Updated on:12/11/2025 05:51 PM 
The third day of the landmark COPA versus Wright legal battle intensified as Dr. Craig Wright passionately defended his controversial claim to be Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Throughout the courtroom proceedings, Wright confronted mounting forensic evidence challenging the authenticity of documents central to his identity assertion.
Wright, visibly distressed by the courtroom atmosphere, noted that the presence of numerous bodies and equipment had elevated the temperature by four degrees Celsius compared to other rooms. He seized upon this environmental detail to pivot discussions away from the core document authentication issues.
A central point of contention emerged as Wright vehemently argued that contemporary Bitcoin implementations—with their restricted block sizes—deviate fundamentally from his original vision. He further criticized the current state of the network, citing elevated transaction fees driven by Ordinals activity as indicators of what he perceives as systemic flaws.
During cross-examination, Wright made several disputed claims, including the assertion that 80% of Bitcoin nodes operate on Amazon Web Services. However, data from Bitnodes indicates this figure is actually closer to 1.8%, a statistic more accurately associated with Ethereum rather than Bitcoin.
The authenticity of Wright's documentation came under intense scrutiny when questioned about potentially unreliable metadata. Rather than addressing the concerns directly, Wright launched into lengthy explanations about how his staff processed his handwritten notes and dictations, suggesting these conversion processes could have altered document properties over time.
"I develop ideas on various devices, which staff members then transform into documents," Wright explained, attributing any metadata discrepancies to these handling procedures. This explanation contradicted forensic evidence suggesting more recent creation dates, as multiple documents contained metadata references to 2012-era fonts and Grammarly features.
When confronted with evidence of document manipulation, Wright resorted to blaming enterprise software solutions like Citrix and Grammarly Enterprise for any irregularities. His defense strategy increasingly centered on technical explanations for observed anomalies, rather than addressing the substantive findings of expert witnesses from both sides.
In a particularly contentious exchange, Wright dismissed the testimony of COPA's expert witness as "completely biased" while simultaneously criticizing his own legal team's expert witness as "unskilled" when their conclusions contradicted his position.
The most extraordinary claim of the day came when Wright suggested that irregular hyphenations in certain documents—identified by forensic experts as potential evidence of manipulation—were actually intentional steganographic watermarks he had embedded to authenticate his work.
Wright's defense narrative ultimately coalesced around two main arguments: that Bitcoin's development spanned an extended timeline with multiple revisions, and that any document inconsistencies resulted from ordinary handling procedures rather than intentional falsification. He maintained that similarities between his documents and later published works stemmed from utilizing existing academic materials, not from forgery.
The proceedings concluded with Wright standing by his claim that he presented a genuine draft of the Bitcoin whitepaper despite compelling forensic evidence to the contrary. He challenged the prosecution's reliance on traditional forensic analysis, asserting that their conclusions failed to account for the unique technological context and document creation processes he employed.
As the trial progresses, the central question remains whether Wright's technical explanations can sufficiently counter the substantial forensic evidence questioning the authenticity of his documentation and his claim to be Bitcoin's mysterious creator.
