A Story of ABCD: Alice, Bob, Craig and Dave — So Is Craig is Satoshi, and Did He Partner with Dave?

A Story of ABCD: Alice, Bob, Craig and Dave — So Is Craig is Satoshi and Did He Partner with Dave?

In their classic paper on the RSA method, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman came up with the concept of A communicating with B. For this, they defined the actors of Alice and Bob. Bruce Schneier then defined more names that could be used within cybersecurity, including Craig (the cracker) and Dave (the fourth participant).

Now, we have a trail that involves Craig and Dave, and which could make Dave one of the richest people in the world. For this, there is currently a court battle and at its heart is bitcoins. This is a case of Dave Kleiman against Dr Craig Wright, and where Ira Kleiman — the brother of the late Dave Kleiman — is suing Dr Craig Wright for a share of between 550,000 and 1.1 million bitcoins, and for the intellectual property around Bitcoin.

The reward relates to the Bitcoin wallet created by Satoshi Nakamoto, and if the transactions within it were cashed in, the person involved would be the 15th richest person in the world, and worth over $55 billion. It would, though, require the associated private key used to sign the transactions to be revealed.

Klieman v Wright

The case started in 2018 when Ira initiated a lawsuit on behalf of Dave’s estate against Craig. It alleges that Craig defrauded Klieman out of intellectual property and bitcoins. The prosecution has alleged that there was a Bitcoin partnership between Craig and Dave, but the defence has proposed that it was Craig who actually was the sole creator of Bitcoin, and while Craig and Dave had a friendship they did not partner on the creation of Bitcoin.

The Witnesses

After Andreas Antonopoulos — the author of the Mastering Bitcoin — had given evidence, it was Patrick Paige (a friend of Dave’s) who gave evidence stating that:

Dave and I had a project in the U.S. He ran it there. We kept what we did secret. The company we ran there mined Bitcoin.”

The third witness was Gavin Andresen — and one of the people who was closely involved in the creation of Bitcoin. Gavin is defined as someone who was there to support Satoshi in the initial creation of the technology and was the developer that Satoshi handed the project over to. Andresen believes that the creation of Bitcoin involved three people, of which, he believes that Craig was the leader. This viewpoint was also echoed by Patrick Paige. Andresen also outlined that Craig seemed to know things that only Satoshi would have known and that Craig has been able to sign for several of the early blocks that Satoshi would have created.

The next witness — Jamie Wilson, a CEO of one of Craig’s previous companies — claimed that Craig had told him that he had over one million bitcoins that Dave had helped him with and that Craig could pay for the plaintiff if the jury went against him.

Up next was Jimmy Nguyen — the founding president of the Bitcoin Association — and also stated that he believed that Craig is Satoshi, but that he worked with others to make it a reality.

Up to this point, three witnesses had testified that they believed Craig is Satoshi.

Next up was Ira, and who produced an email that revealed the words “we did partner” in a correspondence between Dave and Craig, but there were no details on what the partnership actually was.

It was revealed, too, that Dave left a will which had no mentions of bitcoins in it, or with any partnership with Craig. The trial also revealed that Dave was deeply in debt near the end of his life, and but that there had been no attempt to cash in on any bitcoins that he is associated with. For Ira, the only memory he had of possible interactions between the two was that his brother had told him that he was working:

with a wealthy foreign guy to create his own money

and he then drew the Bitcoin logo. As far as Ira sees it, Craig and Dave were partners in the creation of Bitcoin.

While there is little evidence of the partnership, Ira claims that he may have deleted Dave’s encrypted files when he took over his estate, and which could have shown that Dave and Craig created Bitcoin between 12 March, 2008, and Halloween 2008.

Conclusions

One of the main findings so far is that there has been a significant amount of backing for Craig actually being named as Satoshi. The trial continues but so far it has revealed that there is little in the way of evidence that a partnership existed between Craig and Dave around bitcoins. But the plaintiff’s have defined that the partnership was a secret one, and only encrypted emails (that may have been deleted) would have revealed the true nature of this.

But there’s a Catch 22 here. If Ira wins, will Craig actually be able to sign off the final bitcoins from the wallet? If he isn’t Satoshi, it is unlikely he will be able to sign them away. And why hasn’t Craig already cashed out the bitcoins, if he does have the private key?