know people in Abacus, who are running blind holdings for me, that they would have the bearer shares certificates, et cetera. It would be one of them, I would say.
Q. So — but you received a copy of this fully executed sometime around October 23rd, 2012; is that correct?
A. I don’t know when it was received.
Q. It was executed in October 2012. You received it sometime thereafter?
A. It was received and in the trust files after.
Q. Okay. When did you first get a copy of this document?
A. I don’t know. I — my lawyers received all of the sealed boxes of files. All of this was in there. I hadn’t touched any of that for years.
Q. So you put all of your Bitcoin in a trust, but you never even looked at the trust document?
A. No, I didn’t put all of my Bitcoin in the trust. That’s a misrepresentation. I put all of my intellect property. My intellect property included the algorithms that would initially have my mined Bitcoins included.”

August 26, 2019: During an evidentiary hearing in Kleiman v Wright on this date, the October 2012 ‘Deed of Trust’ is discussed once more by Judge Reinhart. And he’s not mild about this deed that was exposed as a forgery.

“There was substantial credible evidence that documents produced by Dr. Wright to support his position in this litigation are fraudulent and forged. There was credible and compelling evidence that documents had been altered. Other documents are directly contradicted by Dr. Wright’s testimony or his sworn declaration of May 8th. While it is true that there was no direct evidence that Dr. Wright was responsible for the alterations or fabrications of documents, there is no evidence before the Court that anyone else had a motive to falsify them. And although Dr. Edman was not permitted to testify that he believed they were fraudulent, as the finder of fact, I find them to be fraudulent, and willfully so. There is a strong and unrebutted circumstantial inference that Dr. Wright willfully created fraudulent documents.

One example is the Deed of Trust document for the Tulip Trust. Among the trust assets identified in this purported Deed of Trust, dated October 23rd, 2012, are all Bitcoin and associated ledger assets transferred into Tulip Trading, Limited by David Kleiman on February 10th, 2011. Notably absent from the list of trust assets is any encrypted file, any software or any public or private keys. The Deed of Trust states that the parties forming the Tulip Trust are Wright International Investments, Limited and Tulip Trading, Limited. There was credible and conclusively probative evidence that Dr. Wright did not control Tulip Trading, Limited until 2014, which would have been two years after the trust allegedly was formed. There was other forensic evidence indicating that the Deed of Trust document itself is fraudulent.

So the totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate — I’m sorry. I find that the totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust even exists, and I find that Dr. Wright’s testimony that this trust exists was intentionally false. And although I am only required to make this finding by a preponderance of the evidence, if required to do so, I would find clear and convincing evidence to support it.

Dr. Wright’s false testimony about the Tulip Trust was part of a sustained and concerted effort to impede discovery in this case.”

So on August 27, 2019 Judge Reinhart’s order dropped with the following phrases:

“There was substantial credible evidence that documents produced by Dr. Wright to support his position in this litigation are fraudulent. There was credible and compelling evidence that documents had been altered. Other documents are contradicted by Dr. Wright’s testimony or declaration. While it is true that there was no direct evidence that Dr. Wright was responsible for alterations or falsification of documents, there is no evidence before the Court that anyone else had a motive to falsify them. As such, there is a strong, and unrebutted, circumstantial inference that Dr. Wright willfully created the fraudulent documents.

One example is the Deed of Trust document for the Tulip Trust. Among the trust assets identified in the purported Deed of Trust creating the Tulip Trust on October 23, 2012, are “All Bitcoin and associated ledger assets transferred into Tulip Trading Ltd by Mr David Kleiman on Friday, 10th June 2011 following transfer to Mr Kleiman by Dr Wright on the 09th June 2011... This incles [sic] the 1,200,111 Bitcoin held under the former arrangement and the attached conditions.” Notably absent from the list of trust assets is any encrypted file, software, public or private keys. The Deed of Trust states that the parties forming the Tulip Trust are Wright International Investments Ltd and Tulip Trading Ltd. There was credible and conclusive evidence at the hearing that Dr. Wright did not control Tulip Trading Ltd. until 2014. Moreover, computer forensic analysis indicated that the Deed of Trust presented to the Court was backdated.

The totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust exists. Combining these facts with my observations of Dr. Wright’s demeanor during his testimony, I find that Dr. Wright’s testimony that this Trust exists was intentionally false.

Dr. Wright’s false testimony about the Tulip Trust was part of a sustained and concerted effort to impede discovery into his bitcoin holdings.”

Indeed, it is practically 100% the same text that Judge Reinhart spoke during the hearing the previous day. Meaning, he was well prepared going into the hearing.

Then there was the Kleiman v Wright trial in November/December 2021. On trial day 7, which was November 9, 2021, we can find that they discussed the ‘Deed of Trust’ also. Note how Kleiman’s lawyer Freedman is slowly and masterfully grilling Craig Wright about the subject in every detail.

From the transcript:

“MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you put that on the left-hand side, and let’s bring up P822.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Again, this is your sworn declaration, Dr. Wright. “I attach” — I’m at Paragraph 5 now. “I attach to this declaration the trust document dated October 23rd, 2012 which is referenced in Paragraph 5 of my May 8th, 2019 declaration as Tulip Trust I. This document is an authentic copy.” Do you see that?
A. Yes, it’s a copy.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please put down the one on the left-hand side and let’s bring up what Dr. Wright swore was an authentic copy of the October 23rd, 2012 trust document, which is P036. That cannot go to the jury yet. It’s not yet in evidence. So why don’t we take everything down and we’ll just bring up P036. No, P036.
(Pause in proceedings.)
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Okay. Dr. Wright, do you see this is a “Deed of Trust” dated October 23rd, 2012 that also contains the words Tulip Trust on it?
A. Yes, I do.
MR. FREEDMAN: Your Honor, Plaintiffs offer P036 into evidence.
MS. MCGOVERN: No objection, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Admitted into evidence.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 036 received into evidence.)
MR. FREEDMAN: Can we publish this to the jury, please? Can we zoom out? Zoom out.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. This is the document you swore was authentic in your May declaration, correct, Dr. Wright?
A. I believe that’s the same document. I can’t see the attachment, but this is a trust document from the trust, yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Okay. Ms. Vela, can you put that down and let’s go back to the first document Dr. Wright swore was authentic, which is P035.”

<<snip>>

“MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you bring these documents down and let’s bring up P036. The second document Dr. Wright swore was authentic.
MS. MCGOVERN: Objection, Your Honor. Move to strike these statements by counsel as though they’re record evidence. There’s not a question pending. It’s inappropriate.
THE COURT: Sustained.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, did you swear this document was authentic?
A. No. I said it was a copy of the trust document.
Q. Swore it was an authentic copy, Dr. Wright?
A. An authentic copy is an authentic copy. If I copy the file 50 times, if I print it 50 times, if I make it to a new print — to a PDF today with today’s metadata, it is an authentic copy.
Q. Did you swear it was an authentic copy? Yes or no?
A. Yes.
Q. Dr. Wright, this purports to be a deed of trust. Do you see on the top it says: “Deed of Trust”?
A. It is what it says.
Q. Purports to be a deed of trust between Wright International Investments.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you highlight that for us and zoom in on the relevant portion.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. IBC 064409?
A. Yes.
Q. IBC is International Business Company?
A. Yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you zoom in on — oh, can we please publish that to the jury, please. It’s in evidence.
THE COURT: It’s in evidence.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, this purports to be a deed of trust between Wright International Investments, IBC number 064409, and Tulip Trading, IBC number 093344. Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. Purports to be dated 23rd of October, 2012. Do you see that?
A. That’s when it was.
Q. In fact, Dr. Wright, not only did you swear this was an authentic copy, you also swore this document was executed in October of 2012, did you not?
A. It would have been that day. It — well, it’s my birthday so that’s I think why we did it.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, let’s move this document off to the side and can we please bring up Joint Exhibit 14. Which if it’s not in evidence, Your Honor, Plaintiffs would like to move it into evidence.
MS. MCGOVERN: No objection, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Without objection, 14 is admitted into evidence.
(Joint Exhibit 14 received into evidence.)
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Can we go — do you see where it says: “Tulip Trust,” Dr. Wright?
A. Where am I looking? Sorry.
Q. Bold. Halfway down the page.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you highlight Tulip Trust for Dr. Wright between Paragraphs 3 and 4.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. This is another sworn declaration by you, Dr. Wright, under penalty of perjury?
A. Yes, it is.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you go to the next page for us? And in Paragraph 5, Ms. Vela, can you call that out for us?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. October, 2012, a formal trust document was executed. Do you see that?
A. Yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: All right. Ms. Vela, can you put down Joint Exhibit 14.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Swore it was an authentic copy. Swore it was executed in October, correct?
A. Yes.
Q. The parties of this document, Dr. Wright, are Wright International Investments and Tulip Trading. You see it says the parties at the top?
A. Yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you go to the next page for me?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. And here it says that — in Paragraph 1, that the parties are the beneficial owners of trust.
MR. FREEDMAN: Can you highlight and can you call out Paragraph 1 for us, Ms. Vela.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. “That we will act as the holder and as nominee agent and trustee for the parties who are at all times the beneficial owners.” Do you see that?
A. The parties who are the beneficial — it doesn’t say: “The parties are the beneficial owners.” It says: “The parties who are at all times.” So …
Q. The parties are the beneficial owners?
A. No, that’s not what it says. “The parties who are the beneficial owners.” That doesn’t mean the parties. So that’s actually, again, two different things.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you minimize that for us, move it to the left side and bring up Joint Exhibit 14 again? Can you go with me to paragraph 13. Can you highlight Paragraph 13 for us and bring it out.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. The beneficiaries of Tulip Trust I are Wright International Investments, LTD and Tulip Trading. Do you see that, Dr. Wright?
A. I do.
Q. So they are the beneficiaries of this trust, are they not, Dr. Wright?
A. Yes, but the comment on the other one wasn’t what you said.
MR. FREEDMAN: All right. Ms. Vela, can you put down Joint Exhibit 14 for us, please.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, right below number —
MR. FREEDMAN: Can you highlight — Ms. Vela, can you zoom in on the — yeah, the bottom half of that document, please.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, this trust document that you swore was authentic says: “Its assets to be settled in this joint agreement and deed between the parties include.” Do you see that?
A. Yes, but if you scan up to the top of the document, you will see what you’re trying to misconstrue as the trust, the cryptographic algorithmic thing that I detailed before. So you are taking this out of context.
Q. Dr. Wright, do you see that under the assets that are supposed to be in this trust you write in 3B: “This includes the 1,100,111 Bitcoin under that former arrangement in the attached conditions.” Do you see that?
A. Again, no. I believe if you zoom out on this, you will see mention of DAC, digital or basically an algorithmic company called The Trust. It will be listed above if you zoom out. What you’re doing is you’re conflating The Trust with the trust as in Tulip Trust. The Trust is the DAC distributed autonomous corporation that I set up in the trust.
Q. Dr. Wright, Paragraph 3 says: “All Bitcoin and ledger assets are going to go into this joint agreement transferred into Tulip Trading by Mr. David Kleiman on June 2011 following transfer to Mr. Kleiman from Dr. Wright on June 2011.”
A. Uh-huh.
Q. On the 9th. So, this document is saying you sent Bitcoin to Dave Kleiman. Dave Kleiman is then putting them into Tulip Trading and now it’s going into this trust, correct?
A. Into the algorithmic system, yes.
Q. So, Dr. Wright, this is yet another document purporting to show that Dave Kleiman has no right to the 1.1 million Bitcoin in the Tulip Trust, correct?
MS. MCGOVERN: Objection. Mischaracterizes the evidence.
THE COURT: Sustained. Rephrase.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, this is another document showing that you, your companies, Tulip Trading and Wright International Investments, are the sole beneficiaries of 1.1 million Bitcoin in the trust, correct?
A. This 1.1 million was actually spent. The Tulip Trading Bitcoin was purchased from a Russian exchange in 2011. The records are all available. It’s all in the blockchain. So that Bitcoin there in Tulip Trading isn’t the Wright International Trading — sorry — Wright International, Limited Bitcoin. It is another group of Bitcoin. So very simply, you keep confounding the Bitcoin in one company with the Bitcoin in another company. And you keep saying “mined,” but this is not mined by me. This is purchased by me. Tulip Trading, Limited transferred control so that we could spend it. This was not outside my control. This was not ones I couldn’t spend.
Q. Let’s just summarize this for a moment, Dr. Wright. Dave Kleiman dies in 2013, correct?
A. Yes.
Q. We saw you swore the Tulip Trust document was executed in 2012, correct?
A. Yes.
Q. And, in fact, it’s dated from 2012, correct?
A. Yes.
Q. And now we’ve seen that this Tulip Trust was created by Tulip Trading and Wright International Investments, correct?
A. Again, what you’re confounding is the bit you’re hiding and not showing, which is The Trust. You will find in this document, if you actually zoomed out and showed the full document rather than not letting me see it, that it involves The Trust, a DAC. A DAC being a distributed autonomous corporation. That is now a big thing with Ethereum and all these other crypto, like how do we make a company that can operate autonomously. So that’s actually in here.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, zoom out for Dr. Wright.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. What am I hiding, Dr. Wright?
A. If you go up to line 2 — line 3. Please highlight them and expand. “We will undertake to agree and act in the process known as The Trust.” I said that multiple times. Being a DAC distributed autonomous corporation, formed
using a split-key cryptographic process, which I said that the SSIs have voting power through the DAC and the software-based provisions formulated and the distribution of keys will be held. The entire thing that I’ve been saying I set up inside my trust, a DAC, a distributed autonomous corporation. The first one in human history. That’s it.
Q. Dr. Wright, I’m not quibbling with you about the form of the trust —
MS. MCGOVERN: I can’t hear the question.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. I said I’m not disputing with you the form of the trust. I’m talking about what you put into the trust.
A. No, you are, because you are confounding —
Q. Dr. Wright, there’s no question pending.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please go down to the highlighted question. The highlighted part of this document.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, this document says: “The assets to be settled in this joint agreement and deed between the parties include the 1,100,111 Bitcoin held under a former arrangement and the attached conditions”; isn’t that true?
MS. MCGOVERN: Objection, Your Honor. The document speaks for itself and it’s argumentative.
THE COURT: Sustained.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, I want to go through these things in order so it’s easy to follow. Dave Kleiman dies in 2013, correct?
A. Correct.
Q. This document was executed in 2012, correct?
A. Executed and issued as copied to the Australian government. Same month.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you bring us to Page 1?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. It was formed between Wright International Investments and Tulip Trading, IBC number 093344 on 23rd October 2012, correct?
A. Correct.
Q. Dr. Wright, isn’t it true that you had no connection whatsoever to Tulip Trading until two years after this trust document was executed?
A. No. Actually, the company was audited and was part of a court case. It went into 2012, 2013 and then 2014. So, you’re going to bring up the fact that some of my staff tried to get me in trouble with the tax office again. And you’re going to ignore the fact that it’s mentioned earlier again. So no.
Q. Dr. Wright, isn’t that because you bought Tulip Trading II years after this trust document was allegedly executed?
MS. MCGOVERN: Objection, Your Honor. Lack of predicate.
THE COURT: Overruled.
THE WITNESS: No.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. And, Dr. Wright, isn’t it true that you purposely looked for and bought an aged shelf company so that in 2014 you could make it look like you had entered into a trust agreement in 2012, the year before Dave Kleiman died?
A. Seeing as though I already had an aged company called Wright International Investments, that would be really silly. No.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please put this down for a moment and bring up P522 for just counsel and the witness.
Q. Dr. Wright, do you recognize this as an email exchange between Denis Mayaka and yourself?
A. I recognize it as a known compromised email that happened, yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you go to Page 3, please.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Do you see the name Tulip Trading, Limited, Dr. Wright?
A. I do.
MR. FREEDMAN: Your Honor, Plaintiffs offer P522 into evidence.
MS. MCGOVERN: No objection, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Admitted into evidence.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 522 received into evidence.)
MR. FREEDMAN: Can we publish to the jury.
And go with the last page. That’s the first email, last page, Page 3.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, the very first email in this chain comes from somebody named Denis — Denis Mayaka?
MR. FREEDMAN: No. No. Ms. Vela, please zoom back out. Zoom into the bottom half, please.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, Denis Mayaka, do you see his signature at the bottom?
A. That’s not his email.
Q. Do you see: “Denis Mayaka” at the bottom?
A. I see: “Denis Mayaka” against a thing that isn’t Denis’s email, yes.
Q. And, Dr. Wright, the title of the email is: Aged Shelf Company,” correct?
A. Yes.
Q. “Dear Craig: We trust you are well. We received your message requesting an aged shelf company.” Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. This is — this email comes from Denis Mayaka on October 16th, 2014. Do you see that?
A. No, because it’s not his email. So if it’s not his email, it doesn’t come from him. Anyone can type someone’s name.
Q. I understand you contend it’s not his email. You’ll have an opportunity to try to prove that later. Okay? Right now, I’d like you to focus on my questions. “We received your message requesting an aged shelf company.” Do you see that?
A. I see that line.
Q. “Please find attached list of our shelf companies.” Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. “Kindly let us know which company you would like to take.” Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. Additionally, once you identify the company, please fill out the attached form and email it back to us. Do you see that?
A. I also do.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you please just scroll up to the next message.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, you respond back that same day. You say you want Tulip Trading, Limited. This is October 16th, 2014. Do you see that?
A. I see the line but, no, I didn’t respond.
Q. And the formation date for the aged shelf company since it’s aged, Dr. Wright, is July 21st, 2011. Do you see that?
A. I see the subject.
Q. And the IBC number for Tulip Trading, Dr. Wright, we’ve seen that number before, is 093344, right?
A. I see that number, yes.
Q. Same number on the trust document you swore is authentic, right?
A. The same trust document that went to the Australian Tax Office in 2012, yes.
Q. Are you saying you submitted a forged document to them too?
MS. MCGOVERN: Objection, Your Honor. Misstates the testimony.
THE COURT: Sustained.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you scroll up to the next email in the chain. Little higher.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. And, Dr. Wright, Denis Mayaka responded still that same day. He says: “Dear Craig: One-off fees of US dollars, $1,850. Annual fees from second year onwards $600. Does that work for you?” Do you see that?
A. I can see that that would be an extreme discount. Everything to do with Dennis’s companies cost a lot more than that, so that’s wrong.
Q. You’re right, Dr. Wright. You do end up paying a lot more than that. Let’s see what happens.
MS. MCGOVERN: Objection, Your Honor. These statements are not statements and they’re gratuitous and inappropriate.
THE COURT: Overruled at this point. Let’s continue.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, you next respond. You say: “Yes. Please reserve it. How do I pay?” Do you see that?
A. I see the line.
MR. FREEDMAN: Can you scroll up again, Ms. Vela.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Mr. Mayaka responds back. He says: “Dear Craig, thanks. The company has been reserved for you. Please fill out the attached form and email a signed copy. I’ve attached our bank account details for your reference. Kindly email us SWIFT payment details once available. I’m available on Skype, telephone call to complete the form together if you need my help. Please see my contact details on my email signature below. I look forward to hearing from you. Regards, Denis.” Do you see that?
A. I can see it.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you scroll up again, please.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. You respond back. We’re now on October 17th, 2014. “Sorry. I cannot see the bank details listed. Also please confirm three years at $600 plus $1,850 for a total of $3,650.” Do you see that?
A. Yes. I see this would have been a real discount on a shelf company.
MR. FREEDMAN: Keep going up please, Ms. Vela.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. October 17th, 2014 Denis Mayaka responds: “Dear Craig, please find attached invoice and bank details. Please email us SWIFT details once available. Best regards, Denis.”
MR. FREEDMAN: Can you go up again, Ms. Vela, please.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Top email now, Dr. Wright, October 17th, 2014. You respond back to Denis Mayaka: “Hello. Due to the limits on the account for new international transfers, this will be completed in parts. It is too late to have the bank increase the limit before Monday. Sorry. Payment one is attached, US dollars $1,650. Payment two is scheduled for midnight tonight, US $1,500. Payment three is scheduled for midnight tomorrow, US dollars $1500. Invoice two will process on Monday. Regards, Craig.” Do you see that, Dr. Wright?
A. I do.
Q. Arranging for payment with Denis Mayaka, right?
A. Wrong.
Q. Dr. Wright, I’m going to switch us to another version of this email chain that contains some of the attachments that we were just referencing before.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you bring up P523 just to counsel and the witness.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. You see it’s called, subject, “Payment”? You’re listed as the organizer?
A. Yes. I don’t recognize this. Sorry.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you zoom out, please, and go to the next page.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. You see this is the same email we’ve — an email between you and Denis again talking about shareholders?
A. Also don’t recognize it.
MR. FREEDMAN: Okay. Ms. Vela, can you go to the next page, please. See an invoice here. Ms. Vela, can you highlight the company details for the invoice.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. You see that? You recognize that name, Tulip Trading, Limited?
A. Yes, and I notice that it’s a different amount to the one that was before. It doesn’t — it’s not the nominee of $600. It is not a share so this is a different document.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you go to the next page please.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. You see again this email chain that we were looking at before? Denis Mayaka telling you he’s going to send you an invoice and bank account details? We looked at this email already. Do you see that, Dr. Wright?
A. Yes. I see two different amounts. In the last one, it was $2,000 for shareholder services and this one it’s $3,650, and it’s completely different. Yes.
Q. One for shareholder services, one for buying the company, Dr. Wright.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you bring us to the next page. And the next page?
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. There we go, Dr. Wright, $3,650. Do you see that?
A. I do. I don’t recognize this document.
MR. FREEDMAN: All right. At this point, Your Honor, Plaintiffs offer P523 in evidence.
MS. MCGOVERN: Object, Your Honor. Authentication. The witness has not identified the document.
THE COURT: Overruled. I’ll allow it. Admitted into evidence.
(Plaintiffs’ Exhibit 523 received into evidence.)
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you bring us to Page 9.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Here, Dr. Wright, you’ll see the emails we just looked at between you and Denis Mayaka.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you zoom in to the top half of the emails.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Again, we’ve seen these emails, Dr. Wright. Company’s been reserved for you, he gives you the price, he tells you the SWIFT details. You tell him: “I’m going to pay on a schedule,” right?
A. No, I don’t pay on schedules. My international transfer rate back then was $250,000 on a new client. And 20 million without authorization. I’ve got a Black credit card. My theoretical limit is 150 million, so I don’t make thousand-dollar payments. Sorry.

Q. Let’s just look at what the documents say. Okay? Please, Dr. Wright.
MR. FREEDMAN: If we go to Page 12, Ms. Vela.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, do you see this is a transfer receipt? Top left corner.
A. I do. I see that’s what it purports to be.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you zoom out a little bit, please. No. Zoom out. There we go.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Okay. It’s from Commonwealth Bank, Dr. Wright. Do you see that in the top left corner?
A. I see that there’s a logo there, yes.
Q. Transfer receipt, the date is 17th of October, 2014. Do you see that?
A. I see the date.
Q. US dollars, $1,650, sent to Abacus Seychelles, Limited. Do you see that?
A. I see that.
Q. There’s a receipt number. Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. You’re transferring to Abacus Seychelles, Limited. Do you see that?
A. Technically, their New York address there, and they’re not in New York. So that’s erroneous.
Q. And “My Transfer Details,” Dr. Wright, at the bottom, do you see where it says: “Transfer from DeMorgan”?
A. No, it says: “DeMorgan” — “DeMorgan Expenses,” and that’s wrong.
Q. And it says you sent $1,650 US dollars. Do you see that?
A. No, it doesn’t say that I sent that.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you highlight the top line in transfer details.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. That literally says you sent $1,650 US dollars.
A. It doesn’t say that I sent it. The line reads: “You sent,” but it doesn’t say from me.
Q. Okay. And do you see in the additional details it says: “Reason for transfer, message for recipient Invoice 393888?”
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you highlight — can you bring that up for us so we can see it easily.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Do you see that, Dr. Wright?
A. I do.
Q. This is your payment transfer, is it not?
A. No, it is not.
MR. FREEDMAN: All right. Ms. Vela, can you please bring up the Invoice 393888 which is on Page 6 of this PDF. Ms. Vela, can you highlight invoice number 393888 right above the line on the left-hand side.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. And, Dr. Wright, there’s your invoice for $3,650 perfectly matching the amount, correct?
A. No. Because that’s — you can’t match something that’s not the other document. The other document isn’t a payment from — transferred from my bank account. My bank account required two of three signatories who were directors. None of that’s listed. That’s not a Commonwealth Bank transfer statement. It might be a piece of paper but it’s not a transfer statement. So, no, that doesn’t match.
Q. You’ll have an opportunity to prove that when your lawyers talk to you, Dr. Wright. For now, let’s focus on the documents. Okay?
A. Well, you want me to match things — and you’re saying — but they’re not.
Q. Dr. Wright, the invoice is issued by Abacus Seychelles. Top right corner’s got their logo. Do you see that?
A. I don’t know if that’s their logo.
Q. “Company details, Tulip Trading, Limited.” Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. “Date — “Invoice date, October 17th, 2014.” Do you see that?
A. Yes, I do.
Q. Purchase of Seychelles 2011 shelf company. Do you see that?
A. I do.
Q. So, Dr. Wright, you purchased Tulip Trading on October 17th, 2014, did you not?
A. No. And nor could I. As I said, the corporate accounts for DeMorgan were run by the CFO and had to be signed off as a separate process. All of the accounts went through on two monthly payments, one on the 15th, one on the 30th, unless it was like a 28th. They were put through by Ali Lodi who was the accountant, and then signed off by John Chesher on the first thing. Once they went through there, it had to be then cosigned by either Ramona, my wife, myself, or Allen Granger, who was the audit head committee. The person who would sign it on the document would be listed and the cosigner would be listed. We — that wouldn’t be shared because we all had biometric thumbprint things that recorded our name. So, all of our transaction things were recorded and had the little one-time tokeny things. So I can categorically say that is not a transfer from our documents or our company. Sorry.
Q. Dr. Wright, you purchased Tulip Trading on October 17th, 2014, two years after you claim it created the Tulip Trust to hold the 1.1 million Bitcoin you now claim Dave has no right to; isn’t that correct?
A. Multiple questions again. One, Tulip Trading was put into evidence in a court case in Australia in 2012. Two, the purchase of Bitcoin was made to Tulip Trading from a Russian exchange in 2011. It wasn’t mined. That was documented. Three, the purchase that you’re talking about here would be after the already-existing company had been part of the audits that you’re talking about and, thus, if they’re already part of a tax audit, what you’re saying, that I’ve been in a tax audit for a year using this company that now this document comes up. So…
Q. One more thing, Dr. Wright. We’ve seen that date, October 17th, 2014, before, haven’t we?
A. I’ve seen October 17th in many correspondences in my life, yes.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you put the purchase of Tulip Trading on the left-hand side on October 17th, 2014. And can you please bring up P518 which is the draft forgery of Dave Kleiman’s email.
MS. MCGOVERN: Objection, Your Honor. Mischaracterizes the record.
MR. FREEDMAN: They’re both in evidence.
THE COURT: All right. The objection is sustained. If you’ll identify it.
MR. FREEDMAN: P518.
THE COURT: 518.
MR. FREEDMAN: It’s in evidence.
THE COURT: Yeah, 518 is in evidence, the email. There are other parts of 518 but that is in evidence.
MR. FREEDMAN: Ms. Vela, can you highlight the date for me.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, October 17th, 2014 is the same date that appears in the draft email you forge from Dave Kleiman to make it look like he agreed to the trust in 2011; isn’t that correct?
A. Not at all. And very simply, if no transfer went through, then everything stays in Wright International. So all you’re doing is saying no transfer went from Wright International into Tulip Trading. So, my company into my company. And your argument is I defrauded someone by leaving it in one of my companies or moving it to one of my companies from one of my companies. Not to Dave, my company.
Q. October 17th, 2014 was a pretty busy day for you, Dr. Wright, was it not?
A. No. Actually, it wasn’t.
Q. Truth is, Dr. Wright, you forged both versions of the Tulip Trust we just looked at in order to make it seem like Dave Kleiman signed off on you owning the full 1.1 million Bitcoin that you both mined in partnership as Satoshi Nakamoto; isn’t that correct?
MS. MCGOVERN: Objection, Your Honor. Asked and answered multiple times.
THE COURT: Overruled.
THE WITNESS: Again, this is Tulip Trading. Tulip Trading is listed as purchasing Bitcoin in 2011. I purchased them from a Russian exchange. They were dodgy, I know. But everyone was dodgy in 2011 to do with the Bitcoin world. I used Liberty Reserve funds from my gaming operations. I know your government doesn’t like gambling. I’m not American. I transferred that money that I owned in Costa Rica and Panama and other places. And yes, I know your government doesn’t like poker. I do. I transferred that to pay for things and that was then put into my company from my company. So the simple answer here is the Bitcoin you’re trying to say are mined have nothing to do with Bitcoin I mined in 2009. The simple thing is you’re trying to say one million Bitcoin, Satoshi, everyone knows. Wrong. There were one million Bitcoin or so, a little bit less, and plus remainders that I mined and there were one million that I bought and there’s extra on top of that. So, you’re wrong, wrong, and incorrect.
BY MR. FREEDMAN:
Q. Dr. Wright, Tulip Trading could not have signed a trust deed in 2012 as relates to your Bitcoin because you didn’t own it until 2014, correct?
A. Absolutely wrong still.
MR. FREEDMAN: Thank you, Ms. Vela. You can take those down.”

Ultimately, and this fact will not surprise anyone, I’m pretty sure, the fact that the October 2012 ‘Deed of Trust’ was found a forgery created after May 2015 by forensic expert Dr Edman.

His forensic report is dated December 13, 2019.

November 6, 2012: The Dave/Craig “trust process” email (a forgery)

We now move to an email created with an email tool called ‘Bitmessage’. Make no mistake now. There’s no doubt that Craig Wright, and only Craig Wright, created several backdated email forgeries with, likely, a legit copy of the Bitmessage software that he obtained long after November 2012.

Why long after November 2012, you ask? Because Craig used so-called ‘version 4’ type of email addresses in his Bitmessage email forgeries. And when Jonathan Warren — the builder of Bitmessage — was asked “Can you say — after reviewing this document, can you say with confidence that version 4 addresses were not available before August 12, 2013?” he answered with “Yes.”.

Conclusion: the Bitmessage email forgeries were created by Craig Wright after August 12, 2013. And that perfectly fits the timeframe of when we know Craig started to create the Dave Kleiman and Bitcoin related forgeries: after Dave Kleiman’s death in April 2013.

One example of the Bitmessage forgeries is this email (back)dated November 6, 2012, which discusses the ‘trust process’ around a loan to Craig Wright. Note that the trust does not have a name yet. On the other hand, a Shamir Secret Sharing Scheme is mentioned, with 15 key slices.

Wait, what, a loan from ‘the trust’ to Craig Wright? Yes, Craig is a champion when it comes to taking loans with the Tulip Trust as collateral. These fictional loans, however, can be considered advance fee scams, since the Tulip Trust does not own any assets, and this fictional trust has been called out by both the ATO and court Florida as an empty vehicle without any assets, set up only by means of forged and backdated documentation. More about that later.A rather recent, and at the same time interesting, example of such a loan demand popped up in a presentation that Craig Wright apparently did in Dublin on June 20, 2022 during IoTWeek. I couldn’t help putting my egg in the basket about it too.

Note that the following quote from Craig Wright’s 2014 forgery on the right comes back in full at the left on the projector screen.

February 18, 2014: ATO hearing (full transcript here)

In 2014 we will see ATO putting more pressure on Craig Wright in an attempt to better understand what Craig was doing. Two of several hearings will be planned by ATO in February 2014.

Let’s run down a few interesting quotes from the transcript.

“So the objective is to try and free up the cash flow and try and free up the resources so we can get all these issues… rather than continually dealing with various ongoing issues. So just to sort of — for those players who are new to it, I thought it was useful just to quickly walk through the chronology of where we got to, or how we got to here. In 2009 the mining of bitcoin commences. There’s audit and ensuing disputes with the Tax Office regarding information defence… and Dr Wright personally back in 2009 and that dragged on for a couple of years. 2011, bitcoin was transferred overseas. R and D then conducted in the US under — by a joint venture company formed as… effectively info defence research LOC. Bitcoin mining continues throughout 2011.

The bitcoins are derived by companies in Singapore and the Seychelles or entities in Singapore and the Seychelles, and they’re actually trusts. Trustee companies and trusts established — or trustee companies in the United Kingdom and other trusts established in the Seychelles. Further work was planned. In early April 2013 unfortunately David ….. dies in the US towards the end of April 2013. In July we have the MJF transactions which are germane to the returns that are being looked at currently. They involve software services and ….. and in July discussions commenced between — with the Tax Office about the nature of bitcoin. September, following the death of David ….. in the US, there was a transfer of intellectual property out of a US entity to Dr Wright pursuant to orders granted in the New South Wales Supreme Court. Those orders in the New South Wales Supreme Court substantiated value of the claims being made for that intellectual property in the amounts shown there, roughly 28 million a piece.

2013, September, intellectual property that had been acquired by Dr Wright from WK Info Defence is on-supplied to the Wright Family Trust and then broken up and transferred to other group entities, Hotwire, Coin Exchange ….. and so on. 2013, December, 23 December, while I was having Christmas with my family, private ruling issued on the nature of bitcoin and January 2014 we got the retention refund notices and so on. And that’s how we got to — all right. So these are the entities that I think are the key players in these transactions. So we’ve got the UK companies; we’ve got Singaporean companies; we’ve got Seychelles, so they’re all on the outside of the dotted line. We’ve got Craig which we’ve referred to with the ….. as CSW ….. is the trustee of the Wright Family Trust.

We’ve got Hotwire PE, Coin Exchange, Cloudcroft, Strasan, Denariuz and if you look at it ….. audit, audit, audit, refund to ….. and audit. So we’re busy, and this is my point, that we’re stretched in terms of our resources to answer these questions at the moment and it would be nice if we could wrap this up and get these audits sorted. So we’ve got copies of all those notices. I don’t think anyone’s worried about it but those are effectively the current drain on our compliance resources to deal with all these questions. Okay. This is the refund retention letter that I was referring to in relation to — this one’s the Cloudcroft one and letters in the same form were issued to Hotwire and Coin Exchange. A couple of issues. One is, “We’ve decided retaining a refund for the following reasons: we are maintaining our interim position with treating the transfer of bitcoin to pay for your acquisitions in accordance with ….. etcetera. So it doesn’t refer to any clarification of information.”

Now go pick a sentence from the above ATO interview extract — or any ATO interview for that matter — and it will be either:

A true statement describing an event which did take place, but has nothing to do with Bitcoin;
A never-proven statement without any evidence trying to connect Craig to large-scale Bitcoin involvement;
A statement which has since been debunked by either the ATO or otherwise in courts of law, involving backdated contracts, falsified correspondence and other forgeries, which fraudulently attempts to connect Craig to large-scale Bitcoin involvement.

The end result is that the picture painted is of another Potemkin Village in Faketoshi’s fictional country.

February 26, 2014: ATO hearing #2 (full transcript here)

This is a meeting which Craig Wright did not attend. On this date, John Chesher (Craig’s accountant) and Ann Wrightson (Craig’s bookkeeper) met with ATO officials at their office building in Parramatta, Sydney. As the minutes state, the “Meeting was for John Chesher to explain workings in the revised activity statements sent to the ATO on 25 February 2014”. In the minutes of this meeting (note: this document was also part of the dox-package that Wired and Gizmodo received late 2015!), we see again a situation where Craig, not yet willing to explicitly declare himself to be Satoshi to those who, unlike the Kleiman family, might be motivated to ask for proof, has a representative simply repeat the previously-asserted ‘OG miner’ fabrication to the ATO.

“Craig Wright started all this in 2009 when he started mining Bitcoins.”

In the following quotes, JC is, as introduced before, John Chesher who is speaking on behalf of Craig Wright.

Applying the previously-defined 3-step rule to understanding the actual truth of the assertions made to the ATO investigators in these interviews, it is again clear that nothing of substance is ever proven regarding Craig’s claims of owning ANY of the millions-of-dollars-worth of Bitcoin he desperately needs to convince were backing the transactions he’d claimed fiat rebates for.

“Craig Wright took the Bitcoins that he had mined offshore.”
“W&K was an entity created for the purpose of mining Bitcoins.”
“Craig then took the Bitcoins and put them into a Seychelles Trust. A bit of it was also put into Singapore.”
“Craig had mined a lot of Bitcoins. […] Craig had gotten approximately 1.1 million Bitcoins.”
“Mr Kleiman would have had a similar amount.”
“Mr Kleiman and Craig Wright decided to start up W&K because they both wanted to get involved with Bitcoins.”
“W&K was responsible for providing funding.”

Craig’s ENTIRE scheme regarding the many multi-million-dollar transactions he fraudulently claimed record amounts of rebate for, is premised almost exclusively on Bitcoin ‘value assignments’ and ‘rights to call on’ Bitcoin supposedly held in trusts he has simply dreamed up a back-dated history for.

April 25, 2014: Craig Wright creates timeline for Ira, mentioning UK trusts

Note that we have now entered the phase in Craig Wright’s Bitcoin fraud career where he had just added a Satoshi cosplay to his palet of scams in January 2014. The following timeline is showcasing that Craig Wright is still threading somewhat carefully to not make too many Bitcoin mistakes.

Already the first sentence under ‘2009’ hints to that. Because it strongly appears here (“mines some bitcoins”) that at this specific moment in time Craig had no idea yet how many bitcoins the real Satoshi had mined. Only after he apparently had learned about Sergio Demian Lerner his ‘Patoshi pattern’ research from 1 year earlier (April 2013), Craig would start mentioning more detailed numbers, unsurprisingly very close to Lerner his initial estimation of 1 million bitcoins that the real Satoshi Nakamoto might have been gathering during his mining in the 2009–2010 era.

In the following timeline that Craig Wright created for Ira Kleiman, he mentions 1.1 million bitcoins though, but that amount hardly contains any mined bitcoins, but contains in majority bitcoins from the Bitcoin whale addresses that Craig had randomly picked from the Bitcoin rich list in the run of 2013 (see “Faketoshi, The Early Years — Part 1”). So you know.

Because the timeline is pretty interesting as a whole, I dropped it in this article unedited. Under 2012 we see Craig Wright mentioning the UK trusts. And no mentioning of other trusts in Panama and/or the Tulip Trust being located in the Seychelles, which gets a somewhat random mention.

Because, you guessed it, the Tulip Trust doesn’t exist yet.

Chronology of Craig Wright (CSW) activities & transactions

2009 Craig Wright mines some bitcoins and attempts to incorporate IP into Integyrs

2010 ATO Rejects IP transaction and CSW retains IP

2011 CSW sends Bitcoin overseas. Value at that stage AUD $0.02 Founds a company in USA with David Kleiman, a business associate from forensic & security related IT areas. Kleiman & Wright co-authored books on the subject and had fairly longstanding relationship. The established was W&K Info Defense. It was set up to further statistical and risk mitigating algorithms, to develop some ideas around CBT learning methodologies (CSW was by then lecturing regularly for Charles Sturt University and others) and to mine Bitcoin. This was done on behalf of entities in Belize (related to Kleiman) and entities in Singapore and the Seychelles (related to Wright). There is an agreement between CSW and W&K whereby CSW loans his Bitcoin and expertise to the company with payback and payment to be received in Bitcoin. In all, 1.1 million Bitcoin reverted to Sq and Seychelles accounts. It is unkown how much reverted to Belize and Kleiman.

2012 CSW forms 2 UK trust companies (non trading) and owned through Seychelles. Permanent Success & Design by Human Plans from W&K develop to the point where there is imminent product in the eLearning space. Discussions progress. At the same time CSW is contemplating Bitcoin and its regulation.

[Narrator: it is actually not in 2012 but only on January 3, 2014 that Craig Wright expands his Bitcoin fraud empire to the UK. On this date, Craig buys 2 UK shelf companies from CFS International Formations Ltd:

Design By Human Ltd (incorporated October 10, 2012)
Permanent Success Ltd (incorporated October 18, 2012)

And from here, Craig sets up an, at times hilariously incompetent, trail of backdated forgeries and filings at Companies House UK, to change the true history of these previously empty companies, with appointments for, there he is again, (deceased) Dave Kleiman and Uyen Nguyen.]

2013 Structural discussions progress to a plan and an agreement between W&K and CSW. See share sale agreement. See also Strasan Agreement. This is done by early April 2013. David Kleiman dies shortly thereafter reportedly from infections related to injuries incurred in US military. He was wheelchair bound and had related circulatory issues. Per terms of the Agreement, CSW forms Hotwire Pre-emptive Intelligence Pty Ltd in Australia and continues the planned program. (June 2013) Acquires IP and software from Strasan and registers for R&D with AusIndustry. All prior to June 30. AusIndustry accepts his application and both AI and ATO do an audit. Hotwire passes AI audit but ATO audit drags on. During the early 2013 period, CSW is pursuing Exchange and banking ideas with Bitcoin. At the same time he is a lecturer and a speaker at functions on topics around IT security and SCADA.

At one of these in March 2013, he meets a fellow introduced as Mark Ferrier. They chat about mining and security and CSW says he’s is actively pursuing the Bitcoin banking possibility but is stumbling due to the need for core banking software. Nothing more said. Within days, weeks he starts receiving emails from Ferrier (MJF) who intimates he may have someone who can help with the banking stuff. There are a series of emails that follow this and a further meeting at some point and it all culminates on the 2nd of June 2013, when CSW agrees to buy a variety of things through MJF’s company as agent. These include:

• Core banking software and source code from al Baraka
• Seimens automation software
• Exchange software — micropayments
• Some gold ore
• And even MJF’s father providing some consulting. Ian Ferrier — noted accountant

There are invoices for all of this. CSW did due diligence on MJF through ASIC D&B Whois etc and both the individual and his company came up clean. The notion of Ian Ferrier lent some credibility. Missed social media however, which would probably have given him a better idea as to who he was dealing with. Payment was from one of the UK entities and a directed payment supported by a Loan agreement to CSW. He has since traced destination as somewhere in Africa. The software and source code have all been delivered. It has been determined that MJF is unable to deliver the gold ore and his father denies any knowledge of any agreement and purports to be estranged from his son. On that basis CSW took action in the Supreme court of NSW for recovery of his Bitcoin or value for the Ore Purchase and consulting fees. Judgment has been given. Emails, contracts and any correspondence has been provided both in court and to the ATO in support of the facts. CSW has offered to assist the ATO in pursuit of MJF should they choose to do so. We are prepared and have briefed counsel on a Federal court action for misleading and deceptive behavior as well as the judgment debt.

Return to early July 2013, CSW communicates with ATO and briefs them on his intention to do the MJF transaction including the offshore payment in Bitcoin. He states at that time his relative holding or control of considerable quantities of Bitcoin and a hope/intention of developing a regulated Bitcoin bank in Australia. He has actively pursued Private Rulings with ATO on many of his transactions and processes; forms a nucleus of companies for Research and Development of the eLearning opportunity and also eBanking.

Since that time, CSW has populated Hotwire with some top people to pursue both R&D projects. He has paid for all this through cashing in Bitcoin when and where possible and after a long struggle with the ATO receiving 1.45Million in R&D rebate from the 2013 tax return for Hotwire. He has spent about 450,000 BTC over that period, much of it at values less than $120.00 so there is no questioning his commitment to trying to do something positive in Australia.

He has also been under audit for most of 2014 financial year by one entity or another. And that leads us to today. What the hell is he up to? There is a lot of IP and ‘stuff’ in the mix. All up, it’s around a hundred million dollars’ worth. This IP originates in work CSW has been doing for more than 10years; it originates in things that came from W&K; it has to do with the software acquired. The values and distribution have all been given to the ATO. It amounts to a third each for Cloudcroft Hotwire and Coin exch.

Cloudcroft gets the security related IP, Coin-Exch gets the banking and exchange and Hotwire gets all of the automation and R&D based stuff. The transactions were all intended to go into the Trust to be distributed. That may or may have been the way it transacted. That is the cleanest solution.

Why not just run the purchase through the entities? Because each transaction had a mix of acquisitions that needed to parsed to different entities. MJF had banking, automation, exchange and Ore; W&K also had variety as did the other. The neatest solution was to bring them into one pot and then distribute accordingly. And that is the mess we are in.”

So far for Craig Wright’s own timeline. A beautiful piece of fiction from start to end!

August 11, 2014: ATO hearing
As we learned earlier, during this hearing a Panama trust was mentioned.

August 18, 2014: ATO Interview of Craig Wright
During this ATO interview we learn a lot more about the trust, now located on the Seychelles. Or better: we learn what Craig Wright made up on the spot about it, because this trust still doesn’t exist yet at this moment in time.

A snippet:

“O’Mahoney: Remember we discussed that, and I want to understand this, how many entities are there within the group that use this funding mechanism, this — -
Wright: All of them.
O’Mahoney: All of them? Okay. So that is seven or eight entities that use —
Wright: Yes.
O’Mahoney: Do they all use as consideration the same rights to bitcoin in the same source, from the same source; ie, the same trust?
Wright: The same group source, yes.
O’Mahoney: Yes. So that, that Seychelles trust, I think we called it that in shorthand last week, that Seychelles trust is really the funding source for seven or eight entities. They each are able to transact —
Wright: There is a loan that has been to that, yes.
O’Mahoney: All right. But each of those seven or eight entities transact using rights to bitcoin held by that trust?
Wright: The bitcoin held by that trust, yes.
O’Mahoney: Can I ask this before I dig into the specifics of how that works, can you tell us what you know about the Seychelles trust?
Wright: I know it’s a trust in the Seychelles, I know the people who were involved in setting it up, I know I was involved in part and I know why.
O’Mahoney: Okay. Can we unpack that. A trust in the Seychelles, who apart from you was involved in setting it up?
Wright: Dave Kleiman.
O’Mahoney: Who else?
Wright: Uyen.
O’Mahoney: Uyen.
Wright: Uyen Nguyen.
O’Mahoney: Okay. Uyen, Uyen Nguyen. Who else?
Wright: Tim, and I can’t remember his last name off the top of my head, and I don’t remember the — but I’ve got — 1 couldn’t tell the other people off the top of my head.
O’Mahoney: Are there many other people?
Wright: No. But you guys have been sent their names before.
O’Mahoney: And Tim, tell us about him, what does he do?
Wright: He worked for Playboy Gaming.
O’Mahoney: Playboy Gaming being?
Wright: Playboy Gaming.”

One of the first times I asked attention for the Tulip Trust fraud, 5 years ago.

Knowing that, let’s dive into the pivotal month of October 2014, and map out what Craig Wright had been setting up to create the Tulip Trust fiction. The next section is taken (almost) verbatim from “Faketoshi, The Early Years —Part 2” and is mixed with information from other places.

October 2014: The start of the Tulip Trust saga.

Ah, yes, the ‘Tulip Trust’. How fitting that ‘Satoshi’ would have created a Trust named after the very historical event that Bitcoin’s exchange market is endlessly compared to, right?

Except, of course, he didn’t. It is just another front in his Potemkin Village of fakery, fraud and forgeries.

The Seychelles company, ‘Tulip Trading Ltd’ is the company vehicle which Craig claimed he incorporated in 2011 as the trust company for the ‘Tulip Trust’ to hold the hundreds of thousands of BTC he pretends he purchased through the millions of USD he claims he held on the aforementioned Liberty Reserve platform… that Craig failed to fake credible screenshots of.

He has also claimed that another Seychelles company, ‘Wright International Investments Ltd’ is part of this ‘Tulip Trust’ structure, only this company is supposedly for holding the many hundreds of thousands of Bitcoin he likes to pretend he mined as ‘Satoshi’ from the very first block-reward right through to 2011, no, strike that, what he meant to say, officer, is he only mined as Satoshi up until August 2010… because he keeps getting exposed for claiming ‘Satoshi’ addresses which turn out to be not-Satoshi addresses.

Let’s be perfectly clear about these false claims: There has never been proof of ANY Bitcoin mining done by Craig Wright, whether it be in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 or 2013 and the same goes for his claims of buying large quantities (and the threshold is 50 here) in that period. Every lie and every forgery that Craig Wright provided over the years to support these wild claims has been thoroughly debunked as such.

Truth is, the Tulip Trust or anything like it, didn’t exist before October 2014.

Sure, the above Certificate of Incorporation shows that Tulip Trading Limited existed from 21st July 2011, so that covers Craig’s ‘evidence’ he furnished the ATO with concerning Tulip Trust-related agreements and declarations from that year, right… right?

Of course not, it’s just more sloppy historical revisionism where Craig likes to believe we’re all as dumb as he believes himself to be smart.

But before we show you how devastatingly ‘not-smart’ Craig actually is, we ask why was he compelled to conjure up this ‘Tulip Trust’ in the first place? It’s simple: Craig had 1,650,000 reasons to cobble together a supposed trust in his Australian tax fraud scheme in October 2014, as he desperately had to avoid paying $1.65 million GST to the ATO for some of the Bitcoin transactions he’d faked.

Let’s break this down a bit more (taken from an article written about 4 years ago “The Faketoshi Fifteen (Times Two)”, with additional sourcing from his very informative tweetstorm: Craig Wright — Tulip Trust Revisited).

As we know now: there was not any physical trust thing in Craig Wright’s Faketoshi lies & forgeries before October 2014; in 2013 and most of 2014 Craig initially claimed to ATO to have full control over his (non-existing) Bitcoin stash, and he only hinted a few times to “offshore trusts”. And although requested by ATO several times, Craig never signed one of the Bitcoin addresses he claimed to control.

Things changed dramatically halfway 2014 when Craig Wright was notified by the ATO that he had to pay $1,650,000 in GST.

In order to *fix* this, Craig asked a Seychelles Corporate Services firm called Abacus (Seychelles) Limited on October 17, 2014 for a list of pre-incorporated ‘shelf’ companies available to buy. He choose, ordered and paid for one company called ‘Tulip Trading Ltd’, which they had formed in July 2011.

Craig Wright also bought a domain called TulipTrading.net in October 2014. And at the same time he’d created several backdated forgeries, like emails, deeds and contracts, to fake a non-existing line of events, as if this Tulip Trust thing was always part of his Bitcoin dealings before October 2014. It wasn’t, of course.

October 22, 2014: Craig Wright creates a backdated forgery that supposedly executes a ‘Deed of Trust’, creating the Tulip Trust, a purported trust that would hold over 1 million bitcoins allegedly mined by Wright and his late business partner, Dave Kleiman.

Snippet of one of many Tulip Trust related forgeries that Craig Wright created in October 2014

How that June 2011 contract with Dave Kleiman was found to be a forgery Source: WizSec

And with another backdated forgery, Craig Wright created the Tulip Trust.

It’s nothing short of hilarious to witness Craig Wright’s infamous sloppiness when it comes to most of his forgeries: he actually sent a June 2011 AND an October 2014 version of the same forgery to the ATO.

Pick one, officer!

Then shortly after that the Tulip Trust is used, or abused is probably better to mention here, by Craig Wright to defraud his audience during the (failed) 2016 signing sessions.

A few examples.

April 17, 2016 Trustee Letter email

Robert MacGregor sends email to Craig Wright, Stefan Matthews and Ramona Watts with the subject “Trustee Letter”.

April 18, 2016 Reply to the Trustee Letter email

In his reply to Robert MacGregor, Stefan Matthews and Ramona Watts the next day we see Craig Wright explaining how his Tulip Trust is set up, who the trustees are at this point in time, and interestingly… he mentions “I do not want to move BTC as yet. I still see ythis [sic] as trouble in many ways. A signed message is a signed message.”.

April 28, 2016 The ‘Limited Consent and Indemnity’ contract

Dated on the same day, we also find a 4-page Tulip Trust “LIMITED CONSENT AND INDEMNITY” contract between Craig Wright and Denis Mayaka (who appears to be the only person to have signed) of Equator Consultants AG, Seychelles.

We notice a list of Bitcoin public addresses in the contract, starting with 12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX. This is the coinbase address of Bitcoin block 1, it contains 50 BTC coinbase reward, sometimes called mining subsidy, received on January 9, 2009 and the address collected some dust transactions totalling 1.34 BTC over the years at the moment of writing. As this contract was made in April 2016, these dust transactions amounted to only 0.02 BTC, according the contract (I checked that, appears correct).

The other Bitcoin public addresses in the list are the coinbase addresses from the Bitcoin blocks 2 to 10 who were are also mined on January 9, 2009, and the same story applies when it comes to coinbase rewards and dust transactions. One address — the one from block 9 — stands out as it contains less than 50 BTC: 12cbQLTFMXRnSzktFkuoG3eHoMeFtpTu3S. What happened here?

In January 2014, Washington Post described what happened with this address in their article “Hal Finney received the first Bitcoin transaction. Here’s how he describes it.”

“When Satoshi announced the first release of the software, I took it immediately. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to execute Bitcoin. I mined block 70 and something, and received the first bitcoin transaction, when Satoshi sent me ten coins as proof. I had an email conversation with Satoshi for the next few days, mostly me reporting bugs and him fixing them.”

Indeed, the reason that the block 9 coinbase address does not contain 50 BTC anymore are a few test (“proof”) transactions of 10 bitcoin each that Satoshi Nakamoto performed from the coinbase address of block 9 on January 12, 2009. One of these test transactions was sent to Hal Finney.

To add, around May 4, 2016 — a week after the “LIMITED CONSENT AND INDEMNITY” contract was set up and ‘signed’ — the coinbase address of block 9 received a few noteworthy transactions.

Find out in “The Craig Wright May 2016 Signing Sessions Debacle, In Full Context” that Rory Cellan-Jones, Gavin Andresen and Jon Matonis will each send a then little, now substantial in USD, amount of Bitcoin to the coinbase address of block 9.

The “LIMITED CONSENT AND INDEMNITY” contract contains a few other remarkable details. Firstly, it is ‘signed’ by Tulip Trust trustee Denis Mayaka. But we know Denis Mayaka also as the individual who sold Tulip Trading Ltd to Craig Wright in October 2014 (the start of the Tulip Trust saga as we just learned), don’t we? And on top of that, Denis “I am lawyer” Mayaka was also the ‘bonded courier’ who delivered the Tulip Trust list — the list that got signed 145 times “Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud” in May 2020, more about that later in this article — to Craig’s wife Ramona Ang who was at that moment the primary trustee of the Tulip Trust in January 2020!

Quite the career for Mr Mayaka, isn’t it? Let’s recap that one more time.

From empty shelf company dealer in 2014, the only genuine interaction between Denis Mayaka and Craig Wright that we know of, to;
Trustee of the non-existing Tulip Trust in 2016, being responsible for holding non-existing Bitcoin assets within Shamir Secret Sharing Key Slices — which strongly appears as another Craig Wright cosplay, to;
Bonded courier in 2020, delivering a totally fraudulent Tulip Trust list that was undoubtedly prepared by Craig Wright’s nChain colleague Steve Shadders and reworked by Craig, as this Tulip Trust list contained the so-called Shadders Bug(*) — making this another Craig Wright cosplay of the Denis Mayaka persona!

Another remarkable detail is found in the content of the contract. Let’s try to digest these two snippets:

What we read here is that the trustee of this April 2016 contract, Denis Mayaka(*), is apparently holding Key Slices on behalf of the Tulip Trust. Elsewhere in the contract we can read that it are 5 Key Slices that Denis Mayaka/Tulip Trust holds, and from Craig’s explanation in his email of April 18, 2016 we learned that 8 of these slices (out of 15 slices total) are needed to unlock the private keys of the coinbase addresses to block 1 to block 10.

(*) Denis Mayaka is also mentioned as trustee in a (forged by Craig Wright in 2014, backdated to:) October 24, 2012 deed. This was debunked as a forgery by the fact alone that Denis Mayaka never worked for Equator Consultants AG according his LinkedIn profile.

Okay.

Now let’s go back to who where the other Key Slice holders, as Craig Wright explained in this same email. Note that Savannah Ltd, and only Savannah Ltd, holds 5 Keys Slices. Just to play along with Craig’s story, it is probably very fair to assume that these are the Tulip Trust Key Slices, right?

No.

Because in the remaining part of that email, Craig claims that “Savanah is now out of the equation. […] I have received slices 10 & 13.”

So at second glance, it appears that the 5 Tulip Trust Key Slices, with no known numbers, at least they are not mentioned in the contract, have been created from thin air. Which is no surprise, as the April 28, 2016 contract has the strong appearance again of a signature sloppy Craig Wright made forgery, in which he is cosplaying Denis Mayaka. The only way for Craig Wright to save his face from this awkward situation is his missing signature.

But let’s not stop here. Note that Craig claims that he “received slices 10 & 13” on top of the slices that he already directly or indirectly controlled: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 11. My pocket calculator now tells me that Craig controls a total of 9 different Key Slices, while only 8 — any of the 8, said Craig — are needed to unlock the private keys. So we can fairly conclude from Craig’s own explanation that, around April 2016 at least, he had access to the private keys of his self-proclaimed mined Bitcoin stash. Fair?

Also note that Craig claims that “Dave [Kleiman]’s [2] Key slices are lost.”. Of course, Dave Kleiman never had these Key Slices in real life in the first place, but again, let’s play along with this Faketoshi nonsense for a bit more. So we can fairly conclude again that Craig Wright was aware in April 2016 that Dave Kleiman did not have any Key Slices, meanwhile Craig had control over enough Key Slices (9 to be precise) to have access to the private keys of ‘his’ mined Bitcoin, and if we take the 5 Tulip Trust Key Slices into consideration too, Craig has even ‘close’ access to up to 9 + 5 = 14 Key Slices maximum! Fair?

What we also should take into consideration is that Craig Wright claims in the COPA v Wright lawsuit that it was actually himself who, early May 2016, “destroyed the hard drive which contains the private keys”!

Then tell me, dear reader, what the actual heck is the purpose of Craig’s wife Ramona Ang, on behalf of the Tulip Trust, suing Ira Kleiman in April 2021 for “systematicaly destroying documents and electronic data that would have contained the private keys […] as a result of that destruction, the Tulip Trust has suffered substantial damages in the form of bitcoins it can no longer access”?

I mean, this is about 2 Key Slices that were not crucial in the slightest in April 2016? Does this make sense to anyone?

May 5, 2016: Bitcoin Magazine article “Satoshi Saga Continues: Tulip Trust Trustee Expected to Appear by September 19, Says Joseph VaughnPerling”

A noteworthy article by Aaron van Wirdum.

A snippet from the article.

“Joseph VaughnPerling: You had some questions?

Aaron van Wirdum: The main question I have right now is: If Wright is Satoshi … why would he publish fake proof? Any idea?

JVP: I have some very good ideas. If I were in Dr. Wright’s position, I would do exactly as he has done.

I also have a message for Dr. Wright from the trustee of the Tulip trust that is controlling the coins that he wants to move. Not yet announced:

“The Tulip Trading Trust trustee, appointed by Dave Kleiman as of Oct 12nd 2012. It has been rumored that Craig Wright will need to access Tulip Trading Trust assets. Trustee acts in the interest of the beneficiary alone and must defend against undue influence by others. In order to authorize movements of trust assets the beneficiary must come forward and make a direct request of the trustee our way — NOT via 3rd party nor any intermediaries. Any coin movement affecting the trust asset without prior authorization will be considered a trust violation and invalid irrespective of any claim of constructive bailment. The Trust alone has control over its assets. Tampering or manipulating with trust assets by anyone (including the beneficiary) might have material legal and tax implications. Beneficiaries are invited to a conference call 12:00 UTC Friday to discuss interests. Principals only.”

AVW: Can you help me out here? Who’s who in this message? Is Wright a beneficiary?

JVP: It is not my place to speculate on the transactions and assets of others.

AVW: So you don’t know?

JVP: What I know and when I know it is not something I am interested in sharing. At least as regards the matter of the finances of others. It would show me to be a nosy one. And that much is already apparent to anyone looking at me. My nose is hard to miss.

AVW: As I interpret that message, Dave Kleiman locked up Satoshi’s holdings with Tulip Trust. In order to move Satoshi’s coins, like Wright said he would, he needs access. Which he may or may not get …

JVP: Close, but it shows that you are not entirely familiar with how a trust works.

AVW: That is correct.

JVP: Did you have other questions?

AVW: Why do you have this message?

JVP: He will know why.

AVW: Why are you sharing it with me?

JVP: It will also be shared with some selected cryptographers.

AVW: But I can publish it?

JVP: Kind of you to ask. Yes.

AVW: So you’re really sharing it with the world then. Which brings us back to “why”…

JVP: Iwould like for Craig Wright to have his privacy. He has already done more for us than we can repay, but it is not just this. I would like him to be able to do what he wants to do, without interference. We would all be better off when that occurs.

AVW: How does sharing that message help?

JVP: He is following a wrong path, because he must. He is doing it the least-wrong way possible. He is on Meifumando. It is as it has to be.”

Let’s go back to the diary timeline. We now make a jump to 2019, as in the years between 2016 and 2019 nothing much interesting happened Tulip Trust wise.

May 26, 2019: Calvin Ayre and the million Tulip trust coins

Calvin Ayre rallying the BSV troops with what can be considered market manipulation with false and fraudulent information. Calvin has no doubt seen or heard about the Tulip Trust 1 forgery with the date January 1, 2020 being mentioned (see June 24, 2011).

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.”

Mockup made by the undersigned, using Sarah’s images

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.”

Mockup of *WuCoin* images made by the undersigned

Back in the days, ATO, of course, noticed all these fraudulent events too, and called it a “scheme”. The following screenshot is from one of the ATO reports.

“acquisition would be a taxable supply, [so] you altered the scheme to insert the Seychelles trust to which you transferred the bitcoin”

Beautiful bookkeeping trick, isn’t it? Only, ATO didn’t buy it.

Because it resulted in ATO ending up stating in 2016: “We do not accept that the Seychelles Trust existed as a matter of law or fact”.

And if that wasn’t enough, Court Florida in the Kleiman v Wright case came to the same conclusion three years later in 2019:

“The totality of the evidence in the record does not substantiate that the Tulip Trust exists.”

And to top it off, Justice Mellor, having looked at the same evidence that was already destroyed by ATO and court Florida, couldn’t help reaching the same conclusions as his predecessors.

Justice Mellor in his May 20, 2024 judgment in COPA v Wright was also on the Tulip Trust fiction.

But then, on January 6, 2020, the unstoppable Dr. Wright produced the deed for a third trust (“Tulip Trust III”) in discovery.

This Tulip Trust 3 document (a forgery again, of course) is backdated to July 7, 2017, a date that can be found on the front page of the document.

According Craig Wright, this document is supposed to replace all previous Tulip Trust documents, we learned about in the Kleiman v Wright case.

Now does that tulip art on the front page of this Tulip Trust 3 document appear familiar to any of my readers? It should be: Craig Wright appears to have plagiarized this tulip art from a painting of the famous Dutch glass watercolor painter and engraver Pieter Holsteyn II (Haarlem, 1614–1673), without crediting the artist.

Twitter user “mytechmix” explains:

“He took it from this painting, grayscaled it and used it on the cover.”

And indeed.

Lap Rock. — a painting by Pieter Holsteyn II

March 9, 2020: Judge Reinhart’s Order on Discovery

On a more serious note, let’s start with the observation that Judge Reinhart was not impressed with seeing the Tulip Trust 3 document pop up in his court case.

“Particularly given my prior finding that Dr. Wright has produced forged documents in this litigation, I decline to rely on this kind of document, which could easily have been generated by anyone with word processing software and a pen […] I give no weight to sworn statements of Dr. Wright that advance his interests but that have not been challenged by cross-examination and for which I cannot make a credibility determination. I have previously found that Dr. Wright gave perjured testimony in my presence.”

And unsurprisingly, Ira Kleiman’s counsel figured out (check link, page 15/16) that the Tulip Trust 3 document is indeed — again, what’s new — a recent day Faketoshi made forgery.

“Plaintiffs contend that the Tulip Trust III is a recent forgery because although the document appears to show that it was executed on July 7, 2017, it lists “JBruk Ltd (UK) (10859457)” [on page 15] as one of its assets, see ECF No. [507–14] at 17. That entity, however, was not incorporated until July 11, 2017, see ECF No. [507–15]. Accordingly, in their view, the Tulip Trust III could not have been executed on July 7, 2017 because “neither JBruk nor the corporate number assigned to it would have existed yet.”

And Craig? Craig Wright just scored a fraud-hat-trick here: Tulip Trust I (2011 era, supposedly), Tulip Trust II (2012 era, supposedly) and Tulip Trust 3 (2017 era, supposedly) have now all been found fraudulent setups, only supported by backdated forgeries. Well done, Craig.

All in all, since this Tulip Trust 3 document was produced by Craig Wright early 2020 in the Kleiman v Wright case, we can safely date this forgery to late 2019, knowing Craig’s Modus Operandi of creating forgeries on the fly when he needs them.

Now why is this Tulip Trust 3 document forgery relevant to Donald Lynam, a person that Craig Wright mentioned in recent years as one of his helpers?

Because it is extremely likely that Lynam his name is in this document (but redacted), and my educated guess is that Lynam is in the Beneficiaries section.

Because all other people and their roles in the latest made-up installment of the infamous (but otherwise non-existing, empty thus fictional) Tulip Trust are known:

And then… we arrive in May 2020.

May 25, 2020: the Tulip Trust List gets 145 cryptographical signatures

Another nail in the coffin of Tulip Trust came after January 2020, when Craig Wright was ordered to come up with the Tulip Trust Bitcoin addresses list in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. This list of 16,404 public Bitcoin addresses (each containing 50 BTC block subsidy) dating January 2009 till August 2010 was ultimately filed by Wright in January 2020.

Unsurprisingly, several expert witnesses (hired by plaintiff Ira Kleiman) like Andreas Antonopoulos (April 10, 2020 Amended Expert Report) and Stefan Boedeker (April 10, 2020 Expert Declaration Report, April 22, 2020 Deposition and April 23, 2020 Supplemental Report) checked the content of this list, and they discovered several inconsistencies leading to the unavoidable conclusion that Craig Wright’s Tulip Trust list (also known as ‘CSW Filed List’ in the court room) was again a forgery, this time created during the run of the lawsuit. Under normal circumstances this is considered ‘fraud upon the court’, potentially a criminal offense, but at all times considered to be one of the most serious violations that can occur within a court of law.

Andreas Antonopoulos, for example, found:

“The presence of 1749 entries that correspond to blocks with a Nonce
least-significant-byte value greater than 127 in CSW Filed, exactly replicating the result of the Shadders Bug, and absent any other deviation from the expected Nonce value (0–58), strongly suggests that the CSW Filed List was derived from a subset of the Shadders’ List or produced by the same software containing the Shadders Bug.”

And if this wasn’t enough already, in May 2020 145 addresses on the Tulip Trust list were signed by their true owners:

“Craig Steven Wright is a liar and a fraud.”

Et voila, here you have it. We have now seen basically everything, from the roots of the infamous Tulip Trust in October 2014 to avoid a hefty tax bill in that year, to the utter destruction by ATO in 2015, court Florida in 2019 and Justice Mellor in the UK in 2024 of this bookkeeping fraud in the years after that.

Make no mistake though, Craig Wright is still using this Tulip Trust vehicle in his online scammery.

And so are his fans on Twitter.

The Story of The Bonded Courier

So, when Craig gets irritated in his private Slack room because he’s being called out on his nonsense, it’s time to tell the whole story. The story of the bonded courier.

It all started with a hearing in June 2019, where Craig mentioned this bonded courier a handful of times in relationship to the infamous Tulip Trust:

Source: Contempt Hearing Craig Wright in Kleiman v Wright lawsuit, June 28, 2019

But, in August 2019, Judge Reinhart was not very impressed by what he heard about this bonded courier, and concluded:

Then, finally, in January 2020, Judge Bloom ruled:

Meanwhile, the Bitcoin Twitter troll mob, but also some of the BSV fans, went totally bonkers with this new Craig Wright meme. Calvin Ayre however, was obviously not amused.

BONUS

The Dr Bitcoin Tulip Trust Podcast Episode Script

As announced in the intro to this article, I would add the script of the Tulip Trust episode of the Dr Bitcoin podcast to this article. We’ve done several notable episodes, but this was certainly one of them!

Hello and welcome to another bonus edition of Dr Bitcoin — The Man Who Wasn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. This month we’re discussing the world famous, in Craig Wright circles, Tulip Trust, that shapeshifting entity that has more tentacles than the Kraken. And donning his diving gear alongside me is a man who knows a thing or two about Tulips, it’s Arthur van Pelt. Arthur, is that classed as culturally insensitive these days?

Haha, good evening Mark, no I don’t think so. I’m from The Netherlands, born and raised, and we know a few things about Tulips, Mark! Although the flower itself originates from the Ottoman Empire (basically what we call Turkey now), in the 15th century, no wait 16th century that was, the tulip was imported in The Netherlands and we became famous for cultivating the tulip and selling it all over the world. The Netherlands maintains 44% of the worldwide trade in floricultural products. 77% of all flower bulbs come out of The Netherlands, most of which are tulips. Mark, we export more than 2 billion tulips worldwide each year! And of course we are famous for the Tulip bubble: a major acceleration of tulip bulb prices that started in 1634 and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. Okay, enough. Let’s go.

The Tulip Trust first came to the public’s attention when Wired and Gizmodo mentioned it as part of their ‘doxxing’ pieces in December 2015, but we’ll start all the way back in 2011 which is when Craig Wright says the Tulip Trust was founded. Arthur, the roots of this are supposedly in Craig Wright’s battle with the ATO over his 2008/09 tax return. What’s the story here?

Yeah, this is only a claim of Craig Wright of course, not substantiated with any evidence. But Craig claimed he was mining Bitcoin as Satoshi in 2009 and 2010 into a trust in Panama, his investments into the Bitcoin protocol and physical network ran into the likes of 2 million Australian dollars and he had put that in his tax filings of the Australian fiscal year 2008/2009. But the Australian Taxation Office, we call them ATO mostly, said in multiple reports that none of his tax returns for that period even mentioned bitcoin, it was all about the treatment of intellectual property in his businesses. But anyway, he started telling people that the ATO had tried to steal his mined bitcoin and bankrupt him from this point onward, even though this never happened.

So in 2011, Craig Wright, apparently worried that the ATO is going to try and tax more of his bitcoin dealings from his mining days, is trying to think of how he can protect what he has left. Now the first known mention of bitcoin being moved overseas didn’t come in 2011 when the move supposedly happened, or in 2012 or 2013, but in fact in a February 2014 interview with the ATO, where Wright’s tax lawyer, Andrew Sommer, explained that Wright had supposedly moved a large stash of bitcoin offshore with loans allowed for use with the Bitcoin companies that he had founded around this time. Arthur, why were Wright’s legal and financial representatives talking to the ATO in February 2014?

That was a result of ATO’s Refund Integrity department halting several tax paybacks by the end of 2013 (remember, Craig’s bitcoin related tax fraud started in the summer of 2013), and they were looking for more information what was going on within the companies that Craig Wright was running.

On February 18th 2014, Sommer told the the ATO that Wright began mining bitcoin personally in 2009 into unnamed trusts in the Seychelles and Singapore, a story that changed a month later when Wright told the ATO that it had in fact been two of his companies, Information Defence and Integyrs, that had done the mining and that the coins had gone to a trust in Panama, the name of which he suddenly couldn’t remember. Incidentally, the ‘Information Defence’ referred to here isn’t the ‘W&K Info Defence’ from the Kleiman vs Wright trial, although Wright’s accountant, John Chesher, told the ATO that this company was created in 2011 for the purpose of mining Bitcoin, which we know it wasn’t.

It’s worth noting something else Chesher told the ATO that Wright did not correct him on: there was a point in time when Wright, through his mining, owned around 10 percent of all the bitcoin in existence, and that Dave Kleiman would “have had a similar amount”. This means that Wright and Kleiman apparently owned around a fifth of all the bitcoin in circulation by 2011, but to Wright’s pile we can add another several hundred thousand that he says were bought for him by Seychelles company High Secured with his Liberty Reserve holdings between 2011 and 2013. Arthur, Craig Wright says he had in excess of 30 million dollars in liberty reserve which was used to buy most of this; where did he say he got this money and how likely is it that he had it?

Craig claimed he had worked for parties in the gambling industry, and had earned a lot of money by providing his consultancy services. It is not very likely this happened to the extent that Craig Wright claimed, because at some point Craig Wright indeed claimed he was able to buy Bitcoin for a total of $30 million in 2011, and since we now know he never bought these bitcoins, it is very likely he didn’t have the 30 million either…

As far as evidence goes, he tried to use a screenshot of a Liberty Reserve withdrawal but the ATO figured out that it looked totally different to the actual liberty reserve account pages at that time, and this was dismissed as a forgery. Craig has never provided any more evidence for his liberty reserve account, and it’s pretty clear why.

One thing we do know is that there was no mention of any Liberty Reserve funds in Wright’s divorce proceedings with Lynn Wright in early 2011, with Wright testifying under oath during the kleiman trial that he instructed High Secured to swap $30 million in liberty reserve dollars for bitcoin right after the divorce was finalised. This meant he was either lying to the court about this happening or he had hidden it from Lynn Wright in the divorce proceedings . Wright claimed that all but 100,000 of the bitcoin bought by highsecured was spent on his companies (each movement of which was followed by a tax rebate claim, of course), with the remainder stolen by High Secured’s representative, Ritzela de Gracia, when the company was raided by police in 2015. The only evidence of a connection between Wright, High Secured and Ritzela de Gracia was found by both the ATO and Dr Edman during the kleiman trial to have been faked by Craig Wright. All up, Craig Wright says that in mid-2011 he temporarily owned almost a third of all the bitcoin that existed at the time.

Arthur, let’s not forget that this comes just weeks after Satoshi Nakamoto’s final email to Bitcoin developers before he quit forever, and Wright says he was booted out of Bitcoin because of a cabal that wanted to use Bitcoin for nefarious purposes. Is it really feasible that someone who hates Bitcoin so much, and who’s also worried about his connection to it from a legal standpoint, is happy to have control over a third of all the bitcoin out there?

Nah. Nope. Like always, these are Craig Wright claims that either have to be taken with a lots of grains of salt, or can just be put in the fairy tale corner.

When Wright started throwing around suggestions of a Seychelles trust hoarding his coins in early 2014, the ATO, obviously, wanted to know more, especially as Wright was claiming tax rebates on their movement between his companies. Wright provided this in March of that year, laying out the following details:

Entities related to the taxpayer contend that Mr Kleiman then arranged for these Bitcoin to be held by the ‘Tulip Trust’.

The Trust was settled in 2010 and has 17 ‘members’, including a Seychelles company related to Dr Wright.

Dr Wright knows the identities of only five of the members.

Under the terms of the trust Dr Wright was to have control and access to the trust deed after 2015.

Dr Wright was unable to identify the beneficiaries of the trust.

To back up the trust’s existence, Wright offered the ATO a series of documents, two of which ended up with Wired and Gizmodo in 2015. The first of these was the contract between Wright and Kleiman laying out the terms of the asset transfer to the Tulip Trust and their return. The unsigned document was dated 9th June 2011 and saw Craig Wright sign over 1.1 million bitcoin to Kleiman’s care, as well as taking “full control of all software and the keys used to manage bitcoin”. Kleiman then became the “trustee for the transfer of the satoshi I have received from Craig Wright”. As we know, ‘satoshi’ in this context means fractions of bitcoin, but it’s not exactly clear why the word has been used in place of ‘bitcoin’ seeing as only whole bitcoins were transferred.

Arthur, there are so many things wrong with this document — what are some of your favourites?

Well, my 3 favourites are, in no specific order:

“I acknowledge that: I, Dave Kleiman, have received 1,100,111 Bitcoin from Craig Wright (of Bagnoo, NSW Australia). At the time of transfer this is valued at around $100,000 USD.”
=> This gives Bitcoin a price of $0.09 while in June 2011 Bitcoin was priced between $9.21 and $32!
“All Bitcoin will be returned to Dr Wright on January 01, 2020.”
=> The bonded courier comes to mind!
“The amount not included to be sent to Ramona Watts will be used to show the “lies and fraud perpetrated by Adam Westwood of the Australian Tax Office against Dr Wright””
=> It’s still a complete mystery what this refers to exactly.

We should also mention at this point a list of trustees that Craig supplied for Tulip Trust I, which actually appeared in a 2012 document:

It’s a beautiful list, isn’t it?

When the contract was made public by Wired and Gizmodo in December 2015, it didn’t take long for the public to smell a rat. The odd clauses, spelling errors, an aborted sentence on the subject of tulips, the entirely unprofessional nature and the fact it was unsigned led to many calling it out as a forgery.

Others picked up on the fact that the contents of the trust (theoretically what Satoshi Nakamoto mined between 2009 and 2010) should, according to the contract, have been moved from Wright to Kleiman in June 2011 as stipulated in the contract and then sent back to Wright in October 2015, 15 months after Dave Kleiman had passed away. There was, however, no sign of this taking place on the blockchain.

When Wright had handed over his Tulip Trust evidence to the ATO, it wasn’t just the document itself that had concerned them. The email to which the contract was attached was purportedly sent from Dave Kleiman to Craig Wright on 24 June 2011 in which Kleiman said, ‘I think you are mad and this is risky, but I believe in what we are trying to do.’ The ATO, however, found some issues with this email, noting that Wright “provided two versions of the email from Mr Kleiman to which the Tulip Trust document was purportedly attached. The emails are identical except one is dated 24 June 2011 and the other 17 October 2014. Mr Kleiman died in April 2013.”

Arthur, here we have an email from Wright dated 17th October 2014 that has been backdated to June 2011 to fit in with his lie to the ATO. What’s significant about that October 2014 date? (tulip trading ltd story)

Oh Mark, don’t get me going! October 2014 was a very productive month for Craig Wright because this is the month where Craig tried to give some more real life body to his Tulip Trust story. All with the intention to defraud the ATO of course. He bought an empty Seychelles company called Tulip Trading Ltd, a company that was actually raised in 2011 already, but put on the shelves for a future buyer who needed an empty company for whatever reason, and from there he created several backdated forgeries to make it look like the trust had been provided with Craig’s mined bitcoin and other things.

Wright discussed the June 2011 document during the Kleiman case in 2021, where a third identical email was also produced from Wright’s systems, saying that when he wrote it he had drunk four bottles of wine. This, incidentally, is the equivalent of drinking a litre of vodka, and yet Wright was able to knock up the contract in at least a readable form and send it over to Dave Kleiman, as opposed to pissing himself, vomiting into a bush and waking up in hospital. During the hodlonaut trial in 2022, Wright downgraded this to a mere three bottles of wine, which is hardly any more feasible. He also changed the narrative around the 2011 tulip trust document, which we will come to later.

In 2014, Wright supplied the ATO with two more documents to try and prove the existence of the Tulip Trust, with his new company, Tulip Trading Ltd, heavily involved. Altogether, the three documents painted a picture of the Tulip Trust being responsible for the assets within two Seychelles-based companies: Wright International Investments Ltd, which supposedly held Wright’s ‘mined’ bitcoin, the number of which fluctuated between 1.1 million and 821,000, as well as the copyright and intellectual property relating to the creation of bitcoin; and Tulip Trading Ltd, which supposedly held the hundreds of thousands of bitcoin that High Secured was purchasing for him using his spurious Liberty Reserve funds. We also know that at no point did Wright ever advise the ATO that the documents on which he was relying might have been tampered with by any third party, something to which he would pivot massively in the years to come to excuse all the forgeries found on his systems. So sure was Wright about the authenticity of these documents, in fact, that in 2015 he even hired his own forensic analysts to try and prove the authenticity of the very documents he would later disown as forgeries during in the Kleiman vs Wright trial, which is where his hit album ‘I was hacked’ was first laid down.

This brief explanation of the formation of the tulip trust hides a multitude of easily provable lies and contradictions, so many that we simply haven’t got time to go into them all here, but what we can say is that it is a totally different animal to the trust that Wright would later tell the jury in the Kleiman trial that he set up.

Arthur, what did the ATO make of this revised edition of the Tulip Trust?

Well, in the end the ATO didn’t buy it at all. First they picked apart that Craig had set up a scheme, as they called it, to purposely hide the Bitcoin that he claimed to own, and with which he claimed to have done payments, and had set up loans between his companies and things. ATO said at some point in 2014 that Craig had to pay AUD 1,650,000 in GST tax. ATO analysed: “acquisition [of this Bitcoin] would be a taxable supply, [so] you altered the scheme to insert the Seychelles trust to which you transferred the bitcoin”.
Now when you go through the tax inquiry reports that they released you will also find quotes like “We do not accept that the Seychelles Trust existed as a matter of law or fact” and this one is a beauty too, Mark: “We do not accept the existence of the ‘Tulip Trust’…due to the anomalies, inconsistencies and gaps in the taxpayer’s contentions.”

So by 2015, Wright’s story of the Tulip Trust should have been dead and buried. However, as we know, along came Calvin Ayre and co in 2015, who all fell for the Tulip Trust story hook, line and sinker and bailed Wright out of his tax quagmire as part of his ‘Satoshi’ deal. This was despite the ATO finding that, even if the Tulip Trust did exist and the addresses Wright had told them the trust owned in those early years were under their control, it would have all but run dry due to Wright’s heavy usage for his companies. These included deals with third parties in which Wright re-used bitcoin that had already supposedly been used to pay someone else months before. This, of course, is where his magical endless Liberty Reserve pot comes into play.

During this time, Wright had been in email contact with Ira Kleiman, brother of Dave Kleiman, over what Wright had said Dave had mined as part of W&K Info Defence, which amounted to something in the region of 300,000 bitcoin. However, relations between the pair soured when Ira found out that Wright had tricked the supreme court of new south wales into handing him $57 million worth of non-existent IP from W&K, which Dave Kleiman half owned, leading Ira to sue Wright for half the contents of the Tulip Trust in 2018.

While this was playing out, the wired and gizmodo stories of 2015 dropped, where the tulip trust first met the eyes of the scrupulous public. The 2011 document was instantly dismissed as a fake, but the tulip trust nevertheless featured during the disastrous proof sessions of 2016 when Wright’s fraudulent block signing was exposed in his famous Satre post of May 2nd 2016. Following this debacle, he was cajoled into sending coins out of one of Satoshi’s known addresses as proof of his candidacy, an address which was of course one of those supposedly in the care of the tulip trust. This sending would, of course, have required the permission of the trustees, the names of whom Wright had told the ATO he had never been told, having explained that he wanted to be kept separate from all such information. Wright’s cheerleader-in-chief Stefan Matthews told author Andrew O’Hagan, who was there to witness the coin sending shambles first hand, that “We have verbal consent from the trustees to move coin, and we’re just waiting on the written consent.” Arthur, correct me if I’m wrong, but this would have largely involved Wright speaking to and then writing to himself, wouldn’t it, seeing as he represented almost all of the trustees in some way shape and form?

Yes, sir, that is a 100% correct assessment. That’s why I sometimes say that Craig Wright is a notorious cosplayer with a fetish for the dead. He took over the roles of many, many people in his scam career and pretended to be them while making up emails, deeds, contracts, you name it. This is one of those examples.

Wright addressed this during the Kleiman vs Wright and Hodlonaut trials, where he brought in the famous Shamir Sharing scheme story that allowed him access to the tulip trust through key slices rather than with trustee permission. We’ll come to this crock of bullshit later on. Arthur, there’s a great quote from Andrew O’Hagan in The Satoshi Affair about the tulip trust, which goes:

I asked Wright about this [the trust] and he told me it was true that his and Kleiman’s mining activity had led to a complicated trust. The trust question was persistently vague: not only how many trusts but the names of the trustees, and the dates of their formation.

That sums up a lot about the tulip trust doesn’t it?

For sure. The Tulip Trust is a Craig Wright vehicle pur sang: an entity covered in mist, deception and obfuscation. That makes it very easy for Craig Wright to change his narratives around this Trust, and believe me, I know a few: I’ve seen statements about 7 trustees and about 17 trustees. And that the files that this trust is supposedly holding are locked in a Shamir Secret Scheme with digital slices, and these slices change holdership like a normal person is changing underwear. Okay, it’s not that bad maybe. But I’ve seen several lists where different numbers were mentioned.

Something else we need to note about this 2016 time period is that there is still no mention of hacks on Wright’s systems and subsequent illicit changes to documents; Andrew O’Hagan doesn’t reference anything like it in the Satoshi Affair, and Ira Kleiman told me that Craig Wright never mentioned that his systems had been hacked through their months of correspondence in 2015, even when Ira challenged him about the ATO’s discovery of faked signatures, bitcoin holdings and much, much more.

The Kleiman trial is where wright’s tulip trust claims get infinitely more complicated. For more than a year after the lawsuit was filed, during which time Wright’s counsel applied and failed to have the case kicked, there was no mention of more than one tulip trust in existence. In April 2019, Wright was ordered by the judge to reveal all his Bitcoin holdings as of December 31, 2013, but Wright refused, saying to do so would be “unduly burdensome”, adding that everything had been sent to a “blind trust” in 2011. This was the first that Ira Kleiman’s legal team had heard of a blind trust and they wanted more information. This led to a deposition the same month, where Wright was challenged over the Tulip Trust contents for the first time since the ATO had taken a stab at understanding it in 2015. Wright said that the Tulip Trust contained “a number of slices of early Bitcoin keys” and “companies that I hold overseas, such as Wright International Investments and Tulip Trading.” Wright added that it was he who had created the 2011 Tulip Trust, not Dave Kleiman, and that it was “not the informal thing from 2011,” which we assume to be the drunkenly prepared tulip trust incorporation document. Wright said that despite creating the tulip trust he couldn’t remember who the trustees or beneficiaries were, which begs the question of who exactly he got verbal permission from in 2016 to send the coins.

Wright added that he asked Dave Kleiman him to “hold documents for a while” and did not involve him at all in the creation of the fund itself. This, of course, was not the story that the ATO had been led to believe going by the evidence Wright had previously submitted to them. Arthur, why do we see a change in role for Dave Kleiman between the time of the ATO investigations into Wright in 2014 and the Kleiman vs Wright case five years later?

Well, during the ATO era, say 2013–2015, it didn’t really matter what Craig lied about Dave Kleiman regarding this matter, because it would not have financial consequences directly. During the Kleiman v Wright case that changed dramatically. Ira Kleiman tried to prove that there was a partnership between Dave Kleiman and Craig Wright, You know, Ira Kleiman’s only source over the years, before the lawsuit in 2014–2017 and after the lawsuit 2018 till now, was Craig Wright. So Craig just had to change the narrative about Dave Kleiman’s role in Bitcoin, I mean the role that Craig gave him in 2014: a partner in designing, coding, writing whitepaper, mining etc. But if that false story would stick, Craig potentially had to pay half of his imaginary Bitcoin stash to Ira Kleiman. So Craig started to deny that Dave was a partner in Bitcoin.

Wright also said in his deposition that the trust never held any bitcoin or private keys to bitcoin addresses, and added that one Joseph Vaughn Perling knew about the trust’s existence. Who is this gentleman and where does he come into this story?

Well, funny that you bring him up, Mark, because indeed, Joseph Vaughn-Perling is an interesting personality in Bitcoin’s history. For starters, he’s found in Bitcoin’s history in 2009 already. In fact, he set up the very first Bitcoin exchange called New Liberty Standard in October 2009. Not many people know this probably, but the very first price lists of Bitcoin have been created by him. For example, on October 5, 2009 he would sell 1,309 BTC for 1 dollar. The very first trade in Bitcoin’s history was between New Liberty Standard (basically Joseph himself of course ) and Martti Malmi, where Martti sold 5,050 BTC to Joseph for $5.02 on October 12, 2009. Joseph was known on the Bitcoin Forum as NewLibertyStandard, but to be fair, I didn’t check what he posted over time after the announcement of his exchange. But I consider it quite likely that he was privately in touch with Satoshi, with some technical or functional questions about how to set up an exchange. After those early days, 2009/2010 we didn’t hear much from Joseph until he started to hint that he was involved with Craig Wright his Tulip Trust. That was in 2017 somewhere I think. I also remember him stating that he thinks that Craig is Satoshi. He was subpoenaed in the Kleiman case, but that never materialised into a deposition. Which is a pity, because I would have been interested in his story about the early days of Bitcoin, and what he is willing to lie to make Craig Wright feel good. That’s about it, Mark, that’s all I know about Joseph.

Wright also introduced the idea of the shamir sharing scheme in this April 2019 deposition, something that for years we thought represented Wright’s first attempt to obfuscate his supposed bitcoin earnings, but he actually tried it on with the ATO in 2015, telling them that this was how at least some of the addresses within the Tulip Trust were to be accessed. The ATO, however, was not buying it, noting that it had been “provided with a number of differing accounts of the number of segments the private keys were purportedly split into, the minimum number required to recreate the keys, who held them and the number held by each person.”

Wright didn’t go into any detail over the shamir sharing scheme that was protecting the tulip trust in this deposition, but the following month he was ordered to produce a sworn declaration identifying “the name and location of the blind trust, the name and contact information for the current trustee and any past trustees, and the names and contact information of any current or past beneficiaries.”

Wright provided this declaration, in which he said that the tulip trust contained “the Bitcoin that I mined” along with “Bitcoin that I acquired and other assets.” Dave Kleiman was initially the trustee before that responsibility had been handed to a raft of people and companies stated on an October 2012 ‘deed of trust’, the vast majority of which turned out, as we have said, to be Craig Wright himself in various guises. Wright added that his point of contact for tulip trust 1 was Denis Mayaka, who worked for Savannah, one of the trustees, and a man who will play a very important role very soon.

Wright then, to everyone’s surprise, revealed that the tulip trust had in fact died in 2014 to be replaced with tulip trust 2. Arthur, tell us about this shift to a new and improved tulip trust.

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/222/kleiman-v-wright/

Tulip Trust 2 took over from tulip trust 1, so craig wright says, and we learn from his sworn declaration, made under oath remember, that he indeed founded it in 2014

These secondary beneficiaries are his wife’s children I think. After he and Ramona Watts got married, he became their stepfather. And I vaguely remember that he somewhere said in an interview that his children are also beneficiaries of his trust scheme. Poor kids, will never get anything… Anyway, as you can see, it looks completely different now!

And what was in tulip trust 2 — did he magic up some new assets or IP to put in there?

As far as I know, no Mark. Same assets, but different structure in trustees and beneficiaries.

Wright also expanded on the shamir sharing scheme in his declaration:

Access to the encrypted file that contains the public addresses and their associated private keys to the Bitcoin that I mined, requires myself and a combination of trustees referenced in Tulip Trust 1 to unlock based on a Shamir scheme.

This reference to an encrypted file is the first time that Wright publicly mentioned its supposed existence, having previously spoken of bitcoin and then companies holding rights to bitcoin as what was transferred over. Wright backed up the birth of tulip trust 2 with a “ trust formation document and declaration of authenticity supplied by a trustee of the Tulip Trust II.” However, when asked at a hearing just a month later whether he remembered producing these documents, Wright told the court “I don’t recall producing them, but I know there are ones called that in this.” Here, again, we have Wright’s incredible memory once again drawing a blank when it comes to evidence he has produced that is about to be debunked. The document in question is a so-called ‘Deed of Trust’, signed on October 24th, 2012. The deed, supposedly between Wright International Investment and Tulip Trading Ltd, was formed as a ‘Declairation of Trust’, just one of a number of telltale Wright typos, and was supposed to formalise the transfer of “Bitcoin and associated ledger assets” that Dave Kleiman had sent over in June 2011, a move that Wright called the ‘legal solution’ to the ‘technical solution’ of the 2011 move.

Among the assets to be moved were ‘All Assets held in Liberty Reserve (Costa Rica) under the company Wright International Investments Ltd’ and ‘All Assets held in Liberty Reserve (Costa Rica) by Craig Steven Wright for and under the company Tulip Trading Ltd’. These items were listed separately to the “1,100,111 Bitcoin held under that former arrangement and the attached conditions”, essentially moving all the fictional bitcoin, IP, and liberty reserve accounts that Wright owned into Tulip Trust II. Access to the trust was divided up into ‘slices’ with one slice going to each trustee and three going to Wright, although no explanation of what this actually meant was offered in the document.

Wright produced a second document, a discretionary deed of trust, dated October 24th 2012, which says that Wright International Investments wants to establish a fund through Tulip Trading Ltd where 821,050 bitcoins “mined from the period between January 2009 and August 2010’ can be sent.” This document sees Tulip Trading Ltd being represented by none other than Denis Mayaka, who is now point of contact for the company that prepared tulip trust II, trustee of tulip trust II and representative of the tulip trading ltd. Arthur, there’s a very simple way to know that this is a forgery isn’t there? (‘XBT’ for Bitcoin not available until August 2013).

Yes. There are several indications that point us to this deed being a backdated forgery, but the most hilarious one, to me anyway, is that Craig Wright is using the ticker XBT somewhere in the document, and remember this is a 2012 document, or that is what it pretends to be, but XBT was not in use as ticker before Bloomberg started using it on their terminals in August 2013! So here (https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/09/bitcoin-ticker-available-on-bloomberg-terminal/)

Wright’s May 2019 declaration over the tulip trust merely threw up more questions than it answered, and Ira Kleiman’s counsel again asked the judge to force Wright to reveal Wright’s Bitcoin holdings as of December 31st, 2013, with Wright once more saying that because he didn’t have access to the encrypted file he couldn’t get a list of the addresses in the trust and therefore couldn’t work out his Bitcoin holdings. Wright’s deposition resumed in June 2019 where he clarified exac tly what had gone into the Tulip trust in 2011:

What I actually did was, I transferred the algorithms and software that I had used, the non-public version of Bitcoin that I was working on, into an encrypted file. That encrypted file was then — basically the key was split so that other people could have it.

With this clarification, it would have been logical perhaps to assume that the 1.1 million bitcoin sent to Dave Kleiman in 2011 was the bitcoin mined using this software, which we know to be roughly the amount mined by Satoshi Nakamoto; this would mean that the mined bitcoin and the software used to mine it were all packaged up together. Of course, this being Craig Wright, logic doesn’t come into it: Wright said that the number of mined bitcoin wasn’t 1.1 million but swore that it was in fact the 821,050 referenced in the 2012 deed of trust. At this point it’s worth reminding ourselves that Wright’s accountant, John Chesher, told the ATO in February 2014:

Craig Wright had mined a lot of Bitcoins. Craig then took the Bitcoins and put them into a Seychelles Trust. A bit of it was also put into Singapore. This was run out of an entity from the UK. Craig had gotten approximately 1.1 million Bitcoins.

Wright, it seemed, had lost 300,000 in the intervening years. Clumsy. So where were these 8210,050 mined coins now? They were, Wright said in his deposition, not included in tulip trust 1 along with the software he used to mine the coins but were in fact in a “cryptographic time lock” inside Tulip Trust II.” Arthur, what’s this cryptographic time lock he’s just dropped on us?

That probably refers to something that was in that June 2011 trust contract that Dave Kleiman set up, oh wait, what Craig Wright wrote after consuming 3 bottles of wine because he had received a bankruptcy notice or something. In that contract it was stated that Craig Wright would get back his bitcoins on January 1, 2020. And the bonded courier would deliver it he said in 2019 in court Miami, which was denied later, blablabla. But yeah, there was supposedly a time lock, not only in the contract but also cryptographically. I consider it nonsense, as usual, because as we all know, the trust doesn’t exist, there is no file, and there is no bitcoin. But Craig’s fairy tales are entertaining, that’s for sure!

So if the 1.1 million bitcoin weren’t the mined coins, then what were they? They were, Wright said, the sum total of the coins bought by High Secured, all of which ended up in that encrypted file inside tulip trust 1 alongside bitcoin mining software and IP. However, Wright then said, confusingly, that the 1.1 million bitcoin never actually existed: he had given High Secured rights to his Liberty Reserve account and they had bought no more than 700,000 bitcoin with the $30 million he had in there. This of course begs the question of why the document mentioned 1.1 million bitcoin at all, and why Wright had gone to great lengths to prove its existence to the ATO. Arthur, why did Craig Wright feel the need to change his story for the Kleiman trial?

Pff, good question Mark. I have to admit, it took me a bit to even understand what Tulip Trust actually means and what is where according to Craig Wright, and then keep track of what he claims in which year. I mean, I just mentioned a trust in Panama in 2009/2010 that he mentioned in 2019, but in later years, he completely dropped the existence of that Panamese trust! So yeah, what I understand now, is that Tulip Trust is actually 2 companies together that Craig claims to have joined in a trust contract. There’s Wright International Investments (let’s call them WII, they supposedly own the mined coins) and there is Tulip Trading Ltd (let’s call them TTL, which owns the bought coins). Both these vehicles in the Tulip Trust are Seychelles companies.
Then the next challenge is how to keep track of all Craig’s claims about his Bitcoin holdings. There are all kinds of numbers in different contracts, in emails, in hearings, in depositions, in his online rants etc. You can find all kinds of numbers between say 300,000 and 1.1 million. So what I did, I take 2 numbers that have a certain “body”. For his mined bitcoins he once forged a Tulip Trust list that his wife Ramona received by bonded courier in January 2020, a list that got signed 145 times in May 2020, but anyway, the numbers he used on that list was 16,404 blocks each containing 50 BTC so then we get to 820,200 BTC. Let’s try to remember that number. It is mentioned in a lawsuit, the Kleiman v Wright. But then we also have the lawsuit where Craig Wright claims that all his bought bitcoins were stolen in 2020 in a pineapple hack, for which he is suing the Bitcoin developers to help him recover these Bitcoins. The numbers here come from 2 addresses: 1Feex and 12ib7 (for short) and they contain respectively, rounded, 80,000 and 30,000 BTC. That makes for a total of 110,000 BTC. Let’s add that to the 820,200 BTC mentioned earlier, then we get to 930,200. This is not a number mentioned by Craig Wright anywhere, but it is the only number that I can explain bookkeeping wise, so to say.

In an evidentiary hearing which took place the same day as Wright’s June 2019 deposition, the description of the shamir scheme that Wright had given the ATO in 2015 was also discussed, where Wright threw another curve ball — what he had sent the ATO wasn’t a description of how bitcoin within the Tulip Trust could be accessed, it was a whitepaper for a patent describing the proprietary technology that utilised the shamir sharing scheme with which the timelock had been created. The name of the protocol? Tulip Trust, naturally.

In this hearing, Ira Kleiman’s lead attorney, Vel Freedman, pressed Wright on the content of the 2011 tulip trust document, referencing the line that all the bitcoin still held in trust would return to Wright by January 1st, 2020. Wright denied this was the case, saying that Freedman was “confounding the enwrapping surrounding legal document with the technical solution. They’re not the same.” The purpose of this hearing was to understand why Wright couldn’t present his december 2013 bitcoin holdings, with Wright saying that control of the key slices needed to unlock the 700,000 bought coins were supposedly left with Dave Kleiman who died without retaining the information as to where they had been sent. Not that this mattered anyway because by 2015 only 100,000 of this 700,000 remained, which had allegedly been stolen by his High Secured contact, Ritzela de Gracia. Wright then uttered a sentence he was to regret probably for the rest of his life: “in January of next year, a bonded courier is meant to return key slices.”

Arthur, you’ve already mentioned the bonded courier, and it’s a story that has gone down in folklore among Craig Wright debunkers. Why don’t you tell us this heartwarming fireside tale? (include signing of 145 addresses)

Hahaha, the bonded courier! This is one of several stories in the Faketoshi saga that will always appeal to a larger audience. And at the same time it’s signature Craig Wright at his best. Let’s start with the fact that Craig denied he ever really meant bonded courier.

But then we bring back in memory what Craig Wright actually said, in court during a June 2019 contempt hearing in the Kleiman v Wright lawsuit. Yes, contempt, Craig Wright is not a stranger to contempt of court as the followers of this saga will know..

Then the Judge, Reinhart is his name, mentioned the bonded courier in his August 2019 ruling:

Judge Bloom in January 2020 however, so Craig realised he should come up with something:

Memes flying.

Then halfway January 2020, this bonded courier supposedly arrived, but it turned out it was actually Denis Mayaka, Craig’s lawyer, who send Ramona an email with some files and one of the files contained a list of 2009/2010 Bitcoin block addresses, so Craig gave that list to Ira Kleiman’s counsel. To cut a long story short, that list was found to be a forgery created from a previously created list by Steve Shadders, at that moment in time CTO of nChain and therefore a colleague of Craig Wright.

That list with 16,404 addresses each containing 50 BTC mining subsidy was supposed to stay sealed, not for the public to see. However, by accident that list became visible in the court docket in May 2020 because either a lawyer or more likely the court clerk made a mistake in storing the list in the digital systems of the court. So it was copied to the website CourtListener where people could download it. In the court systems the list was quickly sealed, but for some reason they never bothered to delete the entry on CourtListener. So a few days later in May 2020, we woke up to no less than 145 signings of 145 different addresses on Craig’s Tulip Trust list! The revenge of the bonded courier, what do you think Mark!?

So by June 2019 we have three tulip trusts — tulip trust one, established in 2011, which once held 700,000 bitcoin bought by high secured but at that point contained up to 100,000 bitcoin stolen by a fictional character from an Agatha Christie novel, as well as software and IP related to Wright’s Bitcoin mining adventures; tulip trust 2, which combined this with 821,050 mined bitcoin which had never been touched; and Tulip Trust, an algorithm developed to protect tulip trust II with time-locked key-slice system.

Wright’s attempts to disguise the fact that the Tulip Trust didn’t exist by hiding behind key slices and Dave Kleiman’s death didn’t impress the judge in the case, magistrate judge bruce reinhart, who said in an August 2019 order, “I completely reject Dr. Wright’s testimony about the alleged Tulip Trust, the alleged encrypted file, and his alleged inability to identify his bitcoin holdings. Dr. Wright’s story not only was not supported by other evidence in the record, it defies common sense and real-life experience.”

Judge Reinhart ruled that Wright was liable for half the bitcoin that he said that he and Dave Kleiman had mined together, which would have been worth some $5 billion at the time, as well as half the IP supposedly bound up in W&K. Arthur, this is one of our favourite judgements for various reasons isn’t it? (bring in some quotes about CSW)

Order: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/6309656/277/kleiman-v-wright/

Oh yes, that was a beauty of an order in August 2019. Because it contains several assessments of Craig Wright the person that we see come back like a boomerang in recent cases. This is a ruling that is heavily quoted by the opponents of Craig Wright. Let’s take a few of my favorite quotes, and by the way, please remember that Judge Bloom affirmed these credibility findings in her ruling afterwards!

And for who can’t get enough, here’s another one.

“To this day, Dr. Wright has not complied with the Court’s orders compelling discovery on May 14 and June 14. Rather, as described above, the evidence establishes that he has engaged in a willful and bad faith pattern of obstructive behavior, including submitting incomplete or deceptive pleadings, filing a false declaration, knowingly producing a fraudulent trust document, and giving perjurious testimony at the evidentiary hearing. Dr. Wright’s conduct has prevented Plaintiffs from obtaining evidence that the Court found relevant to Plaintiffs’ claim that Dr. Wright and David Kleiman formed a partnership to develop Bitcoin technology and to mine bitcoin.”

Fortunately for Wright, Judge Bloom didn’t follow through on Judge Reinhart’s recommendation, and Wright was deposed again in March 2020, where he tried to set the record straight on what the tulip trust now contained:

Wright International Investments holds Bitcoin that I mined between 2009 and August 2010. The rights to all of that Bitcoin reside in that company. That company has never done anything with its Bitcoin; they have not moved, they have not transacted, they have not done anything. The only uses of any Bitcoin associated with Wright International Investment were effectively donated to people like Hal Finney and Mike Hearn, back when Bitcoin had zero value, effectively, and a couple of other transactions to try to get people to understand how Bitcoin worked. So, they were zero value transactions that were never recorded. The other company is Tulip Trading Limited. Tulip Trading Limited is a company that holds Bitcoin I purchased in various times in 2011, and those purchased Bitcoin have been used in the funding of companies.

Here, Wright undermined comments he had made in his May 2019 declaration that High Secured had been the ones who had bought the bitcoin, having been handed control of his Liberty Reserve account. Wright also said in that deposition that Tulip Trust 1 had contained the 80,000 bitcoin in the famous 1Feex address, which he said obtained by buying the private keys to the address from Russian exchange WMIRK in 2011. Of course, this is the bitcoin at the centre of the pineapple hack case that we know Wright never owned.

In this deposition, Wright said that, despite having supposedly got the addresses back from the Bonded Courier in January that year, he still didn’t have access to what was inside them. All he knew was that 100,000 of the bitcoin in tulip trust 1 had been stolen, separate to the 100,000 stolen by ritzela di gracia, and that he was investigating who had stolen it. Arthur, this deposition also changed everything up again when Wright introduced tulip trust 3, wiping out Tulip trusts 1 and 2. What was this one all about?

Yup. That was in December 2019, 7 months after his false Declaration and 2 forgeries of Trust documents that we now call Trust 1 and Trust 2. So Craig had to come up with a better story and produced a new forgery, Trust 3, and he hoped that it would cover up for Trusts 1 and 2. And he received this Trust 3 document, which is where we get a hilarious appearance from Denis Mayaka — hear what the judge said about this:
To establish an attorney-client relationship between Mr. Mayaka and Ms. Watts, Dr. Wright introduced a sworn, un-notarized, Declaration of Denis Bosire Mayaka. […] The Declaration states, “I am lawyer [sic] and obtained my bachelor of law degree in 2007 from Moi University in Kenya.” Dr. Wright also introduced a printout of a LinkedIn profile that reflects Mr. Mayaka having a Bachelor of Laws degree from Moi University. The record does not establish that an attorney-client relationship exists between Mr. Mayaka and Ms. Watts. First, as finder of fact, I disregard the Mayaka Declaration because it has not been adequately authenticated. Particularly given my prior finding that Dr. Wright has produced forged documents in this litigation, I decline to rely on this kind of document, which could easily have been generated by anyone with word processing software and a pen.

So there we go Mark, that’s all the qualifications you need if you want to be Craig Wright’s lawyer!

By this point, Wright was starting to disown the documents that pointed away from his ever evolving tulip trust family, something that he repeated during the opening skirmishes of the Kleiman trial in November 2021. Here, Wright laid down the greatest hits he had been churning out since the start of the case: his systems had been hacked, people inside his companies were working to bring him down, Ira Kleiman was a greedy bastard, and the ATO had a vendetta against him. He also introduced a b-side to his hit single, ‘my systems were hacked’: these hacks meant that he had to rebuild his servers in 2014, and the rebuilding changed the date of the key documents and emails to the date on which the server was rebuilt. Arthur, I’m not a computer expert, but I find it hard to believe that rebuilding a server would alter the creation date and headers of emails and other documents to the date of the rebuild.

That’s indeed not what happens in the real world, no. But you know, Craig can use fonts and email programmes months or even years before their release dates, he receives Microsoft patches 10 days early out of the blue — and he’s the only person on earth receiving them! So when headers of emails change because of a server rebuild, then we just have to believe him, right?

Wright’s excuse of fake documents is handy for his story, but it doesn’t explain why Wright inexplicably used those same documents as proof to the ATO and swore that they were authentic at the start of the Kleiman trial. In fact, there are hundreds of questions we need to ask about these supposed hacks and server rewrites, but now isn’t the time. Safe to say, the idea that third parties hacked into his systems and planted fake documents in the hope that they would make him look bad and build up Dave Kleiman’s role, while also assuming he would never actually look at them before sending them over to the ATO as evidence, is remarkably unlikely.

Wright ended the Klieman trial owing $100 million, increased to $143 million months later, but the Tulip Trust wasn’t done with yet. During the hodlonuat case in 2022, Wright explained how he had moved his assets and IP overseas so the ATO couldn’t bankrupt him, before being questioned over the 2011 tulip trust document:

CSW 1

Wright then, for the first time, utterly dismissed the 2011 tulip trust document, saying that it never made it past the draft stage and that the real document setting up the real tulip trust 1 was sadly, not available to him:

CSW 2

This, needless to say, is the first time Wright has ever mentioned the ‘real’ Tulip Trust documents being drawn up by lawyers and updated every year and which, in their totality, he will never be able to lay his hands on. Arthur, we shouldn’t be surprised that Craig Wright just invented another way in which to distance himself from the tulip trust and the shonky documentation that was faked for the ATO’s benefit should we?

Nope. So far we have seen 3 trust documents being called out as clear cut forgeries without any merit to prove the existence of a trust, and it appears that Craig Wright is done with it.

In his testimony, Wright tackled more of the evidence produced in the Wired and Gizmodo reports:

CSW 3

This is Craig Wright’s suggestion, indeed made during the Kleiman case, that someone had manufactured an entire 41-page interview transcript between three ATO agents, Craig Wright and two of his legal and financial representatives, much of it including boring technical information regarding Wright’s tax affairs with his businesses and in which dave klieman’s name was not mentioned once.

Wright then dismissed the list of trustees for tulip trust 1 referenced in the documents:

CSW 4

Savannah certainly was related, given that its representative was…Denis Mayaka. Wright also dismissed the list of shamir sharing scheme key slice owners before revealing (kind of) how he obtained access to the Tulip Trust for the signing sessions in 2016 (Craig Wright Full Testimony: Hodlonaut v Craig Wright — Day 3):

CSW 5

Arthur, I’m not sure but I think I can smell bullshit.

Uhu. You need a break to go to the washroom and powder your nose, Mark?

We then got the absolute coup de grace when it comes to the Tulip Trust:

CSW 6

Arthur, I remember hearing this at the time and being in utter disbelief — we thought we had heard all the craig wright excuses for not being able to access the tulip trust, but this ‘stomped on a hard drive’ is just another level isn’t it?

Yup. This news caused a few headlines online, and a lot of LOLOLOL in the Bitcoin community.

And how many witnesses did he have for this hard drive destruction?

None, Mark, as usual.

This all took place in 2022, and, again, we thought that we had heard the last of the Tulip Trust. Again, we were to be proved wrong. When Christen Ager-Hanssen went rogue in September 2023 and began to spill the beans about nChain and the inner workings of BSV, one of the areas he touched on was the Tulip Trust. Ager Hanssen published an email from Calvin Ayre to Craig Wright which could well be the bomb that finally sinks this rickety, rat-infested ship, and with it came a very important revelation:

We have also verified that there is no complete paper trail evidencing the trust owning any tokens. This after nearly a year of Zurich reviewing all the evidence you have. This means you cannot repay me the money you owe me for all the litigation to date.

Ager-Hanssen had already said in a Twitter spaces appearance that the trust was “bullshit” and that “craig and calvin” were behind it. Ayre confirmed the email days later, which should, really, really should, bring the curtain down on the nine-year cartload of nonsense that is the tulip trust once and for all.

Arthur, this is one of those craig wright stories that has evolved over time and changed shape every few years to suit Craig Wright at various points in time, but it finally seems to have run out of shapes to change into. Do you think the tulip trust will make an appearance in any more of his lawsuits or have we finally seen the last of it?

Good question. What we can see happening is that after ATO found out in 2015 that the Tulip Trust was basically a “nullity based on sham”, and in Kleiman v Wright the judges basically figured out the same (and mind you, those were rulings that Craig Wright never appealed!) that opponents of Craig Wright in lawsuits start requesting security for costs.

Arthur, it’s been a pleasure to debunk the Tulip Trust with you.

Same here, Mark. Same here.

And I look forward to next month’s evisceration, whatever it might be!

Cheers!

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That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading.