The self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto has been caught lying and falsifying documents yet again. A pre-Bitcoin paper Craig Wright claimed he wrote in 2007 was actually uploaded on Aug. 18 and edited in Microsoft Office 365, software that didn’t come out until 2011.

Faketoshi’s web slowly untangles

The self-proclaimed Satoshi Nakamoto made headlines once again after managing to stay out of the limelight for a few days. Craig Wright, one of the most controversial figures in the crypto industry, was caught red-handed falsifying documents and lying about his alleged involvement with Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack, one of the many recipients of Wright’s libel lawsuits, tweeted about the paper Wright published on SSRN, a scholarly paper hosting service. Wright claims the document, titled “Payment providers and intermediaries as defined in the law of the Internet,” was written in 2007, but contains no upload or publication date.

If you go through SSRN it is listed after the Bitcoin whitepaper, which Craig attributed to himself. Upload date has been removed. pic.twitter.com/ZqWXb457D9 — Peter McCormack (@PeterMcCormack) August 19, 2019

The document contains a paragraph very similar to the abstract of the original Bitcoin whitepaper.

The lack of a publication or upload date prompted McCormack to suspect the document was altered. After checking for alternate versions of the document on the Internet Archive, McCormack found that the only snapshot of the paper was Aug. 18—the day it was uploaded.

So I checked the Internet Archive and the only snapshot is yesterday:https://t.co/1pT6KNJXxH pic.twitter.com/EczPjlYLZ5 — Peter McCormack (@PeterMcCormack) August 19, 2019

Wright’s paper could have been heavily edited

The metadata of Wright’s paper showed that it was created and last edited on Aug. 18, a day before McCormack discovered it on SSRN.

So I downloaded the document and checked the metadata. Look like the file was updated yesterday… pic.twitter.com/2NL50pDrQT — Peter McCormack (@PeterMcCormack) August 19, 2019

Further inspection also showed that the paper was created and modified using Microsoft Office 365, a program which wasn’t released until June 2011. While this doesn’t prove Wright altered the date of the document, the fact that his timeline isn’t quite right pushed other crypto users to dig even deeper.

Multiple Twitter users confirmed they saw the same metadata after downloading Wright’s paper. McCormack also found that Wright had a paper with the exact same name posted on the SANS reading room. While the two papers share the same name and much of the same structure, the paper posted on SANS had no mentions of digital cash, egold, or peer-to-peer electronic cash.

It gets better, if you Google the name in the metafile: "Electronic Contracting In An Insecure World" you find this search result:https://t.co/a8pdPE0dzw pic.twitter.com/fDtbQTaUfO — Peter McCormack (@PeterMcCormack) August 19, 2019

The SSRN paper, however, focused heavily on the use and implementation of digital cash. That, coupled with the paper’s mysterious lack of upload date, shows that there’s a very high chance of it being doctored and backdated.

We are yet to see whether this has a significant effect on Wright’s coin, Bitcoin SV, which saw a 6.45 percent loss in the past 24 hours. However, it’s reasonable to say that the increasing controversy surrounding Wright and his seeming tendency to lie won’t do much to help him in any of his legal battles.

Bitcoin SV $133.94 -4.78% Bitcoin SV, currently ranked #9 by market cap, is down 4.78% over the past 24 hours. BSV has a market cap of $2.39B with a 24 hour volume of $311.58M. Bitcoin SV Price Chart BSVUSD Chart by TradingView