Craig Wright’s Granath v Wright Complete Testimony: What Bitcoin Really Is and Why I Created It

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We encourage anyone with an interest in Bitcoin history to watch Dr. Craig Wright’s complete court testimony in Norway. The comments, made during his defense against plaintiff Marcus “Hodlonaut” Granath, are a thorough recollection of Bitcoin history from its creator. They also do a lot to explain the reasoning behind Bitcoin’s existence, its original use cases…and suggest why many continue to spread misinformation about Dr. Wright’s work.

The four-hour testimony (it’s worth it) begins with some now-familiar background on Dr. Wright’s family, his grandfather’s role as a codebreaker in World War II, and the impact this had on Wright’s career. He also gives graphic details of the threats against his wife and daughters, and the personal pain he felt from Granath’s social media campaign to discredit him. After all, this campaign is why the trial is happening at all.

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Dr. Wright also describes his work at Lasseters Online Casino and audit firm BDO, law enforcement agencies, and how these experiences led him to begin research work on a distributed, time-stamped, digital tokenization system in the form of digital cash. This work itself took a toll on his first marriage, as Wright left a well-paying job to embark on a resource-intensive pursuit with no guarantees of success.

He first saw the Bitcoin system as a product he could sell to a larger company, and held negotiations with both BDO and Microsoft. Both rejected him. Attempts to claim R&D expenses eventually led to a multimillion-dollar dispute with the Australian Tax Office (ATO), which served as the source of Dr. Wright’s “outing” as Satoshi in 2015 and several other accusations since.

Wright’s “sidebar” comments tell much of the story

Dr. Wright often inserts lengthy “sidebar” comments into his answers, addressing various issues that touch on the nature of Bitcoin and its history. Throughout his testimony, he gives his opinion on ICOs, NFTs, cryptography, Bitcoin traceability/reversibility, the true meaning of “decentralization” and “peer-to-peer”, microtransactions and block sizes, “small world”- networks and blind trusts.

Although both Dr. Wright’s and Granath’s attorneys often intervene to limit them, these sidebars serve two purposes. One is to show your deep knowledge of the topics and explain concepts that have been misused. The second is to ensure that these comments are now on permanent, sworn and public record. They are topics that are important to Bitcoin and the purpose it must fulfill, and an overview of how many of the concepts have been twisted by others to suit their own purposes.

An important sidebar comment explains some important points about the nature of Bitcoin:

“The whole point I’m trying to make, and I’m going to make, is that Bitcoin is not encrypted. Bitcoin can be seized, Bitcoin can be frozen. Bitcoin is trading within the law. There’s a lot of misinformation from BTC maximalists who want to go back to drug markets , child pornography, pedophilia—and they don’t want legal enforcement of Bitcoin. I want to make sure that judges and courts understand that Bitcoin is not encrypted and that it can be seized, frozen, and accessed under a court order. I want to make sure that the lies about thousands and thousands of nodes are understood. And that people understand that BTC has fifteen nodes, three of which control fifty-nine percent of the hash power today.”

Segments of Dr. Wright’s testimony suggest that the value of the intellectual property he has created matters more to him than the market value of his Bitcoin. This includes the Bitcoin protocol itself, as well as other systems and processes he has invented – some of which run on Bitcoin, and some of which are outdated in advance. He describes how, in the early days of his “outing” as Satoshi, his priority was to protect his IP as “it was the most valuable thing I had.”

Under cross-examination, Wright explains how he structured “Satoshis” keys first into encrypted key segments, then into the Wright International Investments company, and formal blind trust he regained control of in 2020. This process was to protect his intellectual property from Australian Tax Office (ATO), which had seen his Bitcoin research “as a stupid hobby” with no value, but later threatened to bankrupt him.

Dr. Wright, as he describes in his testimony, has an extensive background in digital investigation and audits. After creating Bitcoin, he first thought of it as a product to distribute to make audit operations easier, as a time-stamping and digital proof system. He thought more about the tokenization of physical products and assets, using simple digital cash as a proof of concept. Hard-coding the now-famous Times headline “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” was itself a time-stamping mechanism, proving that nothing could have happened on the Bitcoin network before that date.

His personal reluctance to “come out” as Satoshi is evident, both before and after the involuntary revelations in the 2015 WIRED and Gizmodo articles. The battle continued well after it was decided to formally link Wright and Satoshi, with Wright often feeling that he was pressured to prove something he didn’t want to prove, and wanted to regain control of his life.

Cross-examination gives a contrary view

The second half of the video is Dr. Wright’s cross-examination. Granath’s attorney’s questions mainly pick on details of the story Wright described in the earlier testimony, as well as pick on details in emails and other correspondence and how well he remembers them. Wright’s demeanor changes as the questions continue, especially as Granath’s counsel reads from Jameson Lopp’s lengthy article that “refutes” each of his claims. His answers are more combative and he is clearly annoyed at having to explain them in the face of persistent accusations from his critics.

The questions concern several accusations made in attempts to debunk Dr. Wright’s claims over the years, in his Wikipedia entries and online articles written by opponents. Such a claim contradicts Wright’s testimony that he has “never been convicted of anything.” When counsel points out that Wikipedia refers to a previous “conviction” for contempt of court in New South Wales, Wright points out that this is not a criminal offense in Australia, and therefore not a conviction. He received a community service sentence after he “was quite belligerent on the stand” during proceedings involving the ATO.

A simple but important question is whether Dr. Wright ever “had access to” Satoshi Nakamoto’s private Bitcoin keys (defined as blocks 1-12 for the court’s purposes). Dr. Wright says he doesn’t have them now, but the question of whether he ever had them is complex: Bitcoin allows multiple parties to hold parts of a cryptographic key, and for individuals to have proof of those key parts without ever necessarily know the exact characters they contain.

It is notable that Dr. Wright’s opponents usually distill their arguments down to the most basic “does he have the Satoshi keys or not?” question — but as Wright reiterates in his testimony, words like “have” and “own” get more complicated where Bitcoin, trusts and corporate structures are involved. Therefore, the core question is “Is Craig Wright Satoshi Nakamoto?” cannot possibly be answered with a readily available set of Bitcoin keys. Unfortunately, these explanations often fall on deaf ears – another reason why it is important to have them on the court record.

“What will it take to access the private keys?” asks the lawyer. “What I’m trying to explain is that you don’t have to,” Wright replies. “I had the algorithm that could calculate the private keys.”

For years, Dr. Wright tried to protect his IP, assets and hide his role in Bitcoin’s creation, rather than prove it. To do this, he created a multi-layered structure of companies, trusts and legal arrangements, which he must now explain to uncover Bitcoin’s history. Under lawyers’ questioning, it’s like watching a reverse engineering experiment, carried out by people who understand neither the end product nor the engineering involved, and explained by a creator clearly reluctant to reveal everything. Interspersed with the technical details are often very personal stories about business and private relationships, life crises and motivations that have influenced the result.

This series of complete video testimonials highlights the human side of the Bitcoin story. As much as we’ve heard the claim “code is law” and the like from the cypherpunk and blockchain communities over the years, this is far from true. A world of men remains, and must remain, under human law. Bitcoin was created by humans to serve humanity. The Bitcoin network works because of financial incentives on human actions. Likewise, there are many actions outside the network that also determine outcomes. This trial is an example of one of them.

Watch Granath vs Wright Satoshi Norway Trial Coverage Livestream Recaps on the CoinGeek YouTube channel.

New to Bitcoin? Check out CoinGeeks Bitcoin for beginners section, the ultimate resource guide for learning more about Bitcoin – as originally envisioned by Satoshi Nakamoto – and blockchain.