Craig Wright Under Oath

Craig Wright had publicly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto since 2016, always on his own terms -- blog posts, sympathetic journalists, carefully staged demonstrations that never produced a verifiable cryptographic signature. On June 28, 2019, for the first time, those claims were made under oath in a federal courtroom in Florida, where perjury carries consequences and opposing lawyers get to push back. (https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2019/06/28/craig-wright-spars-with-kleiman-lawyers-in-combative-courtroom-appearance/)

The Lawsuit

Dave Kleiman was a computer forensics expert and early Bitcoin figure who died in April 2013 under difficult circumstances -- disabled, living alone, found in poor health in his Florida home. In 2018, his brother Ira sued Wright, claiming that Dave and Craig had mined approximately 1.1 million Bitcoin together between 2009 and 2011, and that after Dave's death, Wright had stolen his share through a series of fraudulent transfers. At 2019 Bitcoin prices, the claim was worth roughly $10 billion. The case was Kleiman v. Wright, heard in the Southern District of Florida.

"A Character I Created"

On the stand, Wright declared that Satoshi Nakamoto was not a pseudonym; it was "a character" he had created when writing the Bitcoin whitepaper. Not a real identity in disguise, but a fictional persona. He offered no cryptographic proof of authorship. The simplest verification available, signing a message with any of Satoshi's known private keys, remained undone, as it had since his 2016 public coming-out. Under oath, Wright's claim was the same as it had always been: assertion, not proof.

The Tulip Trust

Wright's explanation for why he couldn't produce the Bitcoin: it was locked in the Tulip Trust, a series of trusts he said he and Kleiman had established together. The keys to access those coins, he testified, would be delivered to him by a bonded courier sometime in 2020. The presiding judge was unimpressed. Her response from the bench became one of the more memorable lines in Bitcoin legal history: "Apparently, dead men tell no tales, but they perhaps send bonded couriers."

The Forged Documents

Kleiman's lawyers presented a Deed of Trust that Wright claimed had been created in 2012. Forensic analysis told a different story: the document contained font files with 2015 copyright timestamps, created three years after it supposedly existed. When the lawyers raised this in court, Wright threw a printed copy of an email at opposing counsel across the courtroom. The court later found credible and compelling evidence that documents in the case had been altered, noting "no evidence that anyone else had a motive to falsify them", a strong circumstantial inference that Wright himself was responsible.

The Breakdown

Cross-examination broke Wright visibly. He cried multiple times on the stand; at one point lamenting that his creation, Bitcoin, was being used to fund child pornography and dark markets like Silk Road. After his testimony concluded, witnesses reported that Wright crawled into his lawyer's arms and bawled. The hearing transcript ran to 239 pages of large print. At another point during the proceedings, the judge threatened Wright with handcuffs after a courtroom outburst.

What the Court Found

The June 28 hearing was not the full trial; it was an evidentiary hearing about whether Wright should be held in contempt for failing to comply with discovery orders. The court found he had violated those orders by failing to disclose his Bitcoin holdings. The broader forgery findings came down in the judge's subsequent orders: the inference that Wright had fabricated or altered key documents was direct and unrebutted.

The Verdict

The full trial came in November 2021. The jury found that no mining partnership had existed between Wright and Kleiman; Wright did not owe half of 1.1 million Bitcoin. But the jury did award $100 million to W&K Information Defense Research, a company the two had co-founded, for conversion of intellectual property. Wright's claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto has never been proven in court or cryptographically. June 28, 2019 was the first day it was tested under oath. It did not hold up well.

Part of an ongoing series on Bitcoin history. This event falls on June 28, 2019.