, Author: Brendan Sullivan, translator: Huohuojiang, reprinted with authorization by Odaily.

Not long ago, Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart punished Craig Wright, who claimed to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto, severely.

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Magistrate Bruce Reinhart (Image: Newsmax TV)

"I disagree with Dr. Wright's testimony, which was in his interest, but which failed to withstand cross-examination and therefore failed to convince me. I found that Dr. Wright had perjured himself in front of me," the judge said in a statement. written in a 14-page written document.

Ira Kleiman claims her brother helped Wright create Bitcoin. This means that half of the 1.1 million bitcoins that Satoshi Nakamoto mined at the start of the bitcoin project, as well as half of the bitcoin intellectual property, should go to the Kleiman family.

The premise of the lawsuit is that Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto.

However, most of the heavyweights in the cryptocurrency industry agree with Judge Reinhart that Wright was not the one who created Bitcoin.

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Distrust, but still be impartial

Judge Reinhart's ruling isn't good news for the man who claims to be the author of the Bitcoin white paper. But the ruling does shed some light on the so-called Tulip Trust III. Wright said it was the latest trust to contain encrypted documents that could unlock a $10 billion fortune in bitcoin.

[Editor's Note: At current prices, the actual value is approximately US$5.8 billion. 】

The pre-trial process determines what information will and will not be shown to the jury. The trial, currently scheduled for July, will be presided over by Judge Beth Bloom of the Federal Court for the Southern District of Florida.

For Kleiman's legal team, Judge Reinhardt is not easy to deal with. Although he ordered Wright to pay for "dishonesty" and "caused delay," he did not issue Wright with the $650,000 fine discussed in the earlier ruling. On March 16, Judge Reinhart v. Velvel Freedman, Kyle Roche, Andrew Brenner and Stephen Lagos Lagos has substantially revised the bill.

Judge Reinhart awarded $165,800.09 in damages (instead of the $658,581.78 previously sought). That's less than a quarter of the cost of the four lawyers' lawsuit.

Wright has until March 30 to pay the fee.

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In the latest filing, Reinhart said: "On March 19, 2019, I asked Dr. Wright to produce a list of his Bitcoin holdings. He said he could not because the The information is held by a confidential trust which he does not have access to. I asked him to confirm the authenticity of the trust, and he then stated that the information needed to generate the bitcoin list may be bonded around January 2020 The courier delivered it to him. So Judge Bloom gave him an opportunity to give information."

Kleiman's team could ask Wright seven questions about what Wright calls the 'courier who delivered the Tulip Trust III document on Jan. 6.' Wright has worked extensively on this situation, calling for attorney-client privilege to be maintained on some of these issues.

First, he claimed that the courier was a lawyer and therefore everything about the Tulip Trust III files was privileged. But Judge Bloom was not convinced and gave Wright 10 days to turn over the documents.

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Now, this involves the marriage agreement again!

"One of the seven questions asked Wright to describe in detail how he obtained the necessary information," Judge Reinhart wrote. Wright responded that his wife, Ramona Watts, was a Tulip Trustee of Trust III, she received the trust agreement from the trust’s attorney in December 2019. She then received an encrypted trust document. She then provided Wright with the document containing the bitcoin listing.

The judge has since summed up Wright's statement in court before ruling against him.

Reinhart wrote in the filing: “Dr. Wright asserts that communications between his wife and the trust counsel are protected by attorney-client privilege. shall be protected by spousal privilege."

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Banned as a lawyer

From Wright's answers to seven questions from Kleiman's attorneys, we identified the person who arranged for the delivery of the encrypted documents — the brazen bonded courier — and a detailed background on that person.

Judge Reinhart now believes the source of the encrypted document was Denis Mayaka, fund services manager at Abacus (Seychelles) Ltd. It has been confirmed that the company is now the company that manages the Tulip Trust.

Then there's the question that Wright is asserting attorney-client privilege for himself and his wife (Tulip's trustee), but the judge doesn't believe the story he's telling.

"In order to establish attorney-client confidentiality between Mr. Mayaka and Ms. Watts, Dr. Wright produced an unnotarized testimony from Dennis Bossiere Mayaka."

This testimony appears to have caused the situation to change, as Mayaka studied law at a university in Kenya.

Judge Reinhart said: "The affidavit stated 'I am a lawyer and obtained a Bachelor of Laws degree from Moi University in Kenya in 2007." Wright also attached Mayaka's LinkedIn profile to the document. profile page.

His educational background was not listed in the document. However, Wright's educational background is mentioned on the LinkedIn page he submitted.

"Dr. Wright also produced a hard copy LinkedIn profile showing Mayaka as having a Bachelor of Laws degree from Moi University," Judge Reinhart added, " Dr. Wright also responded gravely to the questioning that Mayaka was the trust's lawyer.

The affidavit said Mayaka had acted as Wright's attorney since 2012, including when the Tulip Trust was formed on July 7, 2017. Judge Reinhart, however, brushed off the content of the entire testimony.

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Negative trifecta

Judge Reinhart said he did not believe what was in the affidavit because he believed Wright had perjured himself in court.

The judge explained his reasons in three steps.

"First, as a judge, I disregarded Mayaka's testimony because it was not notarized. Especially given that I had previously discovered that Dr. Wright had falsified documents in this lawsuit, I refused to believe such documents, after all Anyone with a word processor and a pen can easily generate these documents."

On this point, Judge Reinhart was harshly critical of Wright's integrity, saying: "The statements made by Dr. Wright are meaningless because Dr. Wright has perjured himself in my presence.

Judge Reinhart then dismissed all claims of attorney-client privilege because the trust itself did not list Mayaka as an attorney.

Third, the trust documents did not identify Mr. Mayaka as an attorney, but held other capacities. All in all, there is no way to prove that Mr. Mayaka is an attorney for the trustees of the Tulip Trust. For these reasons, it could not be established that Dr. Wright and Mr. Mayaka had an independent attorney-client relationship.

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You promised to release the evidence

Judge Reinhart closed the case by refusing to recognize Wright's attorney-client privilege over the Tulip Trust III documents because Wright used his wife, Ramona Watts, as a channel of communication with Mayaka. That's why she's a trustee and Wright isn't.

What about spousal privileges? There has been precedent in court that communications between spouses are private and privileged.

Here, Judge Reinhart ultimately ruled that since all parties had agreed to make this information public (ie, we would have the news about the Tulip Trust after the bonded courier arrived), it could not enjoy confidentiality privilege.

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australian prison

On Feb. 13, Wright argued that he was not entitled to turn over the documents because many of them were from other companies. Here again, the judge sided with the Kleimans, quoting them: "If the document belongs to Wright, we'll see it. If it's someone else's privilege, we'll see it too, and Wright cannot claim the privileges of others."

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Freemantle Prison, Australia (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

Citing the testimony of Australian lawyer Gordon Grieve, Wright said handing over the documents could land him in an Australian prison.

However, Reinhart once again denied the claim. Mr Grieve's testimony failed to establish that submitting the material would have breached Australian law.

He gave Wright until March 12 to turn over all documents he had previously retained and to answer the rest of the seven questions he had asserted about his privileged privilege.

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big question mark

Judge Reinhart's order shows that the Supreme Court has lost patience with Wright. If he wanted Reinhardt's support, he had to find a way to corroborate the documents. His digital forensics expert witnesses must prove to the jury that the 2015 timestamp on the 2011 document was just a routine byproduct of optical character recognition (OCR) software.