Craig Wright Hearing Day 3: Would-be Satoshi Continues Denying “Converting and Backdating” Files

Key Takeaways

• On the third day of a trial to establish whether Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, Wright faced further questioning from the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA).
• The COPA lawyer Jonathan Hough interrogated Wright over documents the organization alleges we forged or backdated.
• Wright attempted to explain away evidence of backdating by arguing that timestamp anomalies were the result of normal data handling processes.

Day 3 of Craig Wright vs. the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) saw Wright continue to deny the allegations that he deliberately altered evidence to make it seem as if he was the Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto.

Continuing a trend established the day before, on Wednesday, February 8, COPA’s lawyer Jonathan Hough interrogated Wright over the veracity of a string of documents the organization alleges were doctored. When faced with the evidence  of falsification, Wright evaded Hough’s questions or made excuses to explain the hallmarks of forgery identified by COPA.

Craig Wright Tries to Explain Away Evidence of Document Tampering

Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, Hough presented the court with document after document, pointing out timestamp and formatting inconsistencies that suggest the files Wright has presented as evidence that he invented Bitcoin were created after the date he claims, or altered at a later date. 

In each instance, Wright defended the integrity of his documents, attributing discrepancies in their metadata to the way they have been handled over the years. 

He occasionally used the excuse that the original ideas were recorded as voice notes or handwritten before being transcribed by his staff post factum.  

File Conversion Blamed for Metadata Anomalies

During his cross-examination, Dr. Wright repeatedly blamed multiple file conversions for the presence of metadata that didn’t line up with his version of the timeline of events.

Throughout questioning, Wright’s default explanation for discrepancies in metadata and document versions is that they arose from normal business practices rather than deliberate manipulation. 

For example, he claimed that COPA had misconstrued metadata added to files by the document processing tools Citrix, Metaframe, and Grammarly as evidence of backdating or forgery. However, COPA’s expert witnesses have contested these claims.

Wright Justifies “Bizarre” Document Handling: “Inventors Are Strange People”

At one point on Wednesday, Hough became frustrated with Wright’s increasingly stretched explanations for inconsistencies between the observable timestamps of evidence and the date Wright claimed he authored them. Responding to one such excuse, he observed that setting a file’s creation timestamp based on another year’s document “would be extremely eccentric,” and a “bizarre thing to do.”

To this, Wright answered that “lots of people call me bizarre.  Justifying the unusual timestamping behavior, he continued that “inventors throughout history have been known to be bizarre … we’re strange people. We’re unusual.”