(Newswire.net — November 11, 2021) — Day 6 of the Kleiman v Wright trial has drawn the interest of the general public, as evidenced by the packed courtroom, with many not being able to get inside due to COVID-19 regulations.
This is largely in part because Craig S. Wright, the defendant in the case and the man behind the identity of Bitcoin white paper author Satoshi Nakamoto, has taken the stand for the plaintiff’s side.
The first major question in the trial is whether Wright is the sole identity behind Satoshi Nakamoto, or whether Satoshi is a partnership between the late Dave Kleiman and Wright.
The second question is whether Wright and Kleiman mined together 1.1 million Bitcoin through a business partnership in W&K Info Defense Research, LLC. If their partnership is proven, the plaintiff stands to receive up to half of the 1.1 million Bitcoin that is currently priced at about $69 billion.
Numerous witnesses have already testified and hundreds of pieces of evidence in the form of emails and documents have already been presented, as well as statements from Wright himself acknowledging Kleiman’s help. Day 6 brings in Ramona Watts’ written deposition, Andrew O’Hagan’s video deposition, and Wright taking the stand.
Ramona Watts
Watts is married to Wright since 2013 and has been involved as a director in several of his companies since 2011. However, she testified to having no knowledge of any kind of transfer of Kleiman’s assets from a company that Wright and Kleiman was allegedly working on as partners to Wright. Watts said Wright “never told me that he mined Bitcoin with Dave Kleiman.”
Watts interacted with Kleiman on multiple occasions, and she said on record that Kleiman told her, “I know he’s difficult, but you just have to hang in there because what he’s doing is pretty amazing and pretty remarkable, and you really need to support him.” This, as other email exchanges have shown, illustrates the good relationship that Kleiman and Wright had, with the former seemingly in awe of Wright’s genius.
Kleiman’s statement to Watts also implies that Wright has a condition called Asperger syndrome, which is under the autism spectrum disorder, and had difficulties expressing himself under normal social situations. “It has taken 10 years for him to look me in the eye when he talks to me,” Watts said of her husband’s disorder.
Through Watts’ deposition, it was also learned that Wright offered Ira Kleiman 10 million shares of Coin Exch Pty after Dave Kleiman’s death. Coin Exch was a project that Wright and Dave Kleiman were working on that would operate as a Bitcoin exchange and trading platform. However, this project did not actually materialize as Dave Kleiman died before it could be completed and launched.
Ira Kleiman did not accept the offer of having shares in Coin Exch because he did not want to be taxed for the assets he would receive. What Ira Kleiman wanted was a cash equivalent of the shares, but he did not agree with the amount offered. It is important to note that it would have been difficult to place a monetary value on the shares offered because the company did not really take off, and there was not very much of value related to it.
Andrew O’Hagan
O’Hagan is a popular and award-winning Scottish author known for his non-fiction novels. He published “The Satoshi Affair” in June 2016. It chronicled first-hand interviews and situations he had with Wright as he wrote about the man who invented Bitcoin.
“I was the main part of it. Other people helped. At the end of the day, none of this would have happened without Dave Kleiman, without Hal Finney, and without those who took over–like Gavin and Mike,” Wright was quoted as saying in “The Satoshi Affair” when he was being interviewed by BBC. Only the first two sentences were aired by the BBC.
This statement is actually one of the plaintiff’s main pieces of evidence in claiming that Dave Kleiman is a co-creator of Bitcoin. Wright never denied that he had help with Bitcoin, but the concept was his own. O’Hagan testified that everything written in “The Satoshi Affair” is accurate by journalistic standards.
It is interesting, however, that on November 5, 2021, O’Hagan filed “a motion for order compelling plaintiffs to pay fees and costs related to document and deposition discovery in England.” It seems that Ira Kleiman’s lawyers, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, refused to pay O’Hagan as previously agreed on by both parties, and as determined by the Court of England.
“On or about March 26, 2021, the Court of England issued a Final Costs Certificate, akin to a Final Judgment. The Judgment noted that the total amount of fees and costs due to O’Hagan was £127,695.48, of which (as noted supra) £34,988 had been paid, leaving a balance due to O’Hagan of £92,707.48 pounds, with interest for so long as it remained unpaid,” the Compel Document filed in the Southern District of Florida stated.
Craig Wright
After the two depositions, Wright takes the stand. Wright will not be cross-examined by his attorneys at this point. He will testify again for the defense at a later time.
Wright has a lot of clarifications to say, and several times he starts off by calmly rephrasing plaintiff counsel Vel Freedman’s questions to something that is more accurate in wording, which clearly frustrated Freedman.
Wright even addresses the jury at least twice, explaining to them the more technical terms, such as the testnet and Bitcoin keys, that normal people like them would find hard to grasp. It must be pointed out that Wright is the only one of the witnesses so far who has spoken directly to the jury, which may prove to hold positive points for Wright.
One of the more important clarifications that Wright has made is that he and Dave Kleiman actually did mine Bitcoin together, but it was on the Bitcoin test net, which is actually just a test network that does not mine actual Bitcoin. In fact, in testing the unbounded protocol, the two were successful in mining a 300GB block at a few million transactions per second.
In addition to this, Wright contacted Ira Kleiman after Dave Kleiman’s death because he believed that Dave Kleiman might be in possession of Bitcoin. Because, why not? Wright has told Kleiman to mine Bitcoin and the two were already mining Bitcoin on the test net.
Dave Kleiman was Wright’s best friend and a partner on many occasions, but he was not his partner in writing the Bitcoin white paper—Kleiman just edited it—and nor in mining the 1.1 million Bitcoin as Ira Kleiman is alleging.
Look at it this way, Dave Kleiman died in abject poverty. He was in foreclosure, already had a second mortgage on his house, and could not pay his bills. On top of this, Kleiman was paralyzed, suffering from an MRSA infection, and was in and out of the hospital.
If he was in possession of a significant amount of Bitcoin or if he believed that he has a legitimate claim to the Bitcoin owned by Wright, then why did he not do anything when he was still alive? Why did he not sell Bitcoin or ask Wright for what was supposedly rightfully his in order to pay off his debts and get treatment for his condition at a better medical facility or even just hire a personal nurse to alleviate his suffering? Why did he have to die alone and in such a tragic way?
Maybe these questions will go unanswered even at the end of this trial. Or maybe some will be answered as Wright continues his testimony on Day 7 of the Kleiman v Wright trial.