Wright made an application to delay the trial one month becaus he couldn't possibly be ready in time. This was, he said, mostly due to the effort required for all his replacement reliance docs which he magically found a bit after his initial reliance documents were shown to be forged but also because it was taking to for wright himself to reply to the 50 forgery allegations and he was working 18 hour days 7 days a week to catch up already... and as a result a trial on the current schedule (which has been known for a year) couldn't possibly be fair.

But, having just gone through a scheduling exercise for the Tulip case we knew (and presumably he knew) the next large opening in the Judge's schedule would be in March 2025. So functionally, it would have been a 14 month delay. This was clearly unacceptable to the defendants for all the obvious reasons. Wright hadn't even sought permission to introduce his replacement documents as permission was needed since it was long past the deadlines. We suggested that if it's going to slip the trial date he ought not be allowed it. His opposition also offered to reduce the number of forgery claims, if that would allow keeping the schedule. True to form Wright's story on what delay he needed and what was causing it kept shifting to exclude any compromise.

This came before the court today and the judge ruled to grant a three week delay, so the trial will now start February 5th, sparing Wright the indignity of bitnorbert viewing the opening arguments. :) No reduction in the forgery claims. Wright's latest documents will be added to his reliance docs, which I'm quite happy about.

Wright's team made it fairly clear in the hearing that they'd be appealing if they didn't get their way. If what they hoped to achieve had genuinely been one month then I wouldn't think it would be worth it to appeal three weeks. But it seems clear enough to me that he really wanted a massive delay. So we'll see.

But the stuff people here will be excited about isn't the schedule. It's all the stuff which can now be made public about Wright's latest "irrefutable proof".

We all learned through the CAH posts that Wright claims to have "found" hard drives that should have been produced as evidence in this and at least three other cases but for unknown reasons were not. (well, come on: we know why...). The drives were said to contain a drive image from 2007 that effectively acts as a time-capsule capturing his system at the time.

Wright then told us that the 2007 images contain early whitepaper drafts, precursor documents, and related material in LaTeX, ascii, and rtf, in spite have never mentioning LaTeX prior to getting the first forensic report. This claim concerned me somewhat: So far we have blown up his documents mostly with PDF and word-specific forgery evidence like grammerly tags, anachronistic fonts, hidden older revisions, etc. But LaTeX is an old and relatively stable system driven by pure text markup.

I think I could very easily have created a LaTeX document today that would be indistinguishable from one I authored in 2007, in fact ignoring filesystem metadata I'd probably do so by accident. So were we about to get a pile of documents which were entirely non-falsifiable by lacking any kind of meaningful metadata or invisible indicator?

Spoiler: No we were not. Come on, this is Wright. He wasn't going to get it right.

Highlights from the 2007 time-capsule include: Short (likely chatgpt generated) C++ source files that extensively use C++11 features, LaTeX documents that were converted using a 2022 revision of Pandoc, LaTeX documents that use packages that didn't exist until 2013. RTF files generated with a recent Windows service pack, and so on.

Perhaps it wasn't wise to use a document format that one of the COPA lawyers and several of the developer defendants are pretty familiar with?

But wait there's more:

Then at the last minute before the pre-trial review hearing he claims that he now has a LaTeX source which has been stored on his Overleaf (web latex editor) account, which when compiled with Overleaf produces the exact Bitcoin Whitepaper.

This is a rather remarkable claim, considering that (1) the WP was written with Open Office 2.4, it says so right in the file and there are many clear indicators that this is true, (2) Wright has never made any mention of it before.

Wright went on to claim that the source was so confidential that it could only be seen by COPA's attorneys (and one person from COPA). Then he backed off to saying that we could see it to but only under burdensome confidentiality rules that sounded like they would have prevented us from trying to render it. In any case, his big gain has been delaying granting access. The court didn't buy it and ordered access be granted under standard confidentiality terms.

But as soon as they told us we immediately demanded the output: surely that couldn't be subject to the burdensome confidentiality rules. They finally provided it on the eve of the hearing. But when it came it came with a list of excuses as to why it was actually not that similar, much less "exact" (or "materially identical", which they switched to calling it at some point). Its flaws go far beyond their admissions too, but until we're certain that he can't continue to change his files...

Wright tried to get a forensic report to vouch for his drive image being a timecapsule. Instead they found the filesystem metadata seemed to show the filesystem was created in 2023.

Speaking of experts: You've heard of the Madden report that is almost 1000 pages long and demolishes Wright's original documents. Wright was allowed an expert reply. Then the two experts produce a joint report. If you recall Norway you'll recognize what comes next: In the joint report Wright's expert comes to agree on the vast majority with the opposing expert. The few differences are some documents where Madden says they have "manipulated timestamps" while Wright's side says they're "unreliable".

A similar pattern happened for Wright Autism report: Wright very late produced a report demanding astonishing affordances (like providing him the questions in writing in advance). COPA hired an expert who similarly met with Wright, but different to Wright's expert he watched videos of Wright's prior trial testimony and public speeches. Defendant's expert was of the view that it would be reasonable to provide Wright with pen&paper, a live transcript, and similar minor affordances. Then they wrote a joint report, and after seeing the videos Wright's expert switched to agree with ours. COPA is seeing the considerable costs Wright caused them because back at the beginning COPA told Wright's side that they though their expert needed to see those trial videos, and because before taking on the cost of their own expert COPA offered even more expansive affordances than they eventually agreed on.

Back to the document forensic experts: You may recall in identity wright managed to turn over (accidentally?) a copy of the myob accounting data that was at the foundation of the TTL claim supposidly containing 2010/2011 information on the purchase of 1feex and 12ib7. The audit logs indicated that the records were all entered in March 2020, around the time Wright started on that lawsuit. Wright responded with some hand-waving and a claim that the live online copy of the myob data was the real data. Wright gave his expert access to the "live" data, without providing it to us. But his expert extracted it and produced it as part of his report. In the Joint report both experts agree that the replacement "live" data was created in May 2023.

This is some of the most interesting and notable stuff, but it's just the tip of the iceberg.