COPA lawyers struggle to keep Wright on topic as courtroom heats up

On Day three of the COPA v WRIGHT trial to determine whether Dr. Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, Wright, visibly frustrated, gave impassioned monologues around his thousands of whitepapers and how his vision for Bitcoin differs from the current iteration.

Noting that the bodies, cameras, and equipment in the courtroom had caused the temperature to rise four degrees Celsius above other rooms, lawyers for COPA were quite direct today,

“I appreciate you’ve ridden a hobby horse for the past few minutes but I put it to you that it was not an answer to my question.”

Wright vehemently defended his position that the current version of Bitcoin with limited block sizes goes against “his” vision for Bitcoin. Further, he cites recent high transaction fees, fueled by Ordinals, denote a flawed system.

Wright further proclaims that 80% of Bitcoin nodes run on AWS. A statistic that has been true of Ethereum, however, data from Bitnodes puts this figure closer to 1.8%.

When asked whether metadata is likely to be unreliable in any of his supporting documentation provided as evidence in his claim to be Satoshi, Wright avoided the question. Instead, Wright began long, rambling statements saying that the documents came from his staff rather than him directly.

He defended the integrity of his documents, attributing discrepancies in metadata to the handling by multiple staff over time and technical processes that may alter document properties unintentionally. This is partly because he allegedly develops ideas and theories on dictation devices and notepads, which staff members turn into documents.

Lawyers for COPA interjected at one point,

“Can I just pause you there Dr. Wright, because I believe you’ve gone quite a bit beyond the subject matter here.” and “Again, I need to ask you to answer the question.”

Wright’s defense is that he claimed to have ‘drafted’ the supplied information and that there is “no such thing” as a pristine copy of a file older than 5 years old. However, when asked whether the Bitcoin whitepaper is a pristine file, Wright must concede that it is “close to pristine” as it is downloaded fresh every time.

All of Wright’s documentation has allegedly been passed on by multiple staff members on servers, thus creating “imperfect” copies of the documents. Throughout the day, he continues to blame Citrix and other enterprise computer software for improperly saving files for any “clumsy edits.”

Wright repeatedly referenced his…