Day 5 Highlights of Landmark Kleiman v Wright Trial

The Kleiman v Wright trial reached day 5 of the largest private lawsuit in history. This concluded the first full week of this landmark trial which is expected to reach its climax just prior to Thanksgiving. As the case picks up momentum, it is receiving additional mainstream media coverage that was not present during the first few days. Notably big networks such as Bloomberg, NBC, and Fox were among those media outlets in the courtroom looking to get some answers about Satoshi Nakamoto. Their presence was likely in anticipation of Craig Wright taking the stand today as scheduled, which did not happen.

At the heart of the lawsuit is one core question: Did Dave Kleiman and Craig Wright have a legal and binding partnership in writing the Bitcoin white paper, creating Bitcoin, and the mining of 1.1 million bitcoins? Ira Kleiman is hoping that the 1.1 million bitcoins exist and that they indeed had a legit partnership giving him and the estate of his deceased brother at least half of it.

Defense lawyer Andres Rivero gave a blistering grilling to Ira over evidence already introduced by Ira and his legal team. This included hundreds of emails which appear to show a real lack of evidence confirming a partnership existed between the two men. Rivero pointed out that both men had several partnerships on other projects both together and separate from each other. In all those partnerships, Craig and Dave always created legal partnerships in those other projects, regardless of who was involved. Not so in the case of Bitcoin.

A few interesting points were made by both defense and plaintiff lawyers. For the defense, it presented evidence in the form of emails sent in 2011 that Dave was excited to finally work as partners with Craig, clearly after the Bitcoin creation. Plaintiff’s attorney presented many emails in rebuttal to the cross-examination that did include the words partner and Bitcoin prior to 2011. Just as notable was the evidence over the use and reformat of hard drives and thumb drives by Ira which he acquired after Dave’s death. It is extremely difficult to grasp why Ira would do that to his dead cyber security brother’s equipment, although it may show the distant relationship between Dave and Ira that existed.  Perhaps if he was closer to his brother and knew how important those devices and the information stored on them were to Dave, he would have taken better care of them. When questioned about his motives for deleting the data, Ira simply said they belonged to him now.

All the legal jousting occurring today was based on previous testimony and evidence that was already introduced. The court hasn’t really seen any new evidence that would clearly indicate whether Craig or Dave invented Bitcoin. Simply no real compelling information has surfaced. There will be a lot of expert testimony expected next week by several witnesses in the case. Since Craig did not take the stand today it will likely happen on Monday. Expect lots of fireworks when that happens.