Saturday, May 9, 2020

Craig Wright provably defrauded the court when he claimed that a bonded courier had showed up with a list of public addresses asserting what Bitcoin he owned in the Tulip Trust. Andreas Antonopoulos' report explains the proof. Steve Shadders HAS to realise he's been fooled at this point.

Background: Craig has been ordered to submit a list of all the Bitcoin addresses he owned several times now. The first time he was given a hard deadline by Magistrate Judge Reinhart and simply ignored it. Then, in a last ditch effort to escape contempt of court and/or sanctions Craig Wright asked the CTO of his company nChain, Steve Shadders to spend 2 weeks putting together a list of Bitcoin he thinks belongs to Satoshi, based on statistical criteria that just happened to match the well-known Patoshi pattern analysis. While replicating existing Blockchain research over a space of two weeks as his top-priority, nChain CTO Steve Shadders managed to include a bug that resulted in 1749 addresses that don't match the Patoshi pattern. This is going to be important later, so keep it in mind.

The court wasn't happy with this last ditch, buggy, probabilistic attempt at producing the addresses he was commanded to produce, but they were especially unhappy with the litany of provable forgeries, perjurious statements, and evasive and dishonest testimonies from Wright that was impeding discovery and Judge Reinhart administered case-ending sanctions against Mr. Wright in response.

Judge Bloom overturned Reinhart's sanctions, though she explicitly agreed with Reinhart's credibility findings regarding Wright. She offered Craig a poisoned chalice:

In light of the Defendant's representations that the bonded courier is scheduled to arrive in January 2020, the Court will permit the Defendant through and including February 3, 2020, to file a notice with the court indicating whether or not this mysterious figure has appeared from the shadows and whether the Defendant now has access to the last key slice needed to unlock the encrypted file. In the event this occurs, and further if the Defendant produces his list of Bitcoin Holdings as ordered by the Magistrate Judge, then this Court will not impose any additional sanctions other than the ones discussed above.

With the not so subtle implication being that Bloom did not believe Craig's invocations of a "mysterious bonded courier" and that if he failed to satisfy this burden additional sanctions would be forthcoming.

Mr. Wright apparently took this as a forgery challenge, only one where he didn't have much respect for the intellect of his adversaries.

In his report Andreas Antonopoulos labels four separate files of Bitcoin lists, Shadders List, CW, DK, and CSW Filed.

Shadders List: The list of Wright's Bitcoin Shadders produced with a bug he disclosed that caused the least significant byte of some of the nonces for the Coinbases to fall outside of the range 0-58 (the Patoshi pattern that's been used to identify Satoshi's Bitcoin), referred to as the Shadders Bug (this bug is discussed more here).

CW List: A list of Wright's Bitcoin the Trust produced during settlement negotiations

DK List: A list of Dave Kleiman's Bitcoin the trust produced during settlement negotiations.

CW Filed List: The list of Wright's Bitcoin Craig allegedly receive from the bonded courier and then filed with the court in time to attempt to escape sanctions.

Bullet points:

  • None of the lists include multiple Bitcoin addresses that were known to belong to Satoshi (the Hal Finney transaction address, the Dustin Trammel transaction address, the Mike Hearn Transaction address, etc)
  • All lists of Bitcoins are subsets of the list Shadders provided initially.
  • The CW List and the CW Filed List are exactly the same, except the CW Filed List omits Bitcoin that was spent on dates between August 6, 2017 and June 27, 2019. As it should, these coins were supposedly locked up in a trust, and inaccessible to the world. On the theory that Wright is not a total fraud it is inexplicable that the Tulip Trust should have provided a list containing coins that were clearly still accessible while they were supposed to be locked up.
  • 3 of the addresses in CSW Filed, the document produced by CSW to avoid contempt of court, allegedly after having received it from the mysterious bonded courier, and which again are supposed to reflect coins he cannot access because they're locked in the Tulip Trust, have been moved since June 27, 2019.
  • Both the CW Filed List and the CSW Filed List fail to omit every single address (and there were 1749) that was erroneously identified in Shadders' list as belonging to Satoshi due to an overflow bug in his code. This means, that in order for the bonded courier to have delivered an accurate list of Satoshi's Bitcoin, through sheer serendipity an overflow bug accidentally present in the code Shadders used to scrape the Blockchain--which he acknowledged as a bug in his sworn testimony and which he has made excuses about here on Reddit--has to have, through sheer serendipity, just happened to capture Satoshi's real addresses. Or, that Wright sloppily forged the list from Shadders' source list to avoid contempt of court.

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