Craig Wright’s LaTeX document "ESDT.tex" Faces Forgery Allegations from COPA

18. “ESDT.tex” {ID_004736} {PTR-F/93/1}

340. The document is a LaTeX source presented as if it was precursor work to the Bitcoin White Paper created during Dr Wright’s employment at BDO. Dr Wright relies upon it as a draft addressing technical concepts which influenced his development of Bitcoin. By its presence in BDOPC.raw, the document purports to pre-date 31 October 2007.

(a) COPA’s Reasons for Alleging Forgery

341. This document is among the 71 New Reliance Documents that were inserted into the BDO Drive by the editing process and which the parties’ experts agree were manipulated [Madden / Lynch1 [12] Q/6/5].

342. Copies of the document are also located on the Samsung Drive. These copies display signs of metadata editing and clock manipulation. [PM46 [74-79] H/278/17]

343. A related LaTeX file has been recovered which encodes the same textual content in a different way. That document had been deleted but was recoverable from within the Samsung Drive. The structure of that file is consistent with the file being generated automatically by software conversion tools (rather than being authored by hand). [Madden4 [67-70] H/278/16].

344. There is a related file {ID_004735} which appears intended to create an image for the paper. The code in that file is consistent with having been generated by conversion tools such as Aspose. [Madden3 [75] G/5/31]

345. A related document, ESDT.pdf, was recovered from the Samsung Drive. ESDT.pdf was a compiled form of {ID_004736} but was deleted and emptied from the Recycle Bin in September 2023 [PM46 [41-52] H/278/10]. The metadata associated with the deleted file indicates that it was modified on 16 September 2023, but the other timestamps have been backdated to 31 October 2007.

346. The metadata of this document (when compared with metadata of other documents related to it) displays signs of metadata editing directly using specialised metadata editing tools. [Madden3 [52-63] G/5/23]

347. The document was sourced from BDOPC.raw. The section “BDOPC.raw” above is repeated. This document was added to BDOPC.raw by the Manipulation User.

(b) COPA’s Reasons for Inferring Dr Wright’s Knowledge / Responsibility

348. The effect of the tampering is to make the document appear to be supportive of Dr Wright’s claim to be Satoshi Nakamoto, contrary to fact.

349. The further effect of tampering is to lend support to Dr Wright’s new position that the Bitcoin White Paper was created in LaTeX. That story is a recent product of Dr Wright’s change in his account.

350. This document was added to BDOPC.raw by the Manipulation User. The Manipulation User is Dr Wright. Paragraph 45 of the section “BDOPC.raw” above is repeated.

351. Dr Wright has attached particular importance to this document:

351.1. It is said to be among Dr Wright’s “Notes, drafts and articles addressing technical concepts that underpin the concepts developed in the Bitcoin White Paper" [Wright6 E/21/3; Schedule 1 to Field1, L20/223/4]

351.2. It is said to be important to Dr Wright’s case because it is a version of “a paper prepared for a 360º Security Summit on 15 June 2006 concerned with “Implementing Effective Risk-Based Controls”, which Dr Wright prepared in his role at BDO. The hash chain technology discussed in the paper is analogous to the blockchain technology used in Bitcoin." [Wright6 E/21/3; Schedule 1 to Field1, L20/223/5]

352. The document was not disclosed at the proper time. It was disclosed instead from the BDOPC.raw image. BDOPC.raw is not a reliable source because it has been manipulated by Dr Wright. The section “BDOPC.raw” above is repeated.

(c) Dr Wright’s Explanations and COPA’s Rebuttal

353. Dr Wright claimed that his use of Xcopy had caused the load file metadata for this and two related documents to all have creation times at precisely the same time on 19 September 2017, with August 2008 accessed and modified times for this document and one other related one. He also claimed that he was still accessing files at BDO in 2008 and so that these may have been copied from a different drive: {Day5/102:21} and following. See Wright11 {CSW/2/43} for an example of him claiming how Xcopy works.

354. COPA submitted that this explanation should be rejected as dishonest for the following reasons:

354.1. If the BDOPC.raw is accepted as being forged, it follows that documents on it should be treated as being forged unless they are documents which Mr Madden says are original to the image that was taken in October 2007.

354.2. Mr Madden states that Xcopy simply does not have the effect that Dr Wright claims. This was also the view of Mr Lynch, as recorded in their Joint Report: {Q/6/4}.

354.3. Dr Wright’s excuse about accessing files at BDO in 2008 is inconsistent with his claim that the files on the BDO Drive are a time capsule and taken from a capture of the BDO files he had in 2007.

354.4. Mr Lynch agreed with Mr Madden that ID_0004736 was manipulated: {Q/6/5}.