A computer scientist fighting a High Court challenge to his claim to have invented bitcoin has admitted to ‘yelling and screaming’ at his solicitors in the run-up to the case. ‘I’m sorry, My Lord, but the only word I can use is that I was a complete arse’, Dr Craig Wright told Mr Justice Mellor today.
Wright was being cross examined by Jonathan Hough KC over alleged discrepancies in his witness statements about documents which he claims show that he was behind the seminal ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’ white paper which set out the principles of bitcoin in 2008. His opponent in the case, the US-based Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), says that Wright’s claim is a lie backed up by forgery of documents ‘on an industrial scale’.
On the fifth day of the hearing at the Rolls Building in London, Hough, for COPA, challenged several of Wright’s witness statements about the ‘reliance documents’ in the case, including pre-issue drafts of the Satoshi whitepaper. Hough suggested that, after the exchange of expert reports last autumn, Wright had changed his position on whether the documents were unchanged originals.
Pressed on whether he could state with certainty that documents had not been altered by other people, Wright said: ‘What I can do is look at the text of the document and say if it is correct. I can’t say if anyone has changed the font. I don’t look at the fonts.’
‘So is it correct to say you are unable to point to an unamended copy of the bitcoin white paper. Correct?’
‘No,’ Wright replied, mentioning a handwritten document.
‘So there is a version of the bitcoin white paper that you can hold up and say is a pre-issue draft which I wrote which has not been mucked about with?’
‘No, I cannot quite… I haven’t memorised [the evidence numbering]. When I leave the court I could say “this one and this one”. I cannot do this from memory,’ Wright said.
Wright was also questioned on a second set of reliance documents extracted from a USB computer drive found in a drawer at his home late last year. He denied that these text and image files contained less metadata than his previous documents and were therefore less open to analysis.
Pressed on why some distinctive material including drafts written in LaTeX software had been produced so late in the proceedings, Wright said it was only in October that he discovered they were not being worked on. ‘I went to Shoosmiths to say “Where the hell are all the LaTeX files?” I had yelling and screaming sessions with my solicitors.’
Denying that he had sought to put the blame on his lawyers, Wright said ‘No, it was a failure by me… Rather than yelling at paralegals to do it I should have been doing it myself.’
The hearing continues.
