Satoshi Itches

The plaintiff's have submitted their exhibits from the recent show cause hearing, and they're available on Court Listener. Without the transcript of proceedings it is hard to know for sure how these were used, but we can speculate.

I'll go through them mostly numerically, but I'll group them into what appears logical where that makes sense.

Exhibit 1 purports to be an email from Dave Kleiman to Craig Wright, where he seems to be suggesting that the Tulip Trust idea is "mad and risky", but he "believe[s] in what we are trying to do." This email is dated June 24th, 2011.

Exhibit 6 seems to be an identical email, but this one is dated October 17th, 2014, which is, of course, long after Dave died. We've seen this scenario before where Craig submitted an email allegedly from Dave to Uyen Nguyen from 2012, but then it turned out Craig had an identical copy he'd sent to himself in 2014, as described in section II of this document. That email also had a PGP signature dated from 2014, and was almost certainly fraudulently created by Craig to appear to be from 2012. So it seems possible that Craig has also backdated this email.

Exhibit 3 and Exhibit 4 are dumps of the email headers and PDF postscript from the 2011 version of the email. Exhibit 7 and Exhibit 8 are the same for the 2014 version of the email. Presumably some metadata in those lends weight to the idea that Craig has backdated this email from 2014 to 2011, although I've not had a chance to analyse them fully yet.

Exhibit 9 purports to be a "Deed ot Trust" entered into between Wright International Investments Ltd and Tulip Trading Ltd, in October 2012. Exhibit 10 is showing metadata about a font (Calibri) that is embedded in a PDF file. The metadata shows the copyright date on the font data is 2015. I can only assume that Exhibit 9 has the Calibri font embedded in it (which is certainly possible with a PDF file), which therefore indicates that this PDF must have been created in or after 2015. So quite possibly another backdated document from Craig.

Exhibit 11 purports to be an email conversation between Craig and a certain Denis Mayaka from Abacus (Seychelles) Ltd. It shows Craig buying an "aged shelf company" called Tulip Trading Limited. These emails are dated October 2014, and the "aged" company was allegedly registered in July 2011. I'm not really sure what the significance of this email trail is. The only thing I noticed was that the purchase price was supposed to $3650 and Craig said he was going to pay $4650. This could easily be an irrelevant mistake so I won't read anything into that. Exhibit 12, Exhibit 13 and Exhibit 14 are more documents purporting to be related to this company purchase.

Exhibit 16 is weird in that it seems to contain a few seemingly unrelated items. It starts with the email from Exhibit 1 described above, then continues with a page from some other document. It then has some black and white screenshots from an email client showing some purported emails from Dave. It then shows a screenshot allegedly from Craig's old blog, from March 2011, showing Craig talking about setting up a trust with Dave, and mentioning bitcoin. It then has all that content repeated, but in colour rather than black and white! I've seen other evidence of Craig backdating blog posts to mention bitcoin, but I've not seen the one shown in Exhibit 16.

Exhibit 17 is a long description of how a trust using the Shamir Secret Scheme might work, followed by some pretty hard to read screenshots of emails. I've not had any chance to analyse what any of this could mean.

Exhibit 18 purports to be an email discussion about how Tulip Trust I was set up. This email is from 2016. Exhibit 19 appears to be some kind of trust document for Tulip Trust also. However, this one only mentions the coins from blocks 1 to 10, totalling 418 bitcoin. Exhibit 20 is a search for a PGP public key in the public databases. I'm not sure why this was submitted.

Exhibit 21 purports to show Craig claiming to have become a director of C01N Ltd in 2013, and having paid money into C01N Ltd in 2012, despite very strong evidence that he had nothing to do with this company until 2014.

Exhibit 22 purports to be a trust deed entered into in 2012, and Exhibit 23 purports to be minutes of a board meeting of Wright International Investments Ltd in December 2014. I have no idea the significance of those.

Hopefully once the transcripts are released things will make much more sense!