The Case Against Craig Wright’s Voting Documents and Their Authenticity

14. Variations on “Secure and Trustworthy Voting” {ID_004732} {PTR-F/89/1} and {ID_004734} {PTR-F/91/1}

284. These documents are two versions of a long paper addressing quorum-based voting in distributed networks and titled “Secure and Trustworthy Voting”. This is a subject which Dr Wright now maintains influenced his development of Bitcoin. One is a plaintext document, “Q.txt”. Another is an RTF equivalent of the same document, “IT1581b.rtf”. By their presence in BDOPC.raw, the documents purport to pre-date 31 October 2007.

(a) COPA’s Reasons for Alleging Forgery

285. These documents are 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].

286. The document {ID_004734} has been backdated. It is a Rich Text File created with the editor version Riched20.dll v10.0.19041. That version of Riched20 is the version associated with the May 2020 update of Windows 10. [Madden3 [86-91] G/5/34], [PM46 [149 H/278/53]

287. The section on BDOPC.raw above is repeated. Comparing the deleted version of these documents to the disclosed versions shows that they did not exist in this form on 17 September 2023. They were modified within BDOPC.raw at some point between 17 September and 19 September 2023. This was done with the computer clock set back to 2007, in order to backdate the document. [PM46 [136 and 141] H/278/46]

288. The modifications included the following:

288.1. In {ID_004732}, altering the words “blockchains” to “hash chains” [PM46 [136] H/278/46].

288.2. In {ID_004732}, deleting references to the dates of articles published in 2016 and 2017 and replacing them with “(?)” [PM46 [136] H/278/46].

288.3. Deleting a long paginated Table of Contents, with page numbers referring to formatted pages. The inclusion of formatted page numbers in a plain text document is not consistent with the technical limitations of plain text documents. It is consistent with a plain text document being created by copying and pasting from a pre-existing MS Word or RTF document [PM46 [136.c.] H/278/47].

288.4. In respect of {ID_004734}, the equivalent edits as displayed in {ID_004732} [PM46 [141] H/278/49 (note incorrect reference in that paragraph to {ID_004737}].

289. The documents were sourced from BDOPC.raw. The section “BDOPC.raw” above is repeated. These documents were added by the Manipulation User.

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

290. 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.

291. These documents were added to BDOPC.raw by the Manipulation User. The Manipulation User is Dr Wright. The section “BDOPC.raw” above is repeated.

292. Dr Wright has attached particular importance to these documents:

292.1. Both are said to be important to Dr Wright’s case because they are versions of “a paper titled: “Secure and Trustworthy Voting in Distributed Networks: A Quorum-Based Approach with Hash Chains and Public Key Infrastructure”. Dr Wright produced this paper during his Master of Information Systems Security research at Charles Sturt University. The paper considers secure voting mechanisms in distributed systems through a combination of quorum-based voting, hash chains, and Public Key Infrastructure, which is analogous to core elements of Bitcoin.” [Wright6 E/21/3; Schedule 1 to Field1, L20/223/6].

292.2. They are said to be “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]

293. The documents were not disclosed at the proper time. They were 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

294. Dr Wright claimed that these were added to the BDO Drive back in 2007 and also made reference to him copying from a drive that was linked somehow, saying that he was creating a VMware image. Dr Wright accepted that ID_004734 cannot be authentic to 2007 because it was created with a 2020 version of Windows Rich Text Editor, but said this must have been due to the hack by Mr Ager-Hanssen or his associates: {Day5/95:9} and following.

295. Dr Wright sought to explain away the fact that there were precursor documents on InfoDef09.raw which showed references to texts from 2016 and 2017 and that those references had been replaced by question marks in the present document by saying that they were accounted for by his “horrible way of working” {Day9/96:24} and following.

296. Dr Wright sought to explain away the presence of a contents table in the version on InfoDef09.raw, which did not exist in this document, by saying that somebody (presumably Mr Ager-Hanssen or an associate) had created a contents table: {Day9/97:24} and following.

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

297.1. Dr Wright’s story about creating some form of VMware image does not make any sense and is a further example of obfuscation by Dr Wright.

297.2. There is no evidence to back up Dr Wright’s claimed technical effect of how these files interact when converted from one format to the other.

297.3. The precursor documents found on InfoDef09.raw included a table of contents and references to papers published post-2007. The versions Dr Wright manipulated had dropped the table of contents (because it would not make sense to have one in this sort of document) and had replaced what would be anachronistic references with question marks again. The story of this happening as a result of the supposed hack, as well as being without supporting evidence, presupposes an extraordinary effort at creating multiple fake versions of documents on the different raw images in a short space of time.

297.4. Mr Lynch agreed with Mr Madden that ID_0004732 and ID_004734 were manipulated: {Q/6/5}.