Self-proclaimed Bitcoin inventor Craig Wright grew flustered during cross-examination on Wednesday as prosecutors mounted evidence disputing his identity as Satoshi Nakamoto.
The computer scientist stands accused of forging multiple documents to give credence to his “false narrative” which expert witnesses – including his own – have now agreed were likely tampered with.
Wright began the day bemoaning the incompetencies of the experts who found his prior evidence to be forgeries.
Dr. Placks, for example – a digital forensics expert with qualifications going back twenty years – he deemed unqualified, due to his lack of a ‘related’ PhD or experience in a virtualized environment. According to Wright’s own words, Placks was an expert hired by his previous lawyers.
When asked about another expert – Spencer Lynch – Wright said that he doesn’t even meet the “basic” level of the U.S. government’s forensics framework, and so isn’t qualified.
Wright also claimed that Lynch had been hired by one of his previous lawyers, Travis Smith, forcing the defendant to dismiss the latter. However, this claim was objected to by Wright’s own current lawyer from Shoosmith, who said they had introduced Lynch. Wright then agreed.
Onlookers found Wright’s competing claims with his personal witnesses and lawyers to be alarming.
“So, like, Craig just lied about that?” wrote Annuit-bitscoin to the BSV subreddit on Wednesday. “It’s not even just he didn’t change experts, he changed the story about who hired the expert.”
As the trial continued, prosecutors from the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), presented a flurry of Bitcoin-related documents supposedly produced by Wright before 2008, when the original Bitcoin whitepaper was published. They identified evidence of forgery for each, ranging from altered metadata to the use of fonts that weren’t available at the time they were purportedly written.
In one case, COPA produced factory evidence that one of the notepads used to write one such document was not available until 2012. Wright insisted that the witness from the notepad producer was wrong.
“Craig starting to raise his voice more and more. Seems rattled. Judge Mellor does not seem impressed,” said Hodlonaut, a trial spectator who has previously been sued by Wright, in a post to X on Wednesday.
A rough transcription provided by @bitnorbert on X read that Justice Edward James Mellor at one point told Wright to “calm down.”