Craig Wright Fails To Name Anyone He Sent Bitcoin To As “Satoshi”

The seventh day of the COPA v. Wright trial kicked off on Tuesday, exposing a glaring weakness in the latter’s argument to convince the court that he is the creator of Bitcoin.

When pressed by prosecutors, Craig Wright failed to name a single person outside of the public domain to whom he had sent Bitcoin under the name of Satoshi.

Who Did Satoshi Send Bitcoin To?

As summarized by @bitnorbert on X, COPA asked the computer scientist to confirm whether he’d ever sent BTC to anyone besides Hal Finney or Zooko Wilcox – the co-founder of ZCash.

Wright asserted that he had sent Bitcoin to hundreds of people, through a mix of his companies whose blockchain addresses were publicly understood as being owned by Satoshi Nakamoto. He said Zooko was not one of them, however, despite the cryptographer himself asserting he’d never received BTC from Satoshi.

When asked about the coins Satoshi had transferred to “hundreds” of others, Wright said he doesn’t “remember them all now.” Judge Edward James Mellor asked Wright to name just one, but he fell short.

“Gavin has talked about that now. It had no value at the time, My Lord. Most were pseudonymous,” he argued.

Wright also faced questions about a public blog post he’d once purportedly signed to prove he was Satoshi that has since been fiercely criticized by experts. When asked whether “signing sessions” would be invalid proof if the private keys behind them could be obtained by people besides Satoshi, Wright said “Not at all.”

“You don’t prove by having identity through possession of something. You prove by knowledge. Who you are. What you create,” Wright said.

Wright “Falling Apart”

Tuesday marks Wright’s sixth day on the stand under cross-examination Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA), a non-profit group backed by Meta, Block, and MicroStrategy.

The organization’s goal is to prove that Wright has committed “industrial scale forgery”, and prevent him from suing anybody who publicly proclaims that he isn’t Satoshi, as he’s done in the past.

Reflecting on Tuesday’s proceedings, @bitnorbert said it “was the strongest showing of Bitcoiners in court today.”

“All in all, it was another day of a cornered man helplessly falling apart in court, his counsel forced to sit in silence and watch,” he wrote to X on Tuesday. Judge Mellor, he noted, had to interrupt Wright several times to “get an answer out of him.”

Wright has spent his time under cross-examination aiming to discredit several expert witnesses who have called his defense’s evidence forgeries – including Spencer Lynch, who was hired by his own legal team.