Another Bitcoin computer in landfill – and other Craig Wright stories

The Granath v Wright trial concluded for the weekend with a grueling session from consultants KPMG on their forensic analysis of a trove of documents and emails on behalf of Magnus Granath.

There was endless talk about source code, metadata and even more mysterious matters. The judge spoke for us all when she interrupted at one point to ask “so what does it mean?” She summarized the response as: “so there is something going on, but we don’t know exactly what.”

It was a different world from the witnesses for Craig Wright, who had appeared earlier in the day. They relived bucolic scenes in Australia from Craig’s youth. “We were naughty young lads,” said his cousin Max Lynam. “We would go down to the creek and play in the mud.” And when they had had enough of that, “instead of Lego”, they worked on the Hitachi Peach computer that Max’s father had just bought.

At university, Craig was even more interested in computers, according to his friend Shoaib Yusuf, now Managing Partner of the Boston Consulting Group. They loved to discuss technology and business – including how credit card companies were ill-suited for the digital world. Craig believed that “we should have a single currency in the digital world that could be accepted globally.”

This was around 2007. Craig had a farm nearby and invited Shoaib over for the weekend. “I had never been to a farm before in my life,” he admitted, and he didn’t expect what he found. Craig’s farm had around 500 books and was impressively high-tech – even “connected to satellite internet”.

Two more witnesses spoke about Craig’s working life: Neville Sinclair, who met Craig when they both worked for BDO, the accountants. And David Bridges, from Qudos bank. Between them they told the story of how Craig tried to get support for his Bitcoin plans, first from BDO and then from contacts he had made through BDO.

For all these witnesses, the line of questioning ended the same way: what did you learn about Bitcoin from Craig, and what did you think when he was outed as Satoshi? If Craig’s team was hoping for a knockout punch, it never quite happened. The stories were completely compelling and consistent, but one more step in each of them would have done it.

In addition to inviting him to his farm, Craig sent Shoaib Yusuf “a lot of things” – links, research papers, etc. to follow up their intellectual discussions. So he sent you the Bitcoin white paper? He was asked. Shoaib wasn’t sure: “he might have shared something with me, but I don’t remember.”

Did you discuss Bitcoin with Craig? Neville Sinclair was asked. Yes, he answered. In fact, in 2011 he even gave me a coin with the Bitcoin symbol on it as a token. He told me that Bitcoin “could be worth something down the road.” But Sinclair was never asked if Craig had said he had invented it.

When did David Bridges first discuss Bitcoin with Craig? Well, he said, it would have been when someone used Bitcoin to buy a pizza. “He pulled out his laptop and showed me his digital wallet … showing how it all worked.” But we never got to know if Craig was talking about his own connection to Bitcoin.

Finally, most intriguingly, there was Craig’s cousin Max Lynam. Both Max and his father, Craig’s uncle, were still interested in computers when Max was an adult. Max said in late 2008, “Craig had some code he wanted us to test.” Max helped his father upgrade the computer so it could run Craig’s code 24/7. Craig sent the program and “some updates” and it was “just sitting there and running on the computer.”

So what was this mysterious program? It seems like they never asked. But the program ran non-stop until the end of 2011, when Max said the global financial crisis had hit their business and they had to shut it down. His father turned off the computer, threw it in a ship, and they moved home.

A couple of years later, in 2013, Max and his wife and children went to Melbourne to meet Craig’s second wife, Ramona, for the first time. During dinner, Craig asked “if we still had the computer.” When he heard what had become of it, he said, “You should have kept it; it might have been worth some money.”

And that’s when he told them about Bitcoin mining. “We said ‘what does that mean?'” Craig explained that if the value of Bitcoin ever reached $800, he would be a billionaire. He did some calculations about their computer and the time it had been running and said they wanted 6500 Bitcoins. At the time, Max said, Bitcoin was worth “still pretty much nothing,” and it was “definitely not worth looking for a computer that had been put in a landfill a couple of years ago.”

It was a sad story, but Max shrugged. And when Craig was singled out as Satoshi, he was just confused: “I don’t know why everyone is so upset about him calling himself Satoshi – it could be Bob.” Yes, plain old Bob Nakamoto. It might have saved a lot of trouble.

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