Judge ‘still investigating’ potentially forged emails in Craig Wright trial

• A journalist contacted a court clerk about documents introduced this week. Judge Mellor decided to reserve judgment about disclosing and/or allowing those documents as public evidence until the trial’s final verdict.
• The co-author of a joint statement on the software program used to create the original Bitcoin whitepaper, Arthur Rosendahl, took the stand as a witness.
• Wright’s legal team accepted certain conclusions regarding the Madden Report.

The Coinbase, Kraken, Block, and MicroStrategy-backed Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) is suing Craig Wright in the highest court in London. By the end of the trial, the High Court of Justice will determine whether Wright may assert authorship and copyright ownership over Bitcoin’s whitepaper. Wright believes he is Satoshi Nakamoto and wrote the paper himself. COPA argues he’s ‘faketoshi.’

Central to COPA’s argument is an alleged forgery created using LaTeX, an advanced document editor based on a 1978 typesetting system, TeX. The real Satoshi Nakamoto wrote Bitcoin’s whitepaper in Open Office. Someone also created a fake version of the whitepaper using LaTeX. That file has been in Wright’s possession.

To further explore this topic, a verified expert in LaTeX took the witness stand on Tuesday to answer technical questions about document forgeries using this platform.

Wright, as usual, claims that he has many enemies who have planted evidence to make him look like a liar. COPA believes Wright is just lying.

Judge to ‘reserve judgment’ on previously-submitted emails

Prior to commencing formal proceedings on Day 17 of the trial, Judge Mellor mentioned that a journalist had contacted a court clerk about emails submitted during the previous day. He explained that he was still investigating the matter and would reserve judgment until after he reached a final verdict. Wright’s attorney, Lord Grabiner KC, had no objections to that decision.

Read more: COPA v. Craig Wright trial analyzes newly published Satoshi emails

COPA’s attorney, Jonathan Hough, confirmed plans to ask Madden to analyze the emails and apply to have allegations that Craig Wright forged the emails brought before the court.

Hough mentioned that Wright had not contacted Placks and Lynch. He said he had asked Madden to verify his report but had not asked him to also confirm Placks and Lynch’s report.

Importantly, Wright’s attorney Grabiner accepted the Madden Report as verified. That declaration was notable because Wright previously attempted to dispute the expert Madden Report.

Read more: Craig Wright hits COPA trial with 164,000 pages of evidence

LaTeX expert Arthur Rosendahl takes the stand

Once the opening proceedings were complete, LaTeX expert Arthur Rosendahl took the stand. Rosendahl and Spencer Lynch submitted a joint statement confirming that the original Bitcoin whitepaper had been created using Open Office 2.4, not LaTeX.

While on the stand, Rosendahl disputed Wright’s claim that Rosendahl had bitcoin holdings, which would have raised the possibility of research bias. “I wish I had investments to lose,” he said.

He also denied having attended the same conference as Wright.

Wright’s attorneys covered Rosendahl’s interest in typography and font design, including a discussion of his executive-level work at a TeX designers group. Rosendahl explained typography and they discussed differences in the typography of Open Office versus LaTeX.

Read more: Craig Wright’s former lawyers say emails submitted to court ‘not genuine’

Craig Wright used Windows and Linux

Rosendahl described LaTeX as having three parts. “LaTeX itself is what allows writing and compiling,” he said. “The distro package contains [additional tools and styling classes]. The core program is basically the same from distro to distro.”

(A “distro” is a software distribution package. It’s a bundled collection of components that a user can open on their computer. In other words, a distro is a turnkey form of software — everything the end user needs to run software on their computer.)

He said most people use a distro even though it is not technically necessary. The testimony also mentioned that Wright using a distro called MiKTeX would not have affected his findings even if that had been made clear. MiKTeX works on Windows and Linux, two operating systems that Wright used by 2012 when he says he started using the distro.

Rosendahl used TeX Live for his analysis. He claimed it wasn’t warranted to use both TeX Live and MiKTeX since they were similar enough to make little difference.

The testimony also mentioned that MiKTeX was not supported on Linux until 2018 — about 10 years after Satoshi published the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Rosendahl listed that as one reason he didn’t use MiKTeX for his analysis. He did admit that Craig Wright could have created or used a customized package to get the Times New Roman font, but it wouldn’t have been available otherwise.

Read more: COPA trial: ‘Very annoying’ Craig Wright was ‘into Japanese stuff’

The day ended with another mention that Madden would create a report regarding the allegedly forged emails.

Judge Mellor closed with a wisecrack about the highly technical discussions that had become a large part of the COPA v. Wright lawsuit: “Back to protein folding, then. See you all tomorrow.”