De ‘Original Gangsters’ van bitcoin hebben gesproken, en zelf verklaarde Satoshi kandidaat Craig Wright zag zijn getuigeverklaringen en rechtbankverhoren in duigen vallen. Vandaag kijken we naar het begin van het einde van Craig Wright: de rechtszaak tussen de Australische fraudeur en de Crypto Open Patent Alliance.

Intro

In deel 1 maakten we kennis met de cypherpunks, en in het bijzonder Adam Back, de man die door Satoshi Nakamoto wordt genoemd in de bitcoin whitepaper.

In (dit) deel 2 maken we kennis met Martti Malmi, een man die tot nu toe veel achter de schermen heeft geopereerd. Toch moeten we zijn belang in de geschiedenis van Bitcoin niet onderschatten: hij was de eerste developer die Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 hielp, en hij heeft dat een aantal jaren gedaan, tot het vertrek van Satoshi Nakamoto in april 2011.

We zullen zien dat Martti heel veel heeft gemaild met Satoshi, en in het belang van deze rechtszaak zijn deze emails uit de periode 2009-2011 allemaal vrijgegeven door Martti.

Martti Malmi

Martti Malmi zijn kruisverhoor vond, net als die van Adam Back ook plaats op 21 februari 2024. Martti was echter niet in de rechtszaal aanwezig zoals Adam Back, maar in plaats daarvan legde hij live zijn getuigenis af, en beantwoordde hij vragen van Craigs raadsman, op het tv-scherm met een door de rechtbank verstrekte videolink.

Laten we eerst eens kijken naar beide getuigenverklaringen van Martti.

Merk op dat ik de e-mails waar Martti Malmi het over heeft, heb toegevoegd aan de getuigenverklaringen, omdat de originele getuigenverklaringen alleen gecodeerde links ernaar bevatten, die ik heb weggelaten om een wat aangenamere leeservaring te creëren.

Fun Fact:

De eerste e-mail die Martti Malmi ontving van Satoshi Nakamoto dateert van 2 mei 2009. Craig Wright heeft echter altijd beweerd dat hij al in februari 2009 contact per email had met Martti Malmi. Die leugen kunnen we dus met ingang van deze rechtszaak naar het land der fabeltjes verwijzen.

I, Martti Malmi, will say as follows:

1. I am a Finnish computer scientist and software engineer who corresponded with the pseudonymous “Satoshi Nakamoto” regarding Bitcoin, shortly after its release in January 2009 until early 2011. This written statement has been prepared by Bird & Bird to record my own evidence and answers given to Bird & Bird during an interview conducted via Teams, but I understand from Bird & Bird that our exchanges are considered privileged. (…)
2. Bird & Bird has pointed out the declaration at the bottom of this statement to me and asked me in particular to keep in mind that on points that I understand to be important in the case, I have stated honestly (a) how well I recall matters and (b) whether my memory has been refreshed by considering documents, and if so how and when.

What I know about Craig Wright

1. I first became aware of Dr Wright in around 2015. I didn’t know anything about him then. He first sent an email to someone else I knew, who introduced him to me. Dr Wright then emailed me and asked me to have a meeting. He was interested in a project I was developing (which was a p2p decentralized identity and reputation database called “Identifi”) and he wanted to have a video call. I said yes but Dr Wright never came back to me about it.
2. Later, I came across a blog post by Dr Wright in which he claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto. When I read the blog post, it was very lengthy and hard to follow and understand, when just the simple signature would have been enough. Satoshi could just sign a public statement saying he is Satoshi using one of the keys from his first Bitcoin transactions, or his known PGP key.
3. Since then I have followed his claims online, on Twitter. I am aware that Craig Wright has been in lots of litigations and has mentioned me in some of them. I am also aware he is involved in the competitor cryptocurrency called BSV or “Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision”.
4. I was reluctant to make a statement in relation to these proceedings at first because I was worried that he might use it as an excuse to come up with lawsuits against me. I prefer to not be involved with that whole hassle. But in this case, I find it important and worthwhile to speak the truth and tell what I know to be true.

Daarna vervolgt hij met enkele aanvaringen die hij had met Satoshi Nakamoto:

• I was studying computer science at Helsinki University of Technology in 2009. I was interested in changing the world through technology rather than politics. I thought changing the money would be the most impactful thing. So I went looking for innovations in money, like googling for peer-to-peer money, and Bitcoin came up. It had been published recently. I think it was around April 2009 when I found it, and took a look at the white paper. I took some time to digest it and sent email to Satoshi. I offered him my help.

• He asked me to do the FAQ and other website content stuff first, which you can see mentioned in the emails, like creating a logo for the site.

• Later in 2009 I set up the forums and helped Satoshi by contributing to the Bitcoin source code as well. Satoshi and I worked together on the Linux port of the Bitcoin software. I know that he was able to compile on Linux as well as me, because we discussed him doing so.

TikiWiki werd besproken, maar uiteindelijk kozen Satoshi en Martti eind 2009 voor Simple Machines Forum

Martti en Satoshi bespraken Linux voor het eerst op 24 augustus 2009

• We mostly communicated by unencrypted email. I remember I did send the forum or server admin password to Satoshi using his PGP key, which he was able to decrypt.

• I don’t contribute to Bitcoin any more. I needed a real job in 2010, and got my first job that kind of matched my skill set. So I had less time to contribute from then on. The Bitcoin community started growing in 2010 and they were so on it I didn’t feel the same urgency to be a contributor. I did also maintain the domain name records for bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org for some time, up to about 2013 I think, when I handed over to others. I did not have the time and energy to participate in the maintenance and oversight of those sites, especially as Bitcoin grew and everything became more intense.

Verder levert Malmi een hele lijst met email conversaties die hij heeft gehad met Satoshi, met allemaal unieke inzichten!

• I have not previously published any of my emails with Satoshi. I was approached by a writer called Nathaniel Popper when he was writing a book about Bitcoin. I did show him some text from some of my emails before but I have not exported them before or shown all of it.

• Exhibit MM1 is a zip archive of electronic documents that I have created. I created it on my current personal computer by exporting native files. It contains copies of all my emails with Satoshi Nakamoto that I still have. I identified these by searching for all emails in my mailbox with Satoshi as the sender or a recipient.

• Bird & Bird have asked me to comment on my technical set up during the relevant period. I recall that I used Windows in 2009 when I was corresponding with Satoshi Nakamoto, and used Thunderbird as a mail client. I also used Ubuntu Linux.

• Now, I normally use MacOS as my operating system and normally use a browser based client [i.e. access my email through an internet browser]. To create this export, I used the program MacOS Mail, which downloaded and exported the emails in their native format.
  
• The archive in MM1 is everything I still have now but it’s not totally complete.

Vervolgens noemt de Fin enkele redenen waarom hij een aantal documenten kwijt is, onder andere omdat hij bijlagen niet heeft bewaard. Ook omdat hij meer dan één e-mail adres gebruikte om met Satoshi te communiceren (bijvoorbeeld die van zijn universiteit, die later van domein veranderden, en Malmi had geen back-ups gemaakt).

Verder heeft Malmi nog enkele andere bijlagen, gekregen van een vriend die ze destijds heeft ontvangen: Exhibit MM2.

Dr Wright’s claims about me

19. I am aware that Craig Wright mentioned me in the Kleiman proceedings. I just read again parts of the transcript. He said I was one of the cofounders of the Silk Road and other dark web marketplaces, along with another Bitcoin Talk forum admin Theymos, and an American man called Ross Ulbricht. He cited the creation of these dark web marketplaces as the reason why he “left publicly as Satoshi in 2010”. He also said I started working on a system to allow assassination markets. It has been well known from reports that Ross Ulbricht was convicted actually, of operating Silk Road. But the claims about me are ridiculous and false and I believe the claim against Theymos is also false.

20. In the proceedings he was asked to spell out my name for the court reporter, and he misspelled it as “Marrti”. I do not think this was a mistake in transcribing because my name was written correctly elsewhere in the transcript. Satoshi could spell my name! Craig Wright also said I was Norwegian but I am Finnish. I emailed Satoshi from my addresses ending in .fi. In one of the exhibited emails I even gave him my street address in Finland.

“There are some passwords and a street address mentioned in the emails, but those are no longer valid or relevant.” Bron: Martti Malmi’s Github pagina

21. I think in a trial in Norway, Craig Wright mentioned me in another context there. I think he said that I wrote some of the posts from Satoshi’s accounts, which I did not do.

22. Bird & Bird have showed me a Tweet conversation of Craig Wright at which mentions me. It says that it was me that called Bitcoin a “cryptocurrency” and that he should not have let others write marketing material. While I wrote texts for the bitcoin.org website, I did not write the referred Bitcoin 0.3 release note where Satoshi calls Bitcoin a “cryptocurrency”, or any other marketing material.

Satoshi: “Someone came up with the word “cryptocurrency”… maybe it’s a word we should use when describing Bitcoin, do you like it?”

Martti antwoordt de volgende dag:

“It sounds good. “The P2P Cryptocurrency” could be considered as the slogan, even if it’s a bit more difficult to say than “The Digital P2P Cash”. It still describes the system better and sounds more interesting, I think.”

Vervolgens gaf Malmi een getuigeverklaring af waarin hij aangeeft dat alles naar waarheid is gedeeld. Dan pakken we meteen enkele snippets van de tweede getuigenverklaring van Martti Malmi ook even op.

I, Martti Malmi, will say as follows:

4. My comments on Dr Wright’s first statement are as follows:

a. At paragraph 83, he states “From February 2009 when Martti Malmi approached me…”. This is incorrect. I did not first approach him in February 2009 but on 1 May 2009. As my correspondence with Satoshi Nakamoto shows, he replied to me on the next day (2 May 2009).

b. In respect of paragraphs 134 and 135, when bitcoin.org/forum was migrated to bitcointalk.org, only the URL and possibly the hosting arrangements changed. The forum database (including all posts and users) was not altered in the process.

5. My comments on Dr Wright’s fourth statement are as follows:

a. Paragraph 14(c) refers to a “recovery email” of [email protected], that was “set-up as a back-up in 2011 for Martti Malmi”. I had never heard of a [email protected] email address before reading Dr Wright’s statement.

b. In relation to paragraph 104, Satoshi’s public PGP key was published by himself in 2009, this can be seen in the first Archive.org record of bitcoin.org shown at Exhibit MM-3. Although the PGP key itself is not visible at this URL, there is a URL at the very bottom of this webpage that hyperlinks to the PGP key as highlighted in red below.

En hoe verliep het kruisverhoor van Martti Malmi? “CryptoDevil” rapporteert:

Martti Malmi reageert later nog in de videoverbinding op de hele reeks aan onzin die CSW heeft bedacht.

H: Introduces himself as barrister representing COPA asking him to confirm witness statements as true
M: Agrees
Hand over to Wright’s barrister
W: “Are you alone in the room”
M: “Yes”
W: “Can you confirm you have no docs relevant to the case with you”
M: Yes”
W: “You do not have access to electronic device capable of receiving messages other than the videolink”
M: “Yes”
W: “You first witness statement you say that were studying at Helsinki Uni 2009”
M: “Yes”
W: “At that time you were interested in changing the world through technology rather than politics, through innovations in money, peer to peer money, you searched google.”
M: “Yes”
W: “Did you join chat forums and mailing lists as a result of that interest?”
M: “No I did not”
W: “Can we see this email to Satoshi you sent to Satoshi in May 2009. You say ‘Hello I’m trickstern from the http://anti-state.com forum. Do you see that?”
M: “Yes”
W: “So at that time were you using the antistate forum?”
M: “Yes at that time after I had discovered bitcoin”
W: “So the answer to my previous question would have been yes. Did you use IRC”
M: “Later yes”
W: “Who were you chatting on IRC with?”
M: “I started it originally and it grew over time, I do not recall too many specific people I was chatting with”
W: “When do you say you started this channel?”
M: “I’m not sure I think 2009/10 but not at first when I discovered bitcoin, when the community grew”
W: “Why didn’t you use IRC channels when you were exploring for peer2peer money originally”
M: “I use google for searching topics. IRC is like Slack”
W: “Your statement, you say you did not approach CSW in Feb but the 1st May 2009 do you say that?”
M: “I was talking about Satoshi”
W: “Your message to Satoshi in the former email “Hello I’m trickstern from the anti-state forum and I would like to help with Bitcoin. You were assuming that Satoshi would know about that forum”
M: “Yes, Satoshi replied to the message thread I started about Bitcoin there”
W: “He replied to that message thread?”
M: “He replied to someone’s message on a thread I started about Bitcoin”
W: “Do you remember what you posted?”
M: “It was something about separation of state and money”
W: “You understand that CSW said he contacted you on forums about Bitcoin, yes”
M: “Yes”
W: “You hadn’t spoken to Satoshi before his message on that forum.”
M: “Yes I only discovered Bitcoin in April”
W: “How do you know that date?”
M: “I recall where I was living at the time and I had shortly moved to another address at the time I first spoke to Satoshi””
W: “Do you recall communicating with Liberty07 on the anti-state forum?”
M: “No I don’t”
W: “In his reply to you Satoshi says ‘thanks for starting that topic on asc, your understanding of Bitcoin is spot-on”. Maybe you could create the website on sourceforge which is currently blank and he talks about you writing an FAQ”
M: “Yes”
W: “Shortly afterwards he made you a developer on sourceforge. Two days later. So I suggest to you that Satoshi must have been familiar with whoever Trickstern was at that time?”
M: “No I don’t think there was any reason he would have been”
W: “Are you suggesting he just handed out developer access readily to anyone?”
M: “It wasn’t code access it was for the forum”
W: “He was bringing you into the project, wasn’t he. I suggest you and he were familiar by then not just through those emails but also on forums”
M: “I don’t know how familiar we could have been other than those messages and the forum thread”
W: “Well I put it to you this is CSW’s claim. Satoshi asked you to create the website on Sourceforge bitcoin dot sourceforge dot net”
M: “Yes”
W: “Satoshi then said ‘Your FAQ looks good so far. You can create whatever you want [on this forum]” So that is talking about the bitcoin project on SF”
M: “Yes”
W: “Your first witness statement you say you helped Satoshi to set up the forums”
M: “Yes”
W: “So you were helping the project by setting up the forums and also contributing to the source code?”
M: “Yes and writing the FAQ”
W: “The Forums means the SourceForge project forum”
M: “Yes at first it was SourceForge but later we experimented with other forum software”
W: “Yes the first stage in the movement of the forum. Going to a later email 13th June 2009 you say ‘the new Bitcoin website portal is at bitcoin dot sourceforge dot net. You then established dev one”
M: “Where do I say that?”
W: “This email July 2009”
M: “No that is the same forum, just a sub-section”
W: “When you moved the forum from SF, it’s right that the 1st stage was to move from SourceForge to bitcoin dot org is that right?”
M: “Yes”

W: “At that time you took over control of the bitcoin dot org domain name”
M: “Yes with instruction from Satoshi”
W: “The bitcointalk wiki page”
M: “It has not been edited recently, I made that paragraph about the domain ownership in 2013”
W: “It says the forum was moved to bitcoin dot org and the domain name was transferred from Satoshi to Sirius. Sirius is you isn’t that right?”
M: “Yes. That was my nickname”
W: “Do you know when this move took place?”
M: “No I don’t recall when Satoshi gave the domain to me 2011”
W: “Did it not happen before 2011?”
M: “No I don’t believe so, there’s no emails showing that”
W: “Let’s take it through the emails clarifying it. You say in your statement when bitcoin dot org forum was migrated to bitcointalk dot org only the url changed. A further move”
W: “Could I ask you again if you are able to clarify [given that] what the timing was of the move from SourceForge to bitcoin dot org?”
M: “I cannot”
W: “The second move to Bitcointalk took place about June 2011”
M: “Yes about Summer of 2011”
W: “Can I show you what CSW says about that. He says ‘i around June/July 2011 Martti took down the bitcoin dot org server and initiated a new server Bitcointalk you agree it was migrated to a different server?”
M: “No I don’t recall a server migration, the url can just change”
M: “I do recall after that the hosting moving to @magicaltux servers ‘Tibanne’ hosting”
W: “Your second witness statement you say when the forum was migrated to Bitcointalk only the url and possibly hosting arrangements change. You agree the hosting arrangements did change”
M: “Yes”
W: “Those arrangements included access to the site and how the site would operate?”
M: “Yes”
W: Asks Marrti to read CSW witness statement paragraph to himself
W: “Do you agree with CSW that when a db is moved to a new server the root admin priv from the original server do not automatically transfer”
M: “No I do not think it automatically transfers typically”
W: “So the answer is you agree with what he says”
M: “Yes”
W: “CSW says there is no way to move the db and forum to a new site without not resetting the db admin privs. He is correct about that isnt he?”
M: “No you can use the same credentials on the new server”
W: “But they don’t automatically transfer”
M: “Yes”
W: “The intention of moving to a new server was to remove Satoshi’s access”
M: “No that was not the purposes”
W: “But that was the effect”
M: “Yes but I have great respect for Satoshi and he could always have asked for creds if he wanted them”
W: “This email from Satoshi to you dated 3rd May 2009, we see that you say ‘alright I can do the website and FAQ and I’ll start writing it now with the questions I can think of’. Satoshi says ‘that would be great, I added you with the SourceForge access’. Do you recall that?”
M: “Yes”
W: “This question and answer dump, this was a dump of the existing Q&A?”
M: “Yes it was a list of questions he had been asked by others and had answered”
W: “There are 15 pages worth of questions. As I understand it the text that we see on p15 appears to be a posting by Satoshi?”
M: “Yes”
W: “The second paragraph Satoshi says ‘then stronger encryption became available to the masses [allowing them to secure their data] It’s time we had the same thing for money, secured by cryptographic proof, effortless transactions. Bitcoin uses p2p proof to check txs”
W: “Do you recall discussing timestamps servers with Satoshi”
M: “No”
W: “This post is drawing a connection between the securing of data and bitcoin’s timestamp server”
M: “Fundamentally that is describing the blockchain way of timestamping with POW”
W: “Securing the ledger with timestamps”
M: “Yes with POW”
W: “The object with it being transparent and verifiable for all participants”
M: “Yes”
W: “The question there ‘btw I don’t think we talked about this’ and Satoshi begins ‘bitcoin is a way to secure transactions with timestamps’ He says ‘ I should add a command to timestamp a file that way’”
M: “Yes”
W: “Did you discuss this with Satoshi?”
M: “No”
W: “It is clear from that the Satoshi was looking at adding a few lines of code to allow for anything to be timestamped yes?”
M: “Yes”
W: “Do you know what would need to be added to the protocol to allow for a file to be timestamped”
M: “You would make a cryptographic hash of the file and write that to a transaction and secure it to the blockchain”
W: “Bitcoin has caused widespread interest in distributed technologies for securing timestamped files”
M: “Yes”
W: “You say there [witness statement] ‘we mostly communicated by unencrypted email. It’s right that you also did by other means”
M: “No, he sent me one message on the forum but I don’t recall any other means”
W: “Are you sure about your recall that Satoshi didn’t DM you on SourceForge?”
M: “No he did not”
W: “CSW disputes that. Do records of those SourceForge messages exist?”
M: “Yes I checked my messages on Bitcointalk and I saw just the one old message there. All the old SourceForge messages are archived there”
W: “Who did you request archive access to?”
M: “You just file a request on the forum”
W: “Who controls that?”
M: “I don’t want to say as I do not know”
W: “Please speculate”
M: “Theymos I think”
W: “Who is Theymos?”
M: give name
W: “You say the direct message between you and Satoshi have not been provided in this case”
M: “Correct I did not recall that message at the time”
W: “Those are all my questions”
Mellor: “You were asked about removal of Satoshi’s access and that he could always ask for access. I assume he never did?”
M: “No he did not”
Mellor: “Thank you, you are released”

Outro

Nog één ding. Martti Malmi wisselde honderden e-mails uit met Satoshi Nakamoto. Een deel van deze e-mails is verloren gegaan door de domeinwijziging van de universiteit, maar Martti creëerde een Github-pagina met de resterende schatkamer van maar liefst 260 e-mails in historische volgorde.

Deze schat breidt de momenteel bekende pool van echte Satoshi-berichten en e-mails uit met ongeveer een derde.

En als je het mij vraagt, zijn deze nieuw onthulde e-mails perfect geschikt om opnieuw een professioneel stylometrie onderzoek tussen de geschriften van Satoshi Nakamoto en Craig Wright uit te voeren.

Nogmaals, zegt u? Ja, nogmaals. Er is al eens een dergelijk onderzoek geweest. Met het weinig verrassende resultaat dat Craig Wright zijn schrift niet lijkt op dat van Satoshi Nakamoto.

“John Noecker, the chief scientist at Juola & Associates, said he does not believe Wright authored the bitcoin white paper, based on linguistic texts. He used an analysis tool called Envelope that condenses millions of linguistic features the company has studied for years.” — “Text Analysis Confirms Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto”

Maar de meeste lezers zullen het idee wel begrijpen met het huidige materiaal, ben ik van overtuigd.

Hoe Satoshi Nakamoto praat met developers

“Thanks, I haven’t settled on a theme yet. My first experiment was to try something besides yet another blue site. Another line of thought is that it should be like a bank website, stately, professional and official looking to support confidence in financial matters.

The logo’s a little too Disco/web-1990’s. I still like your bitweaver one better, I recreated it with text as a placeholder for now. When the theme is more settled, I’ll think about a matching logo.

Good idea about the Sourceforge tag, we can use all the graphics we can get. I have more to do before we go live, and we need to give the search engines more time.” — Quote uit de Martti Malmi emails

Hoe Craig Wright over developers praat

“The cases will be like a lottery. Most BTC devs will fold. A few will be bankrupted, lose their families and collapse. But, a few will become examples to the world. In this, I will prove to the world in court. They will experience torment, but for the cause of truth. In this, the lies will be purged. In this, we start the Jihad, the holy war against the falsehood of “social media”.

I will happily take down every dev who filed a line of code since SegWit if I don’t get compliance. I will burn Cryptocurrency to non existence and have the US government collect the ashes if a single dev exists making BTC with the name Bitcoin.

He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing. I will not stop if a single system exists that is falsely called bitcoin… And if I die, it is set so 5 billion USD goes to fund global actions. I will personally hunt every dev until they are broke, bankrupt and alone before I lost.

If a single project exists that calls itself bitcoin and is not bitcoin as I defined in my whitepaper, then yes I will bring nuclear Armageddon to the industry.

I am the punishment of God in cryptocurency. If those had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon them.” — Quotes gevonden op social media websites

Dat is alles, mensen. Bedankt voor het lezen, tot de volgende keer met een samenvatting van de hele COPA v Wright rechtszaak!

Arthur van Pelt