Claims by Australian computer scientist Craig Wright to be the founder of Bitcoin were dismissed as “not credible” and a “farce” by lawyers for Twitter personality Hodlonaut, otherwise known as Magnus Granath, in closing arguments offered in Oslo’s District Court Monday.
As the trial – one of two ongoing civil cases between Wright and Granath – reaches its sixth and likely penultimate day, the case has put under the spotlight a range of evidence Wright furnished in a bid to prove he is the author of the infamous 2008 paper that launched the cryptocurrency revolution – and whether comments tweeted by Granath in March 2019, in which he called Wright a fraud, are protected under Norway’s free speech laws.
In 2015, Wright said he was the Bitcoin founder pseudonymously called Satoshi Nakamoto. He has offered a range of evidence, including purported early drafts of Nakamoto’s 2008 paper that proposed the cryptocurrency, and references to a signing session he held in 2016. In that session, he purported to show witnesses he held the private keys for early bitcoins that only Nakamoto would have.
Witnesses called by Wright on Monday attempted to throw cold water on evidence offered by digital forensics specialists KPMG last week, which sought to unmask those documents as forgeries.
“In digital forensics … if an independent third party were to verify, they should be able to recreate the steps and the environment exactly as it was,” Klaudia Sokolowska, an investigator for cybersecurity company Cyfor, told the court.
But she “did not see an adequate description of their testing environment” to enable her to scientifically reproduce KPMG’s results, Sokolowska said.
Discrepancies detected by KPMG in double spacings in the draft’s text and edit times reported in document metadata couldn’t be reproduced or weren’t reliable indicators, Sokolowska and fellow witness Dashley van Schijndel, a forensic investigator at BDO in Norway, said.
