Huff accused Wright of backdating the document to make it appear to be a precursor to the original 2008 Bitcoin White Paper, among other forgeries. He manipulated email communications to support his claim that he was Nakamoto. He included postmortems in his academic papers to suggest that he envisioned Bitcoin long before it was released. ChatGPT was also used to create additional forgeries after experts questioned existing material. Specific discrepancies identified by Hough include the use of anachronistic fonts, metadata that suggests computer clocks have been manipulated, and internal timestamps that contradict the document's surface date. was.
Huff appeared to be trying to build an exhaustive catalog of separate pieces of evidence, which combined to paint a picture of fraud on an “industrial scale,” as he said in his opening argument.
In some ways, the cross-examination process focused more on Hough's performance than Wright's answers, said Lindsey Gledhill, an intellectual property partner at the law firm Harper James. It was “a list that the lawyer obsessively listed down to the last detail,” she says.
For all the anomalies shown by COPA, Wright provided explanations. He variously claimed that a printing error caused the pixels to be misaligned and appear tampered with. The complexity of the IT systems used to edit and store documents was not reflected in the tests conducted by experts. And his documents may have been tampered with by the officials who kept them. If Mr. Wright agrees that the documents are not genuine, he must have been the victim of a cybersecurity breach, never intended to rely on the cybersecurity breach to support his claims, or that the documents undermined him. He also suggested that the virus was planted by his opponents in order to make him become a leader.
A central feature of Wright's strategy to deflect suspicions of forgery appears to have been to cast doubt on the credibility of forensic experts. Before the trial began, experts submitted by both sides jointly concluded that many of Wright's documents showed signs of falsification. Wright claimed on the witness stand that COPA's experts were “totally biased.” When presented with the unflattering findings of his own experts, Mr. Wright declared them “inexperienced” or unqualified and said that his former lawyers had selected them. denounced.
Mr. Wright argued, citing his digital forensics qualifications, that if he had actually set out to falsify evidence, it would not have been so amateurish. “Ironically, even if I manipulated or fabricated the document, it would still be perfect,” he says. Mr. Wright has on various occasions cited his own personal testing to explain how documents can bear traces of tampering for innocuous reasons (which Mr. Huff says is unacceptable). I reminded him many times that this was the case) and explained it to him.
The dispute over the suspicion of forgery will hold the key to the outcome of the trial. “The British courts will ultimately assess whether Dr. Wright is a truthful witness,” Marsden said. “If he were to produce documents that the court found to be forgeries, that would cast his evidence in general in a negative light.”
Mr Marsden said it was “a risky strategy” for Mr Wright to effectively replace him in the expert role. Especially given that the lawsuit centers on whether Mr. Wright himself committed the fabrication. Mr Marsden said it was a “very dangerous path” for defendants to “distance” themselves from their own experts, leaving them isolated from anyone who might be able to help them with their case. He said it would be.