How Craig Wright Wrote Himself into a Forgery Charge

10. “A Competing Transaction or Block Model” {ID_004682} {L1/367/1}

222. The document purports to be a paper titled “A Competing Transaction or Block Model”, presented as if it was precursor work to the Bitcoin White Paper. It presents as a paper discussing concepts prefiguring those addressed by the Bitcoin system, such as a time hash protocol, double-spending and conflicting block transmissions. By its presence in BDOPC.raw, the document purports to pre-date 31 October 2007.

(a) COPA’s Reasons for Alleging Forgery

223. This is a document which was among the 71 New Reliance Documents that were inserted into the BDO Drive by the editing process and which the parties’ experts agree were manipulated [Madden / Lynch Joint Report [12] Q/6/5].

224. The document has been backdated. It is an MS Word ‘doc’ document which contains internal metadata timestamps dating its creation and last modification time to 16 June 2007. However, it is listed as being created with MS Word version 11.9999 (MS Word 2003 SP3). MS Word 11.9999 was not released until September 2007 [Madden3 [92-93], G/5/37].

225. This document shares many characteristics similar to others of Dr Wright’s previous Reliance Documents, including that it lists metadata as if it was authored by ‘Lynn Wright’, using MS Word 11.9999. Those documents have been shown to be manipulated and a number of examples feature in COPA’s original Schedule of Forgeries.

226. The document was sourced from BDOPC.raw. The section “BDOPC.raw” above is repeated. This document was added to BDOPC.raw by the Manipulation User.

(b) COPA’s Reasons for Inferring Dr Wright’s Knowledge / Responsibility

227. The effect of the tampering is to make the document appear to be supportive of Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, contrary to fact.

228. This document was added to BDOPC.raw by the Manipulation User. The Manipulation User is Dr Wright, as explained in the section “BDOPC.raw” above.

229. Dr Wright has attached particular importance to this document:

229.1. It is said to be important to Dr Wright’s case because it “is a paper titled “A Competing Transaction or Block Model”, which discusses concepts developed in the Bitcoin White Paper, such the time hash protocol, double-spending and conflicting block transmissions.” [Wright 6 E/21/3; Schedule 1 to Field 1 L20/223/5”)].

229.2. It is said to be one of Dr Wright’s “Notes, drafts and articles addressing technical concepts that underpin the concepts developed in the Bitcoin White Paper” [Wright 6 E/21/3; Schedule 1 to Field 1, L20/223/4]

229.3. The document was not disclosed at the proper time. It was disclosed instead from the BDOPC.raw image. BDOPC.raw is not a reliable source because it has been manipulated by Dr Wright. The section “BDOPC.raw” above is repeated.

230. This document shares many characteristics similar to others of Dr Wright’s previous Reliance Documents, including that it lists metadata as if it was authored by ‘Lynn Wright’, using MS Word 11.9999.

(c) Dr Wright’s Explanations and COPA’s Rebuttal

231. Dr Wright claimed that this document (which has creation and last modified timestamps of 16 June 2007), was created using a version of Microsoft Word that wasn’t released until 19 September 2007. He said this was because at that time he was part of the Microsoft developer network, providing him access to release versions earlier: {Day5/105:18}. Dr Wright claimed that the term UTXO was not anachronistic because he had used it in other works: {Day8/140:14}.

232. COPA submitted that this explanation should be rejected as dishonest for the following reasons:

232.1. If the BDOPC.raw is accepted as being forged, it follows that documents on it should be treated as being forged unless they are documents which Mr Madden says are original to the image that was taken in October 2007.

232.2. Mr Madden’s clear evidence is that it was created with MS Word version 11.9999 which was not released until 19 September 2007. Madden3 {G/5/37}

232.3. There is no evidence that Dr Wright was a member of the Microsoft developer network, nor any evidence that, even if he had been, he would have had earlier access to the version of Word used to create this document.

232.4. Mr Lynch agreed with Mr Madden that ID_0004682 was manipulated: {Q/6/5}.

232.5. The document mentions that a “double spent transactions can lead to two or more UTXO addresses being simultaneously allocated”. The reference to UTXO is anachronistic as it was not introduced until version 0.8 of the software by Mr Wuille. His evidence was that the first time he saw the term was on 21 June 2012 and that it was only becoming important as a concept around that time. Wuille1, [29-32] {C1/1/7}. Mr Wuille’s evidence was unchallenged on this. There is no record of Satoshi using the term UTXO, nor any use of it in any of Dr Wright’s genuine documents.

(d) Conclusion

233. I dealt with the anachronistic reference to UTXO in greater detail in the main Judgment at [752]-[759]. For the reasons set out there and above, I find this document was a plain forgery by Dr Wright.

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