Craig Wright v COPA judge threatens to pull livestream after Hodlonaut photo

During the fourth day of the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) v. Craig Wright trial in London’s High Court, an issue involving the livestream arose. One of the few hundred people watching took a photo of Hodlonaut, a pseudonymous Bitcoin influencer.

Hodlonaut, who was sued by Craig Wright in another lawsuit, attended the trial in person and was live blogging on X (formerly Twitter) alongside many other journalists. The presiding judge referenced the prohibited photo during the day’s opening remarks, saying it violated the terms of service for accessing the livestream and mentioned that the court could revoke the livestream entirely. The court is also investigating who took the picture.

Hodlonaut continued live blogging relatively unfazed by the photo, instead focusing his attention on the case. He implied that Wright depended on him caving and apologizing for not believing his claim of being Satoshi Nakamoto.

As testimony continued, Wright continued to deny COPA’s evidence of his alleged lies and forgeries and he reiterated several statements from his prior court appearances.

Has Calvin Ayre been funding Craig Wright’s litigation?

Billionaire Calvin Ayre of CoinGeek is widely rumored to be Wright’s personal financier. Reuters reported, for example, that Ayre financially supported Wright’s patent filing work. Eventually, most of those patents became intellectual property within nChain where both men worked.

Wright denied receiving financial backing for litigation from Ayre, saying he only received a “commercial loan.”

Needless to say, COPA didn’t believe that Wright was individually capable of litigating multiple, multi-billion-dollar, multi-year lawsuits in jurisdictions across the globe without financial aid. COPA presented documents showing chats between Ayre and Wright that seemed to dispute Wright’s claim that Ayre wasn’t financially supporting Wright’s litigation. Documents included a screenshot with a tweet by Ayre showing IRC chat messages. Wright denied participating in that chat.

As Protos reported in July 2023, Wright filed a Form 1.977 in Florida Southern District Court claiming $13,250 in monthly income, living expenditures of $38,000, that he owned no real estate, had no bank account, and lived with his unemployed wife. When asked to reconcile these seeming contradictions, Wright claimed to possess an American Express credit card the balances on which were paid off from an undisclosed source.

Read more: Craig Wright claims no bank account but uses credit card for $38K living costs

Craig Wright explains away more alleged forgeries

The trial also touched on court documents with abnormalities like missing hyphens in ‘peer-to-peer,’ misaligned text, and variations that would show up if the PDF was opened within Microsoft Word. The scanned document showed evidence of handwritten annotations and a 2009 copyright also suggested postdating. Wright tried to dismiss the differences as just the opinions of an expert witness.

After a break, COPA switched to an analysis of a computer file, Bitcoin.exe. An expert witness found abnormalities of hex editing, implausible IP and Bitcoin addresses, as well as alternate references to ‘Bitcoin’ and ‘BitCoin’ in some of the code. An expert witness also found that the Craig Wright version failed a checksum test in comparison to the original Satoshi Nakamoto version.

Wright claimed that a former employee had helped with hex editing. He also claimed the former employee sent it to David Kleiman. COPA’s attorney suggested that the former employee sent it to Kleiman to make it look like Kleiman compiled it himself and Wright agreed with that. Wright also implied that the former employee set things up to look like Kleiman and Wright were working together.

Again, Wright disputed the timing of disclosures, saying that he’d previously mentioned the former employee on his blog. Wright eventually admitted that his legal team submitted the file.

Read more: Emotional Craig Wright tells COPA trial he was framed with forged documents

Abnormalities in Wright’s evidence for ‘being’ Satoshi

COPA lawyers highlighted another abnormality: a debug.log file showed signs of backdating. Wright tried to redirect the matter to the submitted chain-of-custody documentation and turned down a chance to explain the abnormality directly. He suggested that a former employee or Ira Kleiman could have tweaked the file.

He also claimed that someone spoofed SMTP configuration when asked about the topic of email exchanges with individuals like Uyen Nguyen. SMTP is a common protocol used by email servers for sending and receiving messages. He also claimed that someone else used a compromised system to email individuals like Dave Kleiman and Stefan Matthews using an email address that Wright claims was his.

The discussion went into some highly technical discussions about Microsoft and Exchange servers, Active Directory, and X.500 standards that cover electronic directory services. Wright’s explanations implied that some of the abnormalities were attributable to server migrations.

Wright also cautioned listeners repeatedly about relying on his lawyers’ statements, because he often disagrees with his own counsel. He noted that he fired his attorneys in a case before the Oslo District Court for allegedly refusing to honor his wishes and using documents without his consent.

Read more: Craig Wright loses Peter McCormack case ahead of COPA decision

The day continued with Wright denying details in documents presented by COPA, including ones he had submitted in previous cases like the Kleiman vs. Wright case. For one document, he used an “I was terribly drunk” excuse, saying it was probably Ira Kleiman’s fault.

Throughout the day, Wright faced considerable documentation and evidence from digital forensics experts. Given all of the substantive proceedings, Hodlonaut understandably appeared to consider a photo of himself in the courtroom as a forgettable afterthought.