David Canellis

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There is so much more to Bitcoin than Satoshi. Let’s celebrate!



Today is Satoshi Disappear Day, as <a href="https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6730.20">declared</a> by early contributor Kiba on this day in 2011.&nbsp;



“Since satoshi has been confirmed to be not coming back, the bitcoin community now [has] to fend for ourselves,” Kiba wrote.



“I propose we make a bitcoin holiday in honor of our legendary anonymous founder and to observe the fact that the bitcoin community will be just fine after the inventor of bitcoin left. Even if Gavin is hit by the bus tomorrow, we can live.”



Gavin Andresen had <a href="http://gavinandresen.ninja/eleven-years-ago-today">disclosed</a> his impending meeting with the CIA, both privately with Satoshi and publicly on the Bitcointalk forum, only days earlier.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">On This Day — Satoshi Disappear Day</h2>



What Kiba said turned out to be true. Since Satoshi left, other contributors have worked together to release 73 new versions of the software on bitcoin’s way to becoming a multi-trillion dollar asset.



In that time, developers have pushed upgrades big and small while mitigating bugs and potential <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/09/21/the-latest-bitcoin-bug-was-so-bad-developers-kept-its-full-details-a-secret">disasters</a>. Bitcoin’s creator was otherwise only around for a half dozen or so, even if they conceived and built the original version all by themselves.



We also can’t exactly draw a direct line between Gavin’s CIA visit and Satoshi’s disappearance. A few days before Gavin announced he was to meet with the CIA, Satoshi in an email had already mentioned to another early developer, Mike Hearn, that he had “<a href="https://blockworks.co/news/satoshi-correspondence-bitcoin-emails-research">moved on to other things</a>.”&nbsp;



But considering Satoshi apparently never replied to Gavin’s email, at the very least we can assume it helped confirm their decision to never return.



Meanwhile, Bitcoin was attracting mainstream media attention, with Andy Greenberg’s <a href="https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0509/technology-psilocybin-bitcoins-gavin-andresen-crypto-currency.html">article</a> in Forbes, “Crypto Currency,” running in the week leading up to the inaugural Satoshi Disappear Day.&nbsp;



The article is a progenitor of the “super shadowy coder” trope that has plagued political crypto discourse ever since. It mistakenly describes Bitcoin developers as Gavin’s “underground cadre of cypherpunks” working on anonymous money used to buy illegal drugs outside of government oversight — an image against which Satoshi wanted to push back.



“I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle,” Satoshi told Gavin. “Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them.”



Gavin wasn’t happy with the “wacky pirate money” theme either, and agreed that more credit for other contributors was a great idea.



“On a completely different subject: I did something that I hope turns out to be smart, but might be stupid,” Gavin said. He’d been contacted by In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the CIA that discovers and invests in cutting-edge technologies that would benefit US agencies.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXfuaeYzJ_C1A_8cbtETJxHXeAlKf0Yi5XmqVgU0oAAdYxdMRSec76gBdqG7sd73mnZMRrSTHDcMUIAOz7gPSKoEDEF15cDc24IzvwJw-mkbLm8h-KT1P1lMaTa60tnVA8QlZw37AA?key=osbK7nHTSU9FadKSXHA6lcD4" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Gavin’s visit with the CIA was a recurring topic of interest in Bitcoin IRC <a href="https://buildingbitcoin.org/bitcoin-dev/log-2011-06-13.html">channels</a>.</figcaption></figure>



In-Q-Tel had invited Gavin to its annual conference on emerging technologies, with the theme of that year being “Mobility of Money.”



“They asked if I’d be willing to talk about Bitcoin, and I committed to giving a 50-minute presentation and participating in a panel discussion,” Gavin wrote in his <a href="http://gavinandresen.ninja/eleven-years-ago-today">email</a>.&nbsp;



“I hope that by talking directly to ‘them’ and, more importantly, listening to their questions/concerns, they will think of Bitcoin the way I do — as a just-plain-better, more efficient, less-subject-to-political-whims money. Not as an all-powerful black-market tool that will be used by anarchists to overthrow The System.”



Gavin found himself between a rock and a hard place. “It might be really stupid if it just raises Bitcoin’s visibility on [the CIA’s] radar, but I think it is way too late for that; Bitcoin is already on their radar,” he told Satoshi.



He was also transparent about the trip. Gavin shared his presentation on BitcoinTalk shortly after (the full version is still available via <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20160303090048/https://s3.amazonaws.com/gavinandresen-bitcoin/GavinAndresenCIATalk.pdf">archive</a>) and quickly appeared on Bruce Wagner’s The Bitcoin Show to discuss the meeting.



“After thinking pretty hard about it, I decided I would do it because it&#8217;s an open-source project. I figured, you know, going to the CIA and talking very openly about what Bitcoin is and what it can do wouldn&#8217;t hurt the project. It&#8217;s not a secret,” Gavin said on the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xcMFKfX9ZU">podcast</a>.



The conference itself was a three-day event with the first day unclassified, which meant Gavin could discuss it, while the other two were classified. Gavin said there were people from PayPal and Facebook in attendance, as well as economists from the Federal Reserve.



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" src="https://lh7-rt.googleusercontent.com/docsz/AD_4nXdsy4Pal5ThIe59pLO34GQzTv1k4JRwr8MrWua3FMHkVvBcpLaLi0tEbfddLDkEEWHQgGE1IEZZfmS4tkvtfTwExZSAlCyFPOvoH6DeZZ3JfKJ_C4-_aq0q0cerdJQnEDU0KMfj?key=osbK7nHTSU9FadKSXHA6lcD4" alt=""/><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Gavin’s presentation offered a tutorial on how Bitcoin works, alongside a rundown on the state of the ecosystem as it was in June 2011.</figcaption></figure>



As for why the CIA might be interested in Bitcoin, Gavin could only speculate, like the rest of us.



“I mean, obviously, you know, paying people covertly is part of what the CIA does, and so a payment system that they could use to [pay] somebody covertly is very interesting to them,” Gavin said.



For those after more intrigue, this might help: Gavin sold bitcoin to a CIA agent at the conference. “I had a couple of people come up to me afterwards and say they thought bitcoin is really cool. One interesting interaction: I actually sold a bitcoin while I was there to one of the CIA people.”



“I had showed <a href="https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitbills">Bitbills</a> — I had a couple of Bitbills in my wallet as an example of a physical bitcoin that you can hold. He said it was very cool and wanted to buy one from me so he could show his boss.” Bitcoin traded at around $15 at the time.



So, there you have it. If the CIA “lab leak” <a href="https://x.com/nic__carter/status/1704922555189182784">theory</a> about Satoshi holds any weight (a big “if”), then it took only two and a half years for one of its own to return to headquarters with an actual bitcoin (it’s now worth almost 6,500x more).



Happy Satoshi Disappear Day!



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Bitcoin

Satoshi Disappear Day: CIA agent bought bitcoin from former lead developer

Macauley Peterson

<div id="highlights-block_61a416f02d14a" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Wright’s defense team declared victory, as their client avoided the worst outcomes</li>
 <li>The jury was initially unable to reach agreement last week but were instructed by the judge to keep trying</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



Jurors in the Florida trial of Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist who claims to have invented Bitcoin, were deadlocked as recently as last Wednesday, after several days of deliberations. The judge in the case, US District Judge Beth Bloom, issued what’s known as an <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/allen_charge" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Allen charge</a>, instructing them to “carefully reexamine and reconsider all the evidence” in an attempt to reach an agreement. Now they have.



On Monday, the jury found Wright liable on one of the plaintiff’s claims, that of conversion — unauthorized possession of personal property,&nbsp; in this case intellectual property — and awarded $100 million in damages, according to <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536.812.0_1.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">court documents</a>. Notably, no bitcoin was directly ordered to be paid.



Wright <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/craig-wright-trial-goes-to-florida-jury-which-could-award-as-much-as-189b/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">could have been found liable</a> for a range of behavior including fraud, theft, breach of fiduciary duty, with damages potentially reaching into the billions, therefore he and his legal team see the outcome as a victory.&nbsp;



“This has been a remarkably good outcome — I feel completely vindicated,” Wright told his supporters in a <a href="https://twitter.com/JimmyWinSV/status/1467910308953997314?s=20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recorded video message</a>.



The jury rejected plaintiff Ira Kleiman’s claim that his deceased brother David was a business partner of Wright’s, and decided that Wright would owe nothing to the David Kleiman estate. Instead, the sole monetary award went to W&amp;K Info Defense Research LLC, a company for which Ira Kleiman is now the only registered director, but that was once a joint venture between Wright, his wife at the time Lynn Wright, and David Kleiman.



In <a href="https://cryptopotato.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/lynn-wright-ira-kleiman-petition-071620.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a separate legal maneuver</a>, the ownership of the company is an ongoing matter of dispute, and Lynn Wright contends that Ira Kleiman was “not authorized to act on behalf of W&amp;K Info Defense.”



Lawyers for Ira Kleiman, see the jury award as a win for their client, even if it falls far short of what they claimed:



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="550" data-dnt="true">Kleiman v. Wright update: We are incredibly gratified the jury found Craig Wright has to pay our client, W&amp;K, $100,000,000 for the bitcoin-related assets he stole. This is a great win for our client and for justice!&mdash; Vel Freedman (@VelvelFreedman) <a href="https://twitter.com/VelvelFreedman/status/1467923812075421701?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 6, 2021</a></blockquote><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
</div></figure>



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin stash</h3>



The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto was not a subject of this case. It was simply assumed that Wright had access to Satoshi&#8217;s 1.1 million bitcoins, which could have been awarded as damages. The jury elected not to award any bitcoins, opting instead to levy money damages in dollars.



For Ira Kleiman to collect on the $100 million from Wright due to <meta charset="utf-8">W&amp;K Info Defense Research, he will first have to resolve the dispute over the company’s ownership. If he does retain control, and successfully turns the jury award into a definitive money judgment that Wright must pay, the question remains, where will the money come from?



Earlier in the trial, the initial judge, Judge Reinhart, <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-flsd-9_18-cv-80176/pdf/USCOURTS-flsd-9_18-cv-80176-9.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">found</a> that Wright submitted forged documents and offered perjured testimony related to the production of a list of bitcoin addresses under his (supposedly Satoshi’s) control.



Wright has so far failed to prove that he is in possession of, or has access to, the private keys needed to move those early Satoshi-mined bitcoins. Absent such proof, he is unlikely to persuade <a href="https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/op-ed-how-many-wrongs-make-wright" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">skeptics</a> that he is in fact Satoshi.



Wright disputes the consensus view of what bitcoin even is. In 2018, Wright’s <a href="https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/bsv-what-is-bitcoin-sv" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">preferred bitcoin, BSV</a>, which stands for “Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision”, forked from the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain, which itself forked from the original BTC chain in 2017.



Speculators evidently view the trial outcome as beneficial for the prospects of the bitcoin fork — BSV has surged 34% in the past 24 hours and now as a market cap of just under $3 billion. That remains a far cry from the market cap of BCH at about $9 billion, much less the BTC market cap of $962 billion.




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Verdict in Craig Wright Civil Trial: $100M  Award for Plaintiff; No Punitive Damages

<div id="highlights-block_61a416f02d14a" class="highlights">
 <ul>
 <li>Wright’s defense team’s Motion for Judgment as a Matter of Law was denied on November 22, ensuring a jury decision</li>
 <li>Seven counts, including Civil Theft and Fraud, are now in a jury’s hands</li>
 </ul>
 
</div>



He claims to be the inventor of Bitcoin and the author of the original 2008 <a href="https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf">Bitc</a><a href="https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">o</a><a href="https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf">in white paper</a>, under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. But the ultimate outcome of the civil trial of Dr. Craig Steven Wright, an Australian computer scientist, is unlikely to settle that mystery.



The United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, however, accepts it as a given, by granting the plaintiff in the case standing to sue Wright in the first place. Although the prevailing view among Bitcoin proponents is that Wright’s assertion <a href="https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/op-ed-how-many-wrongs-make-wright" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">is specious</a>, as far as Judge Beth Francine Bloom is concerned, Wright has 1.1 million bitcoins.



The jurors, slated to resume deliberations on Monday after a Thanksgiving break, are tasked with passing judgment on a more limited question: whether Wright is guilty of fraud, theft, breach of fiduciary duty, and a handful of other counts that could leave him liable for half of the bitcoin stash that he may have mined in Bitcoin’s early days.&nbsp;



The plaintiff in the case, Ira Kleiman, says that the <a href="https://cms.blockworks.co/bubbles-bitcoin-and-whats-next/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">bitcoin,</a> while ostensibly Wright’s, rightfully belongs to the estate of Kleiman’s deceased brother David, a friend and alleged business partner of Wright’s. David Kleiman died in April 2013 at the age of 46, without ever laying hands on the fortune his brother now says should be his.



Ira Kleiman initially sued Wright in February 2018, claiming that Wright schemed to steal both the 1.1 million bitcoins and the intellectual property connected with Bitcoin’s open-source code that David Kleiman may have helped develop. At the time of the original suit, the quantity of bitcoin at issue was valued at just over $10 billion. The stakes are somewhat higher now — that much bitcoin is worth some $60 billion dollars today.



If the jury of three men and seven women finds that Wright had a partnership with David Kleiman to mine those coins, assuming they are in fact under Wright’s control, they will have to determine the value owed to Kleiman’s estate, plus any punitive damages — and the plaintiffs&#8217; lawyers have asked for plenty — bringing the total claims and damages to $189 billion. (For comparison, the world’s richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is worth $177 billion and just the $30 billion in bitcoin alone would put Ira Kleiman among the top 50 richest people in the world, <a href="https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/11/13/news-craig-wright-in-court-mt-gox-settlement-bitcoin-futures-etf-reddit-community-points-miners-still-cant-sell-their-bitcoins/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to Forbes</a>.)



Ira Kleiman <a href="https://www.law360.com/articles/1438959" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">has testified</a> that Wright and his brother created a company in Florida in 2011 — W&amp;K Info Defense Research LLC — which is how the Australian has ended up spending time in and out of a Miami courtroom <a href="https://news.bitcoin.com/judge-orders-craig-wright-to-physically-appear-in-florida-lawsuit/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">since 2019</a>.



Wright denies the allegations, and says Kleiman merely helped him temporarily transfer control of the bitcoin — which <a href="https://www.law360.com/fintech/articles/1439426/bitcoin-inventor-accused-at-trial-of-lying-about-trust" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">he says</a> was purchased in 2011 from a &#8220;dodgy&#8221; Russian exchange — to keep it out of reach of Australian tax authorities.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">A last-ditch effort to avoid a jury verdict</h3>



Shortly before closing arguments last week, Wright’s legal team filed a Motion for Judgement as a Matter of Law — basically an appeal to the judge that the plaintiffs haven’t presented sufficient evidence. Such a preemption by the judge is only an option if there “is no legally sufficient evidentiary basis for a reasonable jury to find for the non-moving party.” According to <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-flsd-9_18-cv-80176/pdf/USCOURTS-flsd-9_18-cv-80176-25.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">court documents</a>, there is, and the motion was denied.



The court previously <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCOURTS-flsd-9_18-cv-80176/pdf/USCOURTS-flsd-9_18-cv-80176-23.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">denied a motion</a> from the defense for Summary Judgement, which uses a similar legal standard, so this last legal maneuver was a long shot.



Among the Wright team’s arguments was that the market value of the bitcoins at issue could not be used as the basis for the jury judgment under a Florida precedent known as the “Blockage Discount Theory” —&nbsp; that the bitcoin could not be sold without substantially adversely affecting the price. The judge disagreed.



<h3 class="wp-block-heading">To be or not to be Satoshi Nakamoto</h3>



Wright has never been able to prove that he is Satoshi Nakamoto by either signing a message using the PGP key for Satoshi’s encrypted emails, or moving any of the early Satoshi-mined bitcoin he presumably should control.



The case has yielded more sordid details of Wright’s behavior. In March 2020, a previous judge in the case, Judge Bruce E. Reinhart, <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536.420.0.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">reprimanded Wright</a> for forging documents and giving perjured testimony.



Gavin Andresen, who once claimed that he was personally convinced Wright was indeed Satoshi, expressed doubts on that view in <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536/gov.uscourts.flsd.521536.589.3.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a sworn deposition</a> during the trial, referring in particular to supposed proof proffered by Wright:



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“That gobbledygook proof that he published was certainly, deception, if not an outright lie. So at the very least, that, I consider, you know, that — he bamboozled me there.”</blockquote>



When Wright set a date to prove his claims — by transferring bitcoin known to belong to Satoshi Nakamoto to Andresen — he failed to deliver. On the day that he was due to transfer the bitcoin — May 4th, 2016 — Andresen says he was told Wright attempted suicide and was taken to the hospital.



Wright is now in a precarious position. If the jury finds in Kleiman’s favor, it is unlikely that Wright will be able to access the half a million in bitcoin — whether or not he is Satoshi — for one simple reason: It’s almost inconceivable that he would not already have done so. Satoshi’s coins have not moved for over a decade, even as the price of 1 bitcoin has gone from less than a penny to $68,521. That’s the clearest indication that Satoshi is either dead, or has lost the keys.



As <a href="https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2021/11/13/news-craig-wright-in-court-mt-gox-settlement-bitcoin-futures-etf-reddit-community-points-miners-still-cant-sell-their-bitcoins/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">David Gerard put it</a>, “Wright could end up owing half a million bitcoins he doesn’t control to the estate of the guy he didn’t invent Bitcoin with, just because he wouldn’t admit he wasn’t really Satoshi.”



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