The court and the attorneys are in the dark about how blockchain works, and the decisive witness's lies make the trial harder still

As Bitcoin once again broke through its previous high, the mainstream media moved to put out the fire. They keep chilling new investors with frightening headlines. But of the skepticism the mainstream media has pulled out, far more is not "new" - that is, not news - than is actual news.

Having endured for 13 years in the face of the hostile logic that it must inevitably go to zero, Bitcoin has reached a point where one might call this phenomenon, too, a kind of strength naturally accumulated over time.

Nakamoto's identity revealed? The odds are slim

Mainstream media outlets raised their voices in unison to declare that Satoshi Nakamoto, known as the creator of Bitcoin, would soon be revealed. The source of the story was The Wall Street Journal. This newspaper carries global authority as a business daily, but judged by this article alone it was worse than a college intern's practice piece. That it was nevertheless widely cited had nothing to do with its content. The mainstream media simply needed the Journal's authority at a moment when it wanted a news item with which to hold Bitcoin down.

This civil suit - between Dr. Craig Wright, who claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and the surviving family of Kleiman, known as his business partner and already deceased - is not even a trial to determine whether Dr. Wright is the real Satoshi Nakamoto. Both the creditor and the debtor proceed on the premise that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. If there is any difference at all, it is only that the Kleiman family maintains that Kleiman was the true Satoshi Nakamoto and that Dr. Wright played a supporting role.

This trial has already been going on for years. The news that occasionally spills out of the proceedings has churned up the crypto industry several times. The Wall Street Journal boldly wrote that this trial might be able to prove who Satoshi Nakamoto is, but it could not present a single line of reasonable grounds. It is not news but something closer to background - and as a piece pulled from a newspaper's cabinet of "old things," its quality did not even surpass Wikipedia. It was an article that left one thinking only this: the twisted feelings of the mainstream media in the face of a Bitcoin phenomenon they cannot begin to accept are making them forget even minimal professional ethics, or the basic fundamentals of the job.

There are two main reasons the odds are slim that this trial will approach the substantive truth. First, the court and the attorneys are in the dark about how blockchain works. Second, with Kleiman dead, the sole decisive witness - Dr. Wright - keeps changing his story. Serious Bitcoiners therefore do not expect this civil suit to provide any meaningful information. What is more, the prevailing conviction is that if one assembles Dr. Wright's words and actions over the past six years, the claim that he is Satoshi Nakamoto has in effect been refuted.

The domestic and foreign mainstream media that ignored this hidden context and, borrowing the authority of The Wall Street Journal's suggestion that Satoshi Nakamoto might be revealed, packaged groundless speculation as news, cannot escape responsibility for deceiving investors at a decisive juncture.

Dr. Wright, who claims to be a programmer, has never demonstrated his coding ability. Even the short code he released as his own work produced compile errors. He has reversed his statements many times in the course of the trial. His remarks about the transfer of authority from the Tulip Trust and its deadline are a prime example. Dr. Wright had claimed that because he had placed a substantial portion of the Bitcoin he supposedly holds in the Tulip Trust, he could not immediately prove ownership. But in 2019 he fixed a specific date and asserted that with 99.9 percent certainty ownership would pass to him. On this news, the price of Bitcoin SV (BSV), which he leads, shot up. Yet as the deadline approached, he changed his story. Moreover, using a letter from a lawyer licensed in Africa, he claimed he could not respond to the court's request because of attorney-client privilege.

The card Dr. Wright's lawyers played on behalf of a client who keeps changing his story is the claim that he suffers from Asperger's syndrome and therefore uses definitions of words that differ from those of ordinary people.

At a recent hearing an autism expert testified that Dr. Wright differs from 99 percent of people in his social behavior and fixates on the literal interpretation of language. The argument is that when he said Kleiman was his "partner," the concept of the word "partner" was not what people ordinarily take it to mean.

Even allowing that his manner of using language differs from that of ordinary people, there is a decisive lie he could not swallow back. And that lie has been preserved forever - by the very blockchain he claims to have invented.

He said that in the early days he mined Bitcoin alone with 60 to 70 computers. But for the first year Bitcoin was mined with only one or two machines. Bitcoin is designed to be mined on average every 10 minutes, but it is not necessarily mined every 10 minutes. When competition increases, the hash value that is found by chance can be found faster, so mining speeds up as well. With a block time of 10 minutes, difficulty adjusts roughly once every two weeks; so if Satoshi Nakamoto had mined using dozens of computers, the block time would have had to be tens of seconds, difficulty adjustment would have had to occur within a day or two, and these traces would have had to remain plainly visible in the blockchain.

No such traces can be found. On the contrary, in the early days mining power was so low relative to difficulty that a full six days were consumed in mining the first block. The answer he produced delivered nothing but the jolt of realizing that any serious argument with him is henceforth pointless. He claimed that because Microsoft was upgrading Windows versions, many of his computers had been out of commission for a long time.

For his excuse to make sense, more than 50 of the 60 computers would have had to be continuously upgrading. And for a full year at that. Experts who wanted to demolish even this claim dug through the records and found that between January 3 and January 9, 2009 - when Bitcoin's genesis block was mined - there was no Windows version upgrade at all. Since he is said to have Asperger's syndrome, suppose we take it not as a lie but as a misapprehension or ignorance that invites misunderstanding. That would mean that Satoshi Nakamoto - a genius among geniuses whom no one can readily deny - was this ignorant about his own invention. For the experts, that is far harder to accept than a lie.

His few remaining followers tend to defend him on two grounds: that the real Satoshi Nakamoto does not step forward to confirm the facts even while a fake runs rampant, and that because this trial is a dispute over property rights, a party to the suit is bound to be reluctant to give testimony against his own interest - that is, to prove that he really is Satoshi Nakamoto.

Therefore, for this trial to help reveal the author of an invention that is shaking the global financial system to its roots - as The Wall Street Journal wishes - the court would have to acquire expertise in blockchain and press the parties until they had no choice but to produce decisive evidence. The Kleiman family, too, would have to stop relying solely on Dr. Wright's e-mails and testimony and present evidence, hard to refute, of what actually passed between Kleiman and Dr. Wright.

The court must demand hard evidence

But this is not a development one can expect. The court has declared that this trial has nothing to do with determining whether he is the real Satoshi Nakamoto. It will not depart from the principle of judicial restraint. Nor is there any prospect that the Kleiman family will present decisive evidence beyond the e-mails Dr. Wright wrote. The deceased's belongings, computers included, are said not to have survived.

Someone who associated with their family became the richest man in the world; he mentioned their family with his own mouth; and when the Australian Taxation Office, which investigated Dr. Wright as Satoshi Nakamoto, also produced records referring to Kleiman, they began this suit in the hope of recovering an enormous fortune. That may be most of the substantive truth this trial can tell us. Or, if we put the emphasis on the fact that both creditor and debtor proceed on the premise that Dr. Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto, the trial itself may be part of a larger design meant to complete a single fiction.

As long as this trial continues, it appears that the possibility that Dr. Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto remains, and for some people the passage of time in a state of ambiguity may be more valuable than the truth itself. Even this near-conspiracy-theory hypothesis does not look entirely absurd. After all, the fuss made by media outlets reporting that something decisive will emerge from this trial is itself one meaningful use to which an absurd lawsuit can be put.

Whatever the true intent of the trial, it tells us less about who Satoshi Nakamoto is than about how long the mainstream media of our time can go on deceiving themselves, and their readers, in the face of a phenomenon they find hard to understand.

Oh Tae-min, author of "Bitcoin Was Strong" and "The Genealogy of Bitcoin Wisdom"