Chat_152 - Forging Satoshi with Mark Hunter & Arthur Van Pelt

[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you think if you can get a court to say you're satoshi, then you can, and you are of this mindset, you can then go ahead and you can sue bitcoin developers, bitcoin exchanges, whatever to say, look, I've got a court ruling that I'm Satoshi. Your, your version of bitcoin is not the real bitcoin. I'm satoshi. My version of bitcoin, which is Craig in Craig's world as bsv, is the real bitcoin. So you need to either pay damages or license from me, et cetera, et cetera. So the whole point was to get a court to rule Iwa Satoshi, which would give him the foundation to file these lawsuits that he did at the same time anyway. But that was the whole point was to get that first one through the door, get a court to say he's satoshi. We give him massive backing when he tries to take on the institutions to try and get the billions from them. Because again, just like with the ato, it's a shortcut to riches. [00:01:07] Speaker B: What is up, guys? Welcome back to Bitcoin. Audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else you know, and we have got a really fun one today. So I have done the audio book for Fake Toshi, which is actually the beginning of a three part series. You've probably heard if I've talked about it a couple times on the show here. If not, I have stepped back from audiobooks and I had a pretty good conversation leading into this with Arthur and Mark here is that I did, I really don't. I didn't want to. I love doing the audiobooks. I really, it's. It's fun. I. Despite the grueling work of, of having to go so slowly through a book, you have to really read it when you read the audiobook. I do just enjoy it. But it's far and away the most stressful and the least scaling of all the work that I do. So if I wanted Pear Drive to get the attention that it deserved, that it absolutely had to have or it wasn't going to work. I had to step back from something and it had to be the audiobooks. But I did. I am honored and I am very happy to say I did the audiobook for the first one and Mark the author is doing the audiobook for the second and the third. I love that Mark is actually the one doing the audiobook. This is the story. The intricacies, the frauds, the unbelievable brash arrogance of Craig Wright and he's claimed that he is Satoshi and the many different pieces of how it went down, what we could cover, what we can't cover and what takes too long to even try to unpack. Arthur Van Pelt and Mark Hunter, Dr. Bitcoin have put together an incredible detailing and breakdown of the entire saga of the fake Toshi era. If you haven't really dug into this, it is mind blowing. You're going to be reading this book or listening to this book and you're just going to have to stop and you're like wait, what? Because there were at least half a dozen times where I was just baffled and I had to make sure I was reading this properly and that when I said it out loud that it was in fact saying what it was saying. So it's just, just so crazy. These two guys are probably the resource if I had to say who knows the most about this and who has spent the most time digging into, into every little detail and personality and backstab and who, who's, who's on whose team and who is Satoshi and what piece did they play and how many coins does he supposedly have? Is these guys right here. So this is going to be a fun one. I hope you enjoy it. Real quick, I just want to say thank you to our sponsors as well. To leaden IO for bitcoin backed loans they do simple, basic, like, like boring service. How do you safely and openly provide proof of reserves Bitcoin backed loans? I've been impressed and I'm a customer. 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So with that, let's get into today's episode. This is Mark Hunter, Dr. Bitcoin and Arthur Van Pelt. Chat152 I believe. Forging Satoshi. Well guys, welcome to Bitcoin Audible. Welcome to Bitcoin Auto. We got Arthur Van Pelt and Mark Hunter, Dr. Bitcoin. Good to have you guys on the show officially. Welcome, man. [00:06:52] Speaker A: It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having us. [00:06:54] Speaker B: Yep. [00:06:55] Speaker C: Shane, thank you. [00:06:56] Speaker B: Absolutely. I guess, of course Arthur and I hung out on Shitcoin Insider. So we've been there and done that once. [00:07:05] Speaker C: Yep. [00:07:06] Speaker B: So I wanted to, I mean obviously you guys put together, have put together and are continuing to put together the saga of Fake Toshi and it's funny, you know, I honestly, more than anything, I've read a bunch of the stuff, Arthur, that, that you put out and you know, Jameson Lopp has a really good breakdown of like the history of all of that stuff as well. It really not even, not even legal stuff but just like the times that he's put his foot in his mouth or said something that has just revealed just a lot about who Craig is and who he definitely isn't. And so it's always been like a fun journey and you know, you think you know something about a topic but then you read a book like Fake Toshi and you're like, jesus Christ. It goes so deep and there's so much, there's so much just lies and bullshit. The bullshit mountain is so big and you Think, you know, you're like, oh, yeah, no, there's definitely a mountain of bullsh. Then you, like, get a little bit closer and you get, like, the real scope and you're like, oh, God, that mountain is massive. [00:08:22] Speaker C: Yeah. So when reading part one, you've only seen. Yeah. The. The run up to the whole Psychosis show. [00:08:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:08:32] Speaker A: Just. [00:08:32] Speaker B: It's just. It's just the introduction, basically, and. And it is fascinating. There's so many little things that I'm just like, holy God, I did not realize how crazy this piece of it got and that the. The show almost ended. You know, that's like kind of the crazy thing about this whole story is that we almost went full circle and it almost fell apart on for Craig before Calvin showed up. And then it, like, started. It was like. It was like chapter two, like a whole new era. But before we, like, really dive into that, though, I'm just curious. Mark. And then Arthur. We'll start with Mark. Uh, can you give me, like, your background? What got you interested in this? How did you get in touch with Arthur? Did y' all know each other ahead of time? Um, like, kind of give me the. Give me the rundown and the whole. The. The spill on Dr. Bitcoin. [00:09:28] Speaker A: Sure. So I was working. This would have been 20 or 2018 or 2019, I think. I forget what year it was, but I was working for a crypto news outlet, and I think it must have been with the Kleiman v. Wright trial, which would have been filed, like, a few months before this point. And I was reading a bit about it, and I'd known about Craig Wright. I've been in Bitcoin since 2017. I'd known a bit about Craig Wright, not a huge amount. I'd seen him in the news and this sort of thing didn't know a great deal about it because it didn't know much about bitcoin at the time. So then I'm working for this news outlet and this website. Massive, you know, $10 billion lawsuit, Bitcoin related lawsuit comes up. I'm like, what? Oh, is this. This. This guy again? And so I'm digging around and I come across this. This Medium account, this guy called Arthur Van Pelt. Like, this guy's obsessed. He's written loads about it. Look at the detail he's gone into on this. And. And like most people that read Arthur's work, I was just, like, gripped. Like, like you said, the depth that this goes to is actually staggering. And this was even before a lot of the Kleiman evidence came out even. Even before then with signing session stuff. I think Arthur maybe had two or three articles out by this point. And so we just started doing a podcast as part of the. As part of the website. And I said, well, let's get this guy on. He knows about this Craig Wright thing and we can get to the bottom of this. And so Arthur came on, I kind of took over the conversation, and I was like, talking to him, trying to get these details about what this. What the case was about who this Craig Wright guy was. And then of course, over the half an hour that it. That we spent or whatever it would have been, I was like, this is just, you know, even more. Even more fantastic. And I had him back on again maybe a couple of years later. And again, I forget why Arthur came back on, but it would have been some development that happened. [00:11:17] Speaker C: Maybe the Hognock case, probably even not. Not even a year later. I think. I think two in a year or something. [00:11:24] Speaker A: Yeah, that. Which would have been 2020, I think. And then in mid-2021, I'd done a bit of deep diving on Craig Wright. Since then, I've been speaking to Arthur on and off, and I said to him, like, this story is so good, but it's so comprehensive and it's so rabbit holy that it needs to be told in a more streamlined and commercially viable way. And I personally always wanted. I love podcasts, and I'd always wanted to do a podcast. I love true crime podcasts. And I was like, this is kind of the ultimate true crime podcast in some ways. [00:12:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [00:12:01] Speaker A: If we can find a way to tell the story in. Across six episodes and make it. Make it viable to the general public, this could be. We need to tell this story, basically. And so we did. So we got together late 2021. We recorded. We summed up his entire. Everything in book one and most of book two. We summed up across six episodes somehow. And then that was right at the start. That finished right at the beginning of the Climbing V. Day one of the Climbing V. Right trial. I think it finished or it came out. I forget which. And then we just. We went from there because there's so much stuff coming out on a monthly basis. I said we could do this like one a month, and there's always something you need to talk about. And so we did. So every month we would. We just recorded what had been happening in the last month in terms of the lawsuits, what he'd said, what he'd done, and it just. It was a gift that kept on giving. We just kept on running with it. And then when, of course, when the copper thing really got going, that was a. We did a massive series on that. I don't think anyone covered the COPA trial more than we did because we knew how big it was going to be. And then we'll. We'll cover it a little bit later. But then we decided that the next best thing to do is to turn it into. Into a series of books where we can dive into things we couldn't talk about on the podcast. But I. I'll. I'll let Arthur give his story. But that was to this point. That's. That's how we. How we met and how we. We became Dr. Bitcoin. [00:13:26] Speaker B: Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. So, Arthur, give me your rundown. How did you get roped into and stuck on this thing? Aren't you getting paid by, like the government or something to. To just bring Satoshi down? [00:13:42] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, they found. At some point, they found an old bitcoin address of me where I used to pay for bitcoin miners, I think around 2014, 15. Because then, then I was big, rather big in. In bitcoin mining, and I bought for rather big amounts, dozens of bitcoin miners for a lot of money. And somehow I think I reused that address later as a donation address, and they found really old transactions on it. And I thought, oh, he has been paid. Because if we look at the numbers of bitcoins, which was multiple bitcoins going back to 2014, 15 or somewhere there, it was not that much. But at the time when they found it in 18, 19, 20. No, maybe 20s around there, of course, bitcoin has risen in price and then it looked like a lot of money, but back then it was not. So watch. Anyway, no, I got interested in the subject. Well, actually, I knew it's the same story that I'm telling every time because that, that is how it went in 2015. Well, I got to know Bitcoin in 2012. I. I bought my first in 2013. And in 2015, just before the Wired Gizmoto story, I knew about Craig Rights, but only because I came across his name on Twitter for a bit and I couldn't place it somewhere. It's just that I remember that I saw his name. But with Wired Gizmodo, I was rather quickly. Because of the turmoil that broke loose, I was quickly on the side of the. Mostly the technical people of bitcoin who debunked his. His forgeries and the fake PGP keys and stuff like that. I immediately saw, yeah, this is fakery and he's not Satoshi. In 2016, that was only a few months later, we saw the signing sessions. It was a big failure. Now that was for me completely. Okay? And I was not interested in him much anymore. So I forgot about him basically for several years until 2019 when he started to sue Adam Beck and especially Huddlenuts, which was, my God, was somebody that I respected a lot online for his work for Lightning Network. So I felt, yeah, sort of enraged. I mean, not literally, but sort of professionally. [00:16:19] Speaker B: A little bit pissed off. [00:16:21] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Call it like that. And so I was like, I will map out, for the benefit of the bitcoin community, I will map out all the frauds, all the. All the things that we know about him. Because of course, in the cycle. And I followed him for a bit and a lot of people have been talking about him, writing about him, small articles, big articles, little debunks, big debunks, articles on mainstream or crypto websites. And I was like, but nobody has ever put it together and it is needed now to have a source of all that stuff. So I started with a weebly page. I started to do my own research together with a guy from Australia who helped me in the beginning. He helped me, for example, with the debunk of the. What was it? The fiber to ban you story. That, yeah, great stuff. And yeah, that's. That's how it went. The Bibli page was ramped up with a page on medium. But I started writing articles and it turned out that I like to write long articles, not. Not just short and brief articles, but long forms like Andrew o' Hagan is. Is doing. So he's doing deep dives into a subject and I'm doing the same and I take a subject and yeah, it easily gets to 30 even. I think my longest articles are 90 to 100 minutes. Yeah, if you take it all together, I think it's enough for six books. But I have been writing now today, my. I had a lot of sort of celebration. My 50th article came out today. [00:18:12] Speaker B: Nice, nice. [00:18:14] Speaker C: It was a short one because it was a translation of a German article which was only 8.8minutes, but it was hot news, actually. And we might want to pick that up a bit later in this episode with you also. But it's how we can connect Craig Wright to the Wirecard scandal that is now connected to Kelvin Air, actually. But first, back to 2019, Adam Beck and especially Hollonaud Yeah, they inspired me to start writing and to start debunking. In 2018, I stopped working full time as an IT consultant and I became a bitcoin consultant. That gave me a lot of time on my hand because I'm working from home, so I have a lot of time since then to put into it. I do it as a service for the bitcoin community. I do not earn any money with it, except for a few donations every now and then. And actually I got a few gifts that run into the hundreds of dollars. Not just five dollar or ten, but a few people have been very spontaneously giving me several hundreds of dollars. So it might run into, I don't know, between 500 and $1,000 over the five, six years that I'm doing this, which is not much. [00:19:42] Speaker B: Okay, man. You think about how cool that is though, you know, like just it just that, like there was nobody in the middle any of that. Like you just got sent because people like, there's a lot of work. This was, this was useful. This was entertaining. [00:19:57] Speaker C: You know, I love it. I love to do this, keep pushing. And, and of course I, I spent that money also, actually mainly in Australia, because in Australia when you have court papers, then you have to pay for them and then you have to hire a document broker and they're not cheap. So the moment you want more than a few pages, yeah, you're going to pay good money for to have some information. So if you want, for example, in what later became the Climan case, where he was sentenced to paying $100, that was around an court case in 2013, late 2013, where he dragged Dave Kleiman into a bitcoin story that never happened around the company W and K. Now, if you want to know all that, if you want to have the original paperwork that went into court, like I said, then you need an document broker for that. [00:21:04] Speaker B: You know, one of the, one of the interesting things, like kind of going back to when, when you first heard about it, because I was, I was seeing all of that stuff live too, with the Gizmodo article and the, the, the doxing and the revelations and then the key signing and everything. And what I found really interesting was how quickly, like, like literally like how quickly it went from. Oh my God, is this, is, is Satoshi like, like, is somebody literally actually Satoshi to. No. [00:21:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:39] Speaker B: He couldn't sign anything. Like, he couldn't, he couldn't, he couldn't prove anything at all. Like, this guy's obviously full of crap. Like, I mean, like within the same day, you know, most people were just poking holes and the claim and the story and then the whole signing event was such a disaster because. And that was like, really the big thing is that he claimed he could and then so blatantly proved that he couldn't, you know, like this, that he, he didn't even either either. He was clearly just trying to convince people who didn't know how the basic signature and the cryptography mechanism of this worked or, or he was too stupid to know that what he was doing didn't prove anything and it was just something that you could just grab from the blockchain, you know, so it's like one or, one or the other. It's like either either he's too stupid or he, he's just hoping that everybody else is too stupid. [00:22:36] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a bit, it's a bit, it's a bit of both. He has, he has the stamina to. He wants to be in the, in the limelight all the time. He wants to have all the attention of the less literate people who don't know much about bitcoin. But the moment you start knowing a little bit about bitcoin, the moment you read Satoshi, that's what I've been doing a lot actually. That was for me, it was not only the technical debunks, it's mostly the guy doesn't even talk like Satoshi. When I read, when I read 7, 800, 900 posts that Satoshi has been doing on all the forums and mainly the bitcoin forum and all the technical stuff that he has been writing. Craig Wright cannot even talk like the guy. [00:23:17] Speaker B: I mean, not only can he not talk, but Craig Wright has a bunch of writing. Like he has a bunch of stuff that he wrote. He has the, the blog and website and you know, like all that stuff. They don't like, they, they're in totally different universes in like how they talk, the mannerisms. Like he can't, he can't go two sentences without just cursing or saying something. Just like unbelievably belligerent, you know. And Satoshi is like such a clearly soft spoken and doesn't really make declarations, you know, like, only rarely does he like even seem to be really assertive. It's most just kind of like it always kind of felt like a Nick Zabo or Adam Back sort of character. They don't, they're not super confrontational. They do have opinions and thoughts about things, but it's mostly from a curiosity, you know, perspective. Like they're, they're pretty explorative in how they talk. But yeah, just a. Like, if that doesn't. The level of difference is pretty staggering. [00:24:28] Speaker C: Yeah. For most people it works like that. I will never forget that a few years ago, for example. Well, we all know her, Lynn Alden, she said along the same lines, the guy doesn't even talk like Satoshi. How can he be Satoshi? It's impossible. And when I dived into the. The early history of Craig Wright, when he started to know bitcoin, that was in 2011, that was the first time when he mentioned it online. And there are no traces anywhere that he knew Bitcoin before July 2011. And the way he talked about it, the way how he mentioned it in a long line of payment systems and just on the side like, oh, man, that is how you. How everybody. When you start knowing about bitcoin, you start mentioning it as an option and then you get. You do a more deep dive. And then a few years later, he popped up around bitcoin and then he wrote some longer articles about it on his personal blog. And there you can immediately read, oh, I placed my bet on bitcoin. And then he said something like that. I was like, yeah, that's what you're doing now because you're starting on tax fraud and you're using bitcoin in it. It was in April, just after. Around the time Dave Kreiman died. Now you can immediately read in those three, four articles that he just bought his first Bitcoin on Mt. [00:25:55] Speaker B: Gox. [00:25:55] Speaker C: And he got so enthusiastic that he went down the rabbit hole with bitcoin. And that's how he wrote about bitcoin also. Now, of course, those two moments in 2011, in July, August, on. What was it, the website where he pushed two articles conversation. Yeah. And his personal blog with four longer articles. You never see him revert back to those moments because he is ashamed because he knows that everybody who is reading that stuff will immediately recognize. Yeah, that are the moments that you started to learn about bitcoin, that you started to talk about bitcoin like a noob that we all have been in the beginning. So how can you be the inventor of bitcoin when you talk like that in, in 2011 and even later in 2013? I mean. Yeah, yeah. [00:26:53] Speaker A: Well, of course then he. Then he goes and says that it wasn't him writing it. He had, he had other people controlling his. His. His content. [00:27:00] Speaker B: Every time, every time he gets caught, it's somebody else. Every time that Was. That was one of the. Like, to the point that it got really funny. Like, especially when I'm. When I was, like, reading through the book, because it was like, oh, he just got caught. And then you're like, oh, yeah, no, it's going to be somebody else wrote that, is it? Like, and things that he have literally previously said, oh, I totally wrote this. This is totally me. And there's no question about it. Like, this is everything about this is me. And it's like, well, I had an intern who did this and they died, or I forgot their name and they don't exist. They flew to Egypt and I never spoke to them ever again. And you'll never be able to contact them. [00:27:38] Speaker A: Good luck. Like. [00:27:40] Speaker B: Like, it's just incredible. Incredible that there are literally still people out there who buy the bullshit. [00:27:49] Speaker A: This is. This is the thing, the whole. The whole cognitive dissonance thing. I don't. I don't understand and I will never understand why people are so desperate to believe him when it is. It is so he. He puts his foot in it so many times, like again and again and again. He'll say something or do something that completely undermines something that he's previously said or done, and they for some reason refuse to let it register. And I mean, this is something that when this whole saga, however this whole thing finishes, it's going to be. The one enduring thing for me is how do people still believe him after all the lies? And why are they so determined to believe him? I'll never understand that. [00:28:32] Speaker B: They work really, really hard. Like, really, really hard to try to make it fit together. Like the, all of the. If you just put all of the excuses and the caveats and the. And the changes of story and everything together, it. Look, I mean, it's so incomprehensible. It's beyond incomprehensible. In fact, like, that's kind of what he bets on is that it is so unbelievably incomprehensible that nobody can have a good argument against it because you just have to. You just. No, no, literally, it just. None of this can go together. You know, like, all of this is contradictory. So if. If he's just never involved, or it's always somebody else attacking him or I, of course I did it on my computers. Like, well, somebody obviously had access to all of my computers. And I'm. Maybe I'm still using this five years later and acting like without any changes or anything. And I'm not. I'm not making any note or anything. Like, sure, somebody compromised my entire system. I did nothing about it for five years. You know, like, it just, it's. God, it's crazy. Before we, before we really get. Because this is, this is a never ending rabbit hole. But Mark, you said. So the audiobook is done. The book is out. Like, it's all, it's all out and available now. This is all volume one of a three volume series. And, and I, yours truly, got to do the audiobook for the first one, which I seriously am so honored. Thank you. I really hate, as I said before we started this, I really hate that I can't do volume two and three. But Mark will be doing the audio book. Are you going to do the third one too? [00:30:12] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm doing, I'm doing the next two. I'm doing the next two. I'm committed to it now. [00:30:16] Speaker B: You got it. You got it, Mark. You got it. But honestly, a book read by the, the author is always like, that's always my trade off. If it's, if I, if I can't do it, I want it read by the author. [00:30:29] Speaker A: People say that. So, yeah, that makes me feel a bit better. Yeah. [00:30:32] Speaker B: Yeah, but you are, we have, we have codes, right? We have, we have a giveaway. Go ahead and, go ahead and mention that because I know we'll come back around to that at the end. [00:30:44] Speaker A: Yeah, so we've got, because obviously the Audible connection, we've got some, some free audiobooks to give away some free copies of, of volume one of the audiobook. So yeah, we'll circle around to it later. But if you want to, if you're an audible member or if you're not a member and you want to get your hold, get hold of volume one of fake Toshi read by, read by guy, then keep on listening and we'll, at the end of the show, we'll let you know how you can enter the, the competition to, to win yourself a copy. [00:31:10] Speaker B: Sweet. Okay. All right. So keep that in mind, everybody. Now I want to talk about what the real story is. I want to, let's, let's put aside, let's put aside him impersonating Satoshi for a second. Let's talk about the tax thing. [00:31:26] Speaker A: Let's start. [00:31:27] Speaker B: Talk about like what actually started this, because this, this happened years before Satoshi ever came into play. Right? Give me the background. What was Craig actually doing and what fight was he fighting that made his claim of satoshi useful? [00:31:47] Speaker A: I'll give a brief overview and then Arthur can, can pick up and go into some, some detail and points because it is such, I mean, as you'll know, guy, it's, it's a hundred and odd thousand words of story. So we can't possibly do it justice in a few minutes, but we'll give it a damn good go. So, I mean the long and short of it is that he was trying to con the Australian Taxation Office out of millions of dollars basically because what he. Again, the short thing, the short answer is that he was faking transactions, he was faking contracts, he was faking deals, he was faking clients, he was faking, faking so much to faking supercomputers, all this sort of stuff he said all these businesses, legitimate businesses he founded, he connected them all together and said they were all doing this research and development work around bitcoin. And so he was buying this software, buying this hardware, buying this, buying that, buying this ip and he was conducting all these trades in these bitcoins that he had mined back in the day. So what he was doing was saying, well, normally, say this transaction, now say that I like say one company, one of my companies licensed some software from another company for $5 million. Let's say that $5 million transaction carries with it a goods and services tax charge that the Australian tax government authority level levies on the company doing the selling. So what Craig was doing was saying, well, you've got some things running, some incentive schemes running where we get the rebate paid back to us. There's GST and R D as well, there's two different things going. So he was basically creating these paper transactions and saying, you know, this $5 million deal incurred, say $10,000 in GST, but I'm going to claim to have that paid back to me because of the incentive you're running, but that would be paid back in cash. So he would be using fake bitcoin transactions that created a tax that he would then try and get paid back in cash. That's the nut, that's the acorn of the whole thing. So there's so much more around that. But that was his basic scheme, was to try and do that. And it ballooned to the, where he was trying to claim around $20 million in total between all these different companies. He tried to claim $20 million in tax rebates and things back to him. Yeah, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars. He said that he did. There was one deal which I love, which we talk about in the book. There's one deal he did with a guy who was basically a porn baron. He was a noted fraudster, convicted fraudster. And Craig said that this guy acted as a broker and brokered deals for some banking software and some software from Siemens for some computers. And he paid in, he paid $60 million in Bitcoin in 20, 20, 12, 2013. He was trying to say as if Siemens and Al Baraka, this Islamic bank are going to accept $60 million in Bitcoin. It went from being paid in bitcoin. He first said to them, oh yeah, I paid them in bitcoin. They said, well where are the transactions? And he said here's the transactions on the blockchain here. And they said no, no, these wallets don't belong to you. These wallets belong to somebody else. And this, the company never got them. Oh no. He says, I didn't sell them, I didn't send them bitcoins. I sent them private keys to bitcoin wallets that I own. So I sent them the private key so they can unlock the wallets and take the coins out. It's just utterly laughable. But that was the core of the deal. And the ATO basically pulled the whole thing apart and said no is it 94% of your company's income has come through these, this tax scam basically. So that's what he was trying to do. Arthur, is there anything else you want to. Any nuggets you want to add that I've missed out there? [00:35:49] Speaker C: No, this is basically it. But the question was then, I'll answer that part. Between 2013 and 2014, when in 2013 he started all that, the tax fraud and implement Bitcoin in it at that moment in time he did not, well, not in public at least or semi public. He did not pretend to be Satoshi. He pretended to be an early miner and having had, having put IP from Australia in America in 2011 and he wanted that IP back in 2013. So he sued WNK in 2013 but at that moment WNK was dissolved. It was not an active company anymore. It belonged to Dave Kleiman. But Dave Kreiman was dead in April 2013. So after his death that lawsuit started. It was actually just a one sided double claim of indeed around 60 million in total. Two claims of 2027. 28 million in total, almost 30. Sorry, 60. 60 million. And that way he sort of obtained a paper value of 60 million in Bitcoin IP and because he had forged paperwork and contracts and, and stuff and, and, and, and communication that mentioned bitcoin mining. So he was yeah, pretending to be an early miner and he had to ramp that up almost. Yeah. Organically somehow. Yeah, in. In his way. Organically, to an satoshi position. Because when you have, when you are an early miner and you claim to have those millions. Well, okay, hundreds of thousands in bitcoin. And those bitcoins are mined in 2009. Yeah. The only person who has been mining that much is Satoshi. So somewhat organically, he started to. To become satoshi and, and he first dipped his toe in January 2014. In a few emails with a few people, the ATO got involved. Nobody criticized him, nobody debunked him. So he was like, oh, wow, I'm feeling secure about this, so I can continue. I can continue with this nonsense. And, and nobody debunked him in, in that time because he kept it rather low profile. Only between the business people that he was dealing with at, at that time. And in 2014, it, yeah, it started to. To ramp up. And I think the earliest public outings which were on his block, I think is only late 2014, early 2015. That's when he was searching for a more public profile of, of satoshi and, and find acceptance of it because he could use that for the bailout that he needed when he had to start paying tax back to the ato. [00:39:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Was when he went public. I feel like I, I remember. I can't remember exactly the detail, but basically something had changed on the back end and him going public was going to help try to. He was trying to put pressure on making him basically getting some sort of reinforcement on him being of looking legitimate. Is that actually around the time or am I, am I mixing that up? Was that around the time he was trying to get the Australian government to treat it as a currency so it wouldn't have a, wouldn't have capital gains? [00:39:47] Speaker A: He. He did, he did try to do that. He. I think he tried three times to do that and each time he failed. But I don't think, I don't believe there was any satoshi element to that. That was just him trying to. That was him just trying to reduce his tax bill. [00:40:03] Speaker B: Yeah. You know what's, you know what's really funny? One of the craziest things about this story to me is how many dead people are deeply tied to, to everything that has happened. Like, it's like. And it's. And they're not mentioned, but then they die and suddenly they're involved. That happened. Like there's like three people. Two. Two or three people who, like, we're just, we're not going to talk about them at all for, you know, for six years. Like, it's just. They're not mentioned. There's no. There's no even a hint of, like, oh, but obviously there was this other person. That person's dead. Boom. This person was also the person who wrote all this stuff on the website, and this person was totally the other Satoshi. And it's just like, the second nobody can respond and nobody can actually prove anything, suddenly they're deeply, deeply involved. [00:41:01] Speaker A: A great example of that came, I think it was actually the. The Climb and v. Wright trial with the Bitcoin.org receipt. Because there's obviously. That's one of these, like, holy grails, isn't it? Is the bitcoin.org receipt. And Craig promised it for years and years and years. He promised, we're going to see the bitcoin.org receipt. And when it finally was entered into evidence, it was entered into evidence for the COPA trial, where it was debunked. But he said he got hold of it from an anonymous Reddit user who sent it to his. One of his lawyers who then passed it on to him. And they were saying, well, who is this random Reddit person? Oh, I've got no idea. The reason he could say that is because the lawyer had since passed away, and only after she passed away did he come out and say she got it from a random Reddit user. Why is a random Reddit user got your Bitcoin.org receipt and why have you not followed it up? Oh, God, bananas. Yeah. [00:41:59] Speaker B: And then he submits it, and. And then they're like, oh, well, this is total bs. And he's like, I don't. I. I don't. How would I. How would I have known I got it from a random Reddit user? It's like, you've been talking about this for years. Like. [00:42:15] Speaker C: And then the guy from England, the spy who was found dead in a. In a. All right. It's also a beautiful anecdote. What's his name again? [00:42:26] Speaker A: Gareth Williams. [00:42:27] Speaker C: Yeah, Gareth Williams. Oh, my God. My God. There was this anecdote. I think it also popped up during climate that there was this sort of seance, sort of video call, but without being a video call, because, yeah, of course he realized in the back of his head, oh, my God, Garrett Williams was not alive anymore. That was something. It was an anecdote about that played in January 2011. That was when he tried to. That what he said at least. Which was, of course, a bullshit story. That's when he said, I Tried to erase all my satoshi stuff from. From the face of the earth because I didn't want to have to do anything with it anymore. And Dave Kreiman helped me at that point in time, and Garrett Williams helped me in at that point in time. Little did he know. Well, maybe in the back of his head, because he was a bit insecure about the means of communications. Garrett Williams was dead since August 2010, so he could not have had a video call with the guy. Crazy. [00:43:38] Speaker B: You know, you mentioned the hundreds of thousands of bitcoin that quickly turned into. I guess the highest number was 1.1 million Bitcoin, I believe. [00:43:50] Speaker A: Yeah, there's different numbers. Craig's been given different numbers all the time. [00:43:55] Speaker B: The. The amount of pulling numbers out of his ass, it's just incredible. But he. What I found really, really interesting and which basically unfolded under this. Over this whole situation, a lot of it came out during COPA and these sorts of things was that he. And it also just kind of shows how nonchalant I think he was at the beginning of this. Like, he was just. He didn't really plan. I wonder if he really did not anticipate it to go this far and this big. Like, he just thought that it was going to work to get his tax thing for that year. And then that was just. That was as far as he needed to prove or give examples of anything because he basically just grabbed a bunch of addresses from the bitcoin rich list, right? Like, and. And he. And he explicitly said and posted, these are my addresses, and these are the coins that I own. And then over a period of a couple of years, it was like, well, this one's literally Mount Gox and it has since moved. This one just got sent and signed on the chain by some dude who literally wrote in the message, craig Wright is a fraud, or Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto or something. This one also. This is another one connected amount guy. Like, it. Like the. The dominoes of the things that he listed were just increasingly, you know, fell like. I think it was like, what was it? What the number does anyone even remembered off top of the head, like 11 addresses and five became provably nonsense. Do you remember? [00:45:31] Speaker A: It depends which case you want to take. You know, he's probably given dozens and dozens over the years to the ato and they've all turned out to be fake. So you could. You could almost pick a number under 100. He's probably given that many. There's been so many times when he's had like A little clutch here, a little clutch here. And like you say, they all turn out to be owned by other people over the course of time. [00:45:53] Speaker C: It also automatically debunks sometimes when he tried to make. He came up with a story that he used it for a payment. And then he is mentioning something about the payment, and then either the address is already empty or it was paid months, a month later. So it couldn't have happened as he said it happened. I think it was around Professor Reese. I think he was also paid in bitcoin. And, well, the family never knew about Craig Wright, let alone about bitcoin being paid to Professor Reese, who was, of course, also not alive anymore when things happened. [00:46:32] Speaker B: Actually, actually, hold on a second. Hold on a second. I want to dig a little bit into this Professor Reese thing because this is. This was actually a part of the story that I didn't know very deeply. Like, I just kind of, like, heard about it. It was all Dave Kleiman and all of that stuff when I was really digging into it. And so a lot of the Professor Reese details were totally new to me. And that is such a fascinating. Another one of those somebody was involved as soon as they were dead thing. Professor Reese being a prime example. [00:47:03] Speaker C: Actually, he was part of Team Satoshi for a while, huh? [00:47:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, he was. He was definitely. He was like half of the research for Satoshi and he wrote a bunch of the code. I borrowed him to. To write a bunch of code. Who is Professor Reese? [00:47:21] Speaker A: I'll. I'll take this one because this is one of my favorite little stories, like you said. So this. This was a guy who. I mean, there must have been a connection between Craig Wright's family and his, because it seems that Craig Wright's grandfather, who was. Who. Who pretty much raised him to a point, and he was one of his big influences, it seems like him and Professor Reece, they knew each other. They had some work during the war or something. There was some sort of connection there. And so Craig tried to use this connection as part of his ATO scam. He said, Professor Rees did some work on bitcoin and he charged me $1.6 million for this work and I want to get the tax rebate back, please. And they said, okay, well, you do realize he's 94 years old, or at the time you sent the invoice, the time you said you did the work for you, he was 94 years old and in a home with dementia. And he said, ah, no, he did the work for me a bit before then. I Was like, okay, well, why does the invoice and what does the contract say, this date? Oh, we agreed. We agreed back in the day that I would pay him a certain amount, and I pay. I'd pay him a certain number of bitcoins. And then that number, the value went up, so of course the dollar value had to go up. He said, okay, well, where's the transaction then? Well, here's the transaction, right? That, that transaction, as Arthur just said, that's an empty wallet. And even the money going there, that there's not the right number of coins in that wallet to go there. Oh, well, no, I didn't send him the coins. I sent him private keys. Okay, well, how did he get them Bitcoin out? Oh, his family must have been looking after it. Right. Well, his daughter's been looking after his financial affairs ever since he was taken into the home. She's never heard of. You never heard of bitcoin. He's not been near a laptop. She's not done an invoice for him. Like, where on earth does this all come from? And he. And, and, and the moment that he passed away, Craig then submitted the invoice and tried to get the tax claim back. And that's when this, this story all came out. It's just. It's. It's another one of those things where he's just found a useful person who he can say, ah, I can use this to try and get some money back without thinking it's going to get any further. But the ATO spoke to Professor Rees's family, who basically said, as I said, we've never heard of him. He's never, never done any work for him. And he was. He was. Yeah, he's got dementia and he's in a home at 94 years old. It's absolutely ridiculous. [00:49:48] Speaker B: And he didn't even write code. [00:49:51] Speaker A: No, he'd never written code in his life. And Craig said he'd written some code. [00:49:54] Speaker B: For him and paid him $1.1 million for it. [00:50:00] Speaker A: And the ATA came along and said, right, well, we want. We. Because they. They gave Craig a bit of advanced warning and said, we're going to come to your office in a couple of weeks, and we want to see the work that Professor Reese did for you. Okay. He's like, okay, so. So he comes along and says, all right, where's the work Professor Reese did for you? Oh, it's not here. It's at home. I left it at home. Okay, so we can't see the work he's done. For you. Can you please run the calculations on your computer? You've got the calculations he worked out for you. Can you run them for us and show us what it all came out? Oh, I've done them already. We don't need to do them again. They've been done once already. Every excuse under the sun he could find, he rolled out for them. And they were like, no, we don't believe Professor Rees did any work for you ever. [00:50:52] Speaker B: Dude. [00:50:54] Speaker A: He's mad. I love these mad little stories. [00:50:57] Speaker B: There's. There's literally a dozen of them, and it's. It's like one of those things. And I want to ask you about this, actually, because this was one of the interesting things about the fake Toshi book is that you can't. You can, but you can't really tell it in chronological order. You know, like, this thing's so sprawling that. And there's so many different pieces to it that if you. If you laid the breadcrumbs for something that ends up being debunked five years later, you'd have forgotten, because you've been laying so many little pieces to this puzzle that when you finally unraveled it, you'd be like, wait, because you're trying to follow, like, 10 different stories at the same time. Because he has changed stories. You know, he has, like, totally different narratives and paths that have occurred during all of this. And as. As obviously the case, he doesn't even seem fully prepared to back up a lot of the things that he starts. So he has to. He literally has to come up with the narrative two years later when he's finally put on the stand to defend something that he's put down as, like, some foundational piece of this. And then he has to figure out how to back twist this whole thing to be relevant to his whole Persona, his whole, like, kind of position on how this played out at the beginning and a whole bunch of other things he says. And he'll contradict, like, 30%, but he'll try to, like, specifically hang on to. And this was. The. One of the most interesting things is when you guys detailed out, like, when he changed his narrative, because his narrative was basically different at every trial. And what the difference was at each trial was the liability. Literally. It was literally the. The piece of the narrative that changed was always the piece that the. That this one court case hinged on, so that it had to. It had to play out in his favor. So it was like one was Dave Kleiman with Satoshi, and then another one is Dave Kleiman was totally not involved. And. And he just, like, has. I just, like, gave him a bunch of Bitcoin or something. Or. Or he gave me Bitcoin or something specifically. Because he would have to owe the other trial. He would have had to owe all of the money to Kleiman and Kleiman's family if the other narrative that he had done in the previous trial was. Was something that he actually hung on, hung onto. So that was like, one of the craziest things. [00:53:28] Speaker A: How. [00:53:28] Speaker B: How do you tell this story? How do you actually go about laying this thing out? Because if you had, like, a chronological map, there's no. The map is as nonsense as his attempt to piece these things together. [00:53:43] Speaker A: It was. It was so, so difficult. I mean, and actually this, the first one is a good example because what. When you're trying to map out the tax fraud. Fraud. Just. Just taking the tax fraud as the example, what I had to work with is these ATO reports into his companies and interviews with the tax office. And so everything from sort of 2013 to 2015 is, yeah, like, interim reports on his companies, final reports on his companies, post final reports on his companies, interviews. He's gone. He's had along the way. And each of these reports is. Is giving its own little chronology of what they've spoken to him about and what he has said and what's happened and what transactions have been made. And every company is connected to one of the other companies. So you can have five reports and five different companies, but they're all. They're all interconnected and they all tell their own individual story. And so you've got to. You've got. It's like trying to do five jigsaw puzzles at once and come out with it, with it with a complete soul picture. It is so, so difficult to do. And you just. And then, like you say, so you've got that. And then he. Then he says something on Slack that undermines something from back over here. But then he says something at a trial two years later that backs up the thing from over here. So you got to go, well, hang on a second. What's he saying now? What's the impact of that? And it's just. It's 10 years of shifting sands. And it was so, so hard to understand. And it's not a complete narrative either. There's gaps. There's gaps of months, there's gaps of Bitcoin transactions. There's so many gaps. You've got to try and work out what's happened in the Gaps and see if you can work out, you know, what's happened in that point. It was so difficult to do. But what really helps, actually, is knowing what Craig is like. Once, you know, the person, excuse me, the person you're dealing with, you can work out, right, if something is a little bit not quite right. Knowing Craig as I do, what has he probably done here? It's like. It's like. It's like trying to be a detective and work out, you know, if. If you're like a detective, you're trying to catch a serial killer, for example. You're like, right, we know his modus operandi now. So we know that if this happened, he's probably done this. And if we assume he did that, does that fit from what happens next? Yes, it absolutely does. So that probably happened. So I've. I've said sometimes, you know, we don't know that this happened at this point. What we can infer from what was said before and what was said afterwards. So, yeah, there's. There's so many points where that. That is the case. But. But it continues in books two and three, because he, as you say, he. [00:56:24] Speaker C: He. [00:56:25] Speaker A: He paints a narrative in one trial, and then he'll go to another trial. And because some evidence has come out that totally disproves what he said before, he'll change his story again. There's one point, actually, in the second book where it's in the Climbing, right, Climbing v. Wright case, and it's over the ownership of W and K. And as Arthur was saying, the court case in Australia, when Craig was trying to get this $57 million from W& K, he had to say to them, dave owned half of the company. I own half of the company. Dave's dead. It's all mine. I'm suing this company to get it all back. When it came to the Kleiman case, he had to try and say that never happened. And so Judge Bloom, who's the judge in that trial, she says to his attorney, do I believe what he told the court in Australia or do I believe what he's telling me now? He can't have it both ways. Which one you expect me to believe here? And I forget what his answer was, but he had to come up with some blustering answer that didn't put Craig Wright in massive trouble, but that just summed it up. Even the judge is like, right, he said two contradictory things. Which one are you telling me is the truth? Because at the moment, they're both lies. [00:57:34] Speaker C: Yeah, but that's how I went with it. Also when I remember writing in the early days of my medium articles when I wrote a three series with the three long articles about fake Toshi, the early years together with my friend cryptodevil at some point you just note down all the anecdotes and you just don't bother too much. What is the code, the coherent thing here? Because it's not. You see him, just one example. You see him in 2013, 2014 when he starts building up bitcoin holdings. Over the course of like six months, nine months, it changes from 10,000 bitcoins up to over $700 million in bitcoins that he owns. And he is checking the bitcoin rich list every month. Probably come up with new addresses that he adds to the list or in his mind and it changes all the time. And you can see, you can find those, all those that are in the small details of my articles. You will find it that it runs up, for example in fake Toshi number one, it goes up to 300 million. And in factoshi two he reaches the stage that is the highest number that he ever mentioned of his holdings in bitcoin. Then remember back then, back then that his wealth in bitcoin and Bitcoin related IP was if I remember well, $730 million or something. I mean, and that's why it was so, so, so nice to put everything under the umbrella of Potemkin Village. Because that is what he has been building a series of Potemkin villages that he connected with each other. And it's all empty, it's all fairy tales. It's meaningless, it's not supported by anything substantial. It's all his fantasy. [00:59:46] Speaker B: You know, I'm really curious because Calvin Air, okay, we haven't even, we haven't covered Calvin Air yet. And Calvin Air is literally a whole, it is, it's his own beast when all of this kind of starts unfolding. But I want to talk about where and how his lawsuit against the, against bitcoiners, against bitcoin devs and then also against Hodalot holding on fit into this because he went on the offensive at a couple of different points during this. And he was mostly like, it seems like throughout a lot of this situation he was on, he was playing defense like he's trying desperately to protect himself from the ato. Now he's trying to protect himself from this climbing situation, from the COPA situation. But what was his, what do you think his purpose was? And this was, I think after Calvin Air came home, came onto the scene with attacking the bitcoiner. What do you think he was trying to get out of that that was going to help him? [01:00:58] Speaker C: Oh that's, it's very easy. I mean they were looking for Calvin Air somewhere said it literally. They were looking for a fool to, to, to drag in into court and get an. Either by a ruling or by threat that the opponent would say, yeah, I believe that you are satoshi and I will not repeat this type of label in defamation anymore. But unfortunately for, unfortunately for the bitcoin community and unfortunately for Craig Wright and Calvin Air, somehow both hodlnaut and Peter McCormack hold on to their story and okay, Peter McCormick got away with it in a good, in a good sense. And hold on was just, yeah, I'm not, I'm not giving in. It was stressful for him, very stressful, but he just didn't give in. And, and Craig Wright never got what. [01:01:59] Speaker A: He wanted because the reason he did it as well is if you think if you can get a court to say you're satoshi, then you can and you are of this mindset, you can then go ahead and you can sue bitcoin developers, bitcoin exchanges, whatever to say, look, I've got a court ruling that I'm Satoshi. Your, your version of bitcoin is not the real bitcoin. I'm Satoshi. My version of bitcoin, which is Craig in Craig's world as BSV is the real bitcoin. So you need to either pay damages or license from me, et cetera, et cetera. So the whole point was to get a court to rule he was satoshi, which would give him the foundation to file these lawsuits that he did at the same time anyway. But that was. The whole point was to get that, get that first one through the door, get a court to say he's satoshi. We give him massive backing when he tries to take on the, the institutions to try and get the billions from them. Because again, just like with the ato, it's a shortcut to riches. That's what he wanted, is a shortcut to riches. And this was what he thought was going to be the way to do it. [01:03:00] Speaker C: Yep. [01:03:03] Speaker B: Having to sell bitcoin hurts, especially when you are certain it is going to be worth more in the future. But you can actually get access to the fiat without selling it by using a bitcoin backed loan. 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Everybody who's at least holding Bitcoin for other people but they do a proof of reserves so that you can confirm that your balance is there. And something that made me really happy recently is they just cut their Ethereum loans, they cut their yield product, they cut their non custody custody loans at lower rates. And so they now offer one simple hyper focus thing. Custodied, secure, easy Bitcoin backed loans. Use someone with a good track record who's done over $10 billion in loans available in over a hundred countries. They do proof of reserves and they've made it through the toughest times in the market without having a single problem. There's no credit check, there's no hassle and it's simple. This is why Leden IO exists. Get the value of your Bitcoin without having to sell it. Remember to read up on how the collateral works. They're really good at reaching out and making sure that everything stays balanced. Remember that Bitcoin is volatile so do not overextend if you know how to use it. This could be a huge benefit to your bitcoin stack and give you optionality in accessing fiat without it being that selling Bitcoin is your only option. I've been a very, very happy customer. Check them out. The link and details are in the description. That's so crazy that he was just, he was literally trying to claim ownership of Bitcoin like not, not of like bitcoin addresses but like of the Bitcoin system that was released. And you know that's, it's funny about that too because it was, it was free and open source. You know like Bitcoin was always released like that. How could he. I Mean, not to say that anything legal has to make sense because it usually doesn't. But there, there's at least some attempt at coherence. Why. Why would he have been able to backtrack? Because that could have been devastating. Obviously if you have to force everybody who's using Bitcoin in any commercial sense to pay a license now, now or you know, sue developers for literally altering software that didn't belong to them or, or making you know, you know, edits to, to his system. How. How was was that gambit actually like? Do you see that as actually. I mean, because that could have been devastating. It was that realistic. Do you think that that could have gone that way had it been not for McCormick and Harlena and basically everyone he went after essentially holding the line and taking, taking the hit and paying the enormous sums to defend themselves and winning? [01:06:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that. I mean I saw it as a threat but because I already knew that the threat was not so high because Craig Wright is just isn't satoshi. So I, I was, I've always been trusting to, for justice to run its, its course. So I, I've never given it in a long and big thought in, in. In that sense. I always trusted. Yeah like I said justice to take its course in the right direction and, and that actually happened. But I, but I still find a very funny way of thinking is think about when Calvin Air was bailing out Craig Wright in 2015. What we calculated back then, it costed him $15 million. What if he bought bitcoin and sit on that stash for 10 years? How rich would he have been instead of spending? What we think he spends is roughly around. Well just around number is 500 million including all the infrastructure that he has been paying for the salaries of several hundreds of people of, for several years. All the, the legal stuff of Craig Wright going on, all the losses that he had by BSV thinking from almost 500 down to now 20$. I mean oh, the guy has been spending yeah what we think hundreds and hundreds of millions into this stuff that he will never recover anymore. On the other hand it's gambling money that is coming in probably in, in big streams also. So he might not be too worried on, in, in, in in that sense. But yeah, he would have had billions if he bought Bitcoin for 15. [01:08:47] Speaker B: I did the math really quick just, just to see. So this is 2015, right? [01:08:51] Speaker C: I think it was around May or June in 2015 if you take that price. [01:08:59] Speaker B: The, the price would have been April May. So, yeah, about two, $200 to $220 to $240 maybe. And he could have gotten himself about 68,000 Bitcoin and it'd be worth about $6 billion today just for that. Not, not, not accounting for any of the other stuff that he's paid for and the ongoing costs and the lawsuits. Calvin Air could have just bought $15 million worth of Bitcoin and he'd have 6 billion bucks, 6 billion fiats today. [01:09:34] Speaker A: Just to your point about the MIT license and being open source, Craig had a very novel argument. He said that everyone else misunderstood the MIT license, but only he understood it properly and it precluded people from changing certain aspects because obviously he's got a big thing about Segwit and the rest of it. So he said that the MIT license does not provide for the changes that were made to the protocol. No one else understands it except for him. [01:10:06] Speaker B: Only he gets it. [01:10:07] Speaker A: That was his argument. Yeah. [01:10:10] Speaker B: So give me, give me the rundown of since we brought up Calvin Air. I want to know about this news because I just saw, I just saw this like literally, like moments ago, about an hour or so before we started this, I just saw like browsing through stuff about the wire fraud in one of my newsletters. And so I haven't, I haven't read it. Um, but. So Arthur, you said you just translated and published something about this? [01:10:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I, I came across. It was a sort of surprise for me also because I never, to be fair, I didn't pay too much. It was a big thing a few years ago, I think around 20, 2020 or 2021, that Wirecard collapsed with billions in money being lost or something. And it turns out now that a few journalists in Germany working for the Bayerundfunk, which is the Bayern Radio, basically, but they also have a website, BR or BR24, where they publish stuff, but it's in German, so for me it's not so easy to read. Although I do some German and I had a few years German in, in high school, but that is a long time ago. But yeah, I was notified that the article existed and I knew because, yeah, you know, most of the. If you do this for several years, then you know, of course, several journalists. So I have been talking to this journalist and many others from Wired and then the New York Times, and I mean, I know all those people. Not that I talk with them every day, but yeah, so I was aware about, of, of Wirecard and, and the scandal that has been happening there. But yeah, these journalists and Mr. Finger or something and then another guy they had, they say that they can prove that it's actually Kelvin Air behind it now. So I started reading and quickly translating that that article box I thought yeah, this is interesting because if it is Calvin A then then there's probably a link with Craig Wright. And I quickly came, I noticed several links in that article. For example, one of them is an important one is Tisch Consulting. T Consulting was one of the companies, it is mentioned in the article as one of the money laundering vehicles of, of, of Calvin Air. But Tisch Consulting is also the company that helped in the second half of 2015 to bail out Craig Wright for many millions. And the funny thing is in the article it is mentioned that in 2014 just before the bailout many millions of money laundering money went to Tisch Consulting. So yeah, for me the link is quite clear at some point because what I understood from the article, from the German article is that they had access to the bookkeeping for one year. That must have been in I think 2014. And if Tisch Consulting is one of the vehicles mentioned in 2014. Yeah then it is also one of the vehicles in 2015 because it still existed back then. I think it was run or associated with Robert McGregor. And Robert McGregor was indeed a key person in 2015 who disappeared from the stage I think around 2017. But in 2015 he played a rather important role. He was one of the people what I call the fraud squad of Stephen Matthews, Calvin Air, Craig wright and Robert McGregor. The four of them were doing and wheeling and dealing of, of the identity fraud that was set up then. So yeah, I, I, I translated the article and I added a few paragraphs with supported by a few photos. 1, 1 email where the the minister or an ex Minister of Foreign affairs or something who is now running an law firm on Antigua Cortes. I already lost the name. But yeah, he was mentioned also in, in those early days around Craig Wright. So he was also wheeling and dealing with the identity fraud being set up in 2015. And he was also mentioned in, in the article of those German reporters. Yeah, so I found several links and I was like oh my God, here we go. Craig Wright, the bailout has been paid with money laundering from, from the scheme around the wire cards debacle and, and wow. It's big news because it's one of the, I think for the last several decades, I think it's one of the most massive scandals ever in, in Europe now and now we can connect Calvin Air and Craig Wright to it it's amazing. [01:15:44] Speaker B: That's crazy that, that, like. Like, it keeps getting deeper, you know, like, that's a huge. [01:15:55] Speaker A: Like. [01:15:55] Speaker B: Like one of the most fascinating things about this whole story to me is just the. The sheer scale. Like, you have to. You kind of have to be in awe of Craig Wright and Calvin Aaron, everybody in this. [01:16:12] Speaker C: You have no idea how many times I'm screaming from the rooftops that this is worthy of a documentary or a good movie. It only needs an editor and a good script writer to. To turn this into one of those amazing series like James Bond or Mission Impossible or that type of thing. I mean, it screams, go do this. Netflix or whatever. It's such a crazy story. [01:16:42] Speaker A: But this. This. This is part of the problem is it's so broad. I mean, how. How on earth would you do an elevator pitch for this story? I. This is one of the issues that I've got is that, you know, I mean, well, this is why we turned into three books. This is why the podcast ran for three years. This is why it's three books. Because I tried to fit into one book, and I couldn't do it because we had to leave too much stuff out. I tried to fit into two books, but there was still too much stuff. And this is while coping was still going on, and that was all playing out. And then you can only tell the story across three books of over a hundred thousand words each. That's the only way you can do it justice. That's the smallest it can possibly be. Because, as you say, it's so vast, it's so broad, there's so many elements to it. It's like. It's like one of those, like the counter Monte Cristo, the family trees and stuff. You know, if you plot like a Shakespeare thing with the characters, you plot everything out on a wall, and it's just like the links, the connections, where things go. It is crazy. And that is one of the. One of the problems is that if someone was to try and really narrow this down and try and try and sell it to the. To the public, just think of what you'd have to leave out. I actually almost don't want to see it in a way, because what. [01:17:56] Speaker C: What. [01:17:56] Speaker A: Whatever you. Whatever the end product would be, it would just would not do it justice because there would be stuff left out that I'd really want to see. So. But then. Because people could go to the books. So, yeah, go for it. [01:18:10] Speaker C: Go read the book. [01:18:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [01:18:13] Speaker B: But as I understand it, he broke a record. He is. Tell me. Tell Me this mark? [01:18:22] Speaker A: We believe so. I mean, the idea is that there is, it's almost certain he is the record. He holds the record for the most number of forgeries submitted to a UK trial, a UK court case. There is nothing in any written records that exceeds the number of forgeries attributed to him through this case. Now, there might have been times where there's been really highly complex financial crime. And so if you count every transaction as a fraud, if you like, then, you know, that's one thing. But when you're talking about actual documents, forgeries, emails forged, you know, you've got the whole latex thing, the whole software forgeries, he. There is no written records anywhere going back however many thousands of years. British justice goes back and the records are kept. If anyone coming close to him in terms of one person being responsible for so many forgeries, so he is almost certainly a record holder in that respect. So when you talk about it being impressive, the one thing I will say is his work rate. The amount of work he's put into this is actually incredible. I mean, Hitler had a high work rate. You know, these guys, they have it, they work very hard. Unfortunately, it's the direction they choose to put their energies in. If you think, if he put that much effort into doing good in the world, think the amount of good he could have done. Imagine the late nights. You've got a pull to put out those kind of forgeries at the last minute during a trial. And there wasn't all of them. There was a box of evidence that was supposed to be that he tried to introduce two weeks into the trial and that wasn't submitted because it was too late. So we've got stuff we haven't even seen yet. You know, he was still creating this stuff late into the night. It's, it's mad to think how hard he worked on that for absolutely nothing. [01:20:12] Speaker B: That's kind of, that's, that's like such a beautiful example of like, like doing it. The, you know, he's trying to get rich quick, right? Like, this is all about like, how do I create a fraud that saves me a lot of work so that I can get a lot of money very easily. And yet he put in more work than probably than so many other people in just trying to prop up his lies and just tried to like, just. It was not a get rich quick scheme. It was a maybe, maybe end up in prison, maybe make a little bit of money after years and years and years of grueling work. It's like, man, if you had Just if you just bought bitcoin and like, just did some, just did something positive in the world, you could, oh, man, you could have come out so on top like this have been great, you know. [01:21:07] Speaker C: No. [01:21:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:21:07] Speaker C: But what probably helped is that, is that Calvin Air has been sponsoring him. I mean, he had, he had a rich life anyway, so he did not really need to put a scheme on his followers or on, on the BSV fans or anything like it. So he could, he could pretend to not be looking for riches because he already got them. I mean, Calvin Air sponsored his lifestyle. I mean, he was able to rent a Bentley and a Lamborghini and whatever. He could fly around the world and do some speeches here and there. [01:21:40] Speaker B: He basically did, did live richly. He just had to defend it. He had to prevent it from getting snatched out from underneath. [01:21:47] Speaker A: I was going to say there is a sliding doors moment because the whole point was when they signed this deal in 2015, initially the whole thing was supposed to stay under the radar. Craig and Stefan Matthews both agreed that Craig would not have to come out for about 10 years. The idea was they would set up this development, this end chain development hub. He would churn out these patents like Craig, sorry, Stefan knew he was satoshi, Calvin knew he was satoshi. Maybe even the staff would have been told they had to keep it secret. The Idea was for 10 years, Craig would pump out these patents, get paid this amazing salary. And then when the time came, he could say, well, look at all work that I've done. I must be satoshi. Look at all this work that I've done. There was never supposed to be the cryptographic proof because he knew they couldn't do it. So it was never supposed to happen. It was when Robert McGregor got involved to start with. But also there's a moment where he's talking to Andrew o', Hagan, who is the report, who is the journalist and the writer following them around at this time. And only Andrew o' Hagan said, no, you're going to need public cryptographic proof. The public, I've spoken to bitcoiners, they are not going to accept you. Waiting for years and years and years and then saying, look at my patents. They want cryptographic proof that you're satoshi. And that was when Robert McGregor and those guys started having this idea that crap, what we're doing is not going to be enough. People are. We're not going to be able to sell these patents for all this money unless we've got the cryptographic proof, the patents on their own. Aren't going to do it. And that was the moment in mid, mid to late 20, like autumn 2015 when it started to shift more towards this public signing. If it hadn't been for that, we might only now be learning that Craig is Satoshi because 10 years later he's got all these patents and he's coming out and saying I'm Satoshi. Look at all my work. All my work I've done. So you never know what might have happened. But there is that sliding doors moment of he could have got away with it if it hadn't been for that meddling Robert McGregor and Andrew O', Hagan, to badly paraphrase Scooby Doo. [01:23:51] Speaker C: No, I think, I mean it's only an impression that we get. But I think Robert McGregor was one of the more critical people in, in this story. On the other hand, I also think that especially Stephen Matthews must have been in the. In. [01:24:08] Speaker B: In. [01:24:08] Speaker C: In the complot. Is it an English word? He knew. What we know now is that it is quite. It's quite certain that Stephen Matthews knew from the start that Craig is not Satoshi and they set it up to get as much money from Calvin Air in. In the first place. But Calvin A must have known things also rather quickly and, and he had, he had the idea to get all his money back quickly together with the rest of the fraud squad. Indeed by selling the. The patents for. For several billions together with an outing of. Of Craig Wright as. As Satoshi never happened. [01:24:57] Speaker B: Has anybody kind of like, has anybody from the. The inside circle, so to speak turned, turned state's evidence? Have they. Have they like backed out or turned against the group? Like has there been infighting? [01:25:16] Speaker A: Well, basically, I mean yes. Christian Agarhansen is the, is the one that, that, that is the most explosive one. He was the end chain CEO for about a year and he came out in September 2021, was it? No, sorry, no. Was it September 24th last year? Wasn't it September last year? Beg your pardon? And he came out and said Craig's a fraud. This whole Nchain thing is a scam. I'm sure we even heard some wirecard Calvin Air stuff back then. He completely flipped and was posting emails and all this sort of stuff. We've got some great material from him about the inside workings of Nchain and the whole Craig Wright thing. [01:25:58] Speaker C: Wasn't that in September 23rd when it happened? Just before the trial? I think yeah, it was. [01:26:05] Speaker A: You're right, I'm too far ahead. So yeah. 23. So that was the most explosive one. But also you've got Steve Shadders, who was an end chain developer and a Craig Wright acolyte for a long time. He even helped, tried to help with some of the stuff during the climb and V. Wright trial. At some point, I'm not entirely sure, when he flipped, he realized that it was all a fraud. And he has been publicly against Craig Wright as well for a good few years now. So there have been a few that have left the cult, shall we say. Yeah. [01:26:39] Speaker C: And a few other people that we are not, well, let's say not allowed to mention because they want to stay anonymous. So we do have a few insights, sources where we, where we hear some anecdotes. But the most, yeah, prolific figures is indeed Iger Hansen and Steve Shadows. [01:26:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I asked specifically because if somebody was going to do like a, a series on this, like let's say, let's say a, A show or something, you know, get eight episodes out of it or something like, those would be the people to talk to, to try to get like the backstory of when they were, when they were aligned, when they were fighting, like what their goals were, what they were thinking, you know, that sort of thing. Because do we have any, do we have any concrete or idea of the relationship with Calvin and Craig now? [01:27:35] Speaker A: Like, ah, I mean that, that's one of the great imponderables. I mean you just, you just don't know. When Christian Agarhansen turned rogue in 23, he sent this fantastic. He posted a fantastic email from Calvin to Craig and to a few others where he basically called out Craig and said, essentially said, I don't believe you anymore. The Chilib Trust, which is this trust that's supposed to hold all these coins, these bitcoins. I don't believe you. We don't believe that exists. You need to sign now or it's over. I'm not funding your lawsuits anymore. You've ruined my life, you're ruining my kids lives. We're done. And so you'd think that at that moment, that's when Calvin realized that he'd had the wool pulled over his eyes for a good eight years or so. But then publicly he defended Craig. That's the only, the only naysaying we've ever heard has come from that publicly. He still backs him. So there's a couple of sides to it. But then about a day after the ruling for the Copa v. Right trial, Calvin Ayer said on Twitter, I'm going on a journey. I have been planning for a Year now, goodbye. He just skipped off like a day after the ruling. And what's interesting is that his Twitter feed, he mentioned Craig and Craig's cases on an almost daily basis, multiple times a day in some cases for years and years and years. Always pushing Craig, always pushing BSV relentlessly to anyone who did or didn't want to listen after that. He, he has not mentioned Craig's name once in his Twitter feed since the Copa v. Right ruling. Not one mention of Craig's name since that ruling. So you kind of have to think he, he must be done now. He, even if he doesn't believe him, he knows the game is up surely now. But yeah, whether he's going to, whether he's going to actually whether they still speak, whether he's going to try and get some sort of recompense, I mean, I have no idea. I have no idea. [01:29:43] Speaker C: No. But, but, but we think, and I think if I remember well it's also supported by, by Hanssen. I think he mentioned it a few months ago on Twitter half a year ago probably already. Is that this. And I think it makes a lot of sense that Calvin Air is still paying the costs of Craig Wright. He's now in, in Thailand in, in or around Phuket is what we, what we know. He's grow, he's growing cucumbers. Yeah, crazy. But it's still being paid. And he lives a nice life because we've seen photos of his, his crib which is still a nice place to live and he doesn't have that from his own money, although he might have some money when he sold his shares in End Chain to Calvin Air. Maybe he has a few million then he can buy such a thing. But on the other hand, it also makes sense that because Craig Wright knows a lot of dirt on, he has a lot of dirt on Calvin Air. So I think it's in somewhat mutual understanding, not really a friendship anymore. But it wouldn't surprise me to see still to still see money going from Calvin Air to Craig Wright. [01:31:06] Speaker A: This is what I've maintained for a while, especially between Calvin Air, Stefan Matthews and Craig Wright, this mutually assured destruction. They will never sue each other for that, that simple reason. [01:31:17] Speaker B: Because if somebody, as soon as, as soon as they're. They're enemies, they're both dead. They're both like completely done. Especially with this wire card thing coming out. That's how, that's how, that's how I think it would, it would be great to tell the story is, it's, is. It's Like a, It's a, it's a fraud. It's a fraud love story between two buds. [01:31:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:31:40] Speaker B: And. And it's a story of betrayal. Ultimately. It's a story of betrayal and they, they go their separate ways. Like, I won't backstab you and. But no, that's a. [01:31:52] Speaker A: God, it is a shame, you know, it is a shame we don't know more about that 2015 period. You can get your hands on a lot of people in the later years that have worked with them and they would happily tell some stories. But unfortunately there's so few people that were around them at that time. There's a three or four main players between, you know, 20. 2014, 2016, whatever it might be. And they all. That they're not going to turn on each other. And you just wish there was a few more people from that era that you could, you could get some stories from because that, that's the period where you really want to know what went down. But I just don't think we're ever going to get that. [01:32:30] Speaker C: No. [01:32:30] Speaker B: Well, that's the job. That's the job of the director. Right. You got to, you got to. Yeah. Just put a little creative. Creative dust in there. And guess what they were up to. And some of the stuff, some of the stuff with Calvin Air is. Which is kind of mine. Eager to get into book two because literally book one pretty much didn't even get. There's so much to cover even leading up to that. Just kind of like laying the groundwork for when Calvin showed up because Calvin is his own character. Like this is. [01:33:04] Speaker A: We're quite lucky because the story almost naturally fits into three. I mean there is some crossover but pretty much you've got like the three cycles of Craig. Right. You've got the 2011 to 2014, which is the tax fraud era. You've got 20. Well the way we've done it 2015 to 2021, which is the, you know, you could call it almost a fake Toshi era where he's. The signing sessions and the Wired and Gizmodo and then the Climate v. Right. Lawsuit. That's how packaged it. And then cycle three is the lawsuit. The lawsuit Craig, where he's got all this like almost 12 concurrent lawsuits going. So it's almost divided up into. Into three site into three parts of his life. The three. The three different kinds of Craig. So you know that that's how we've done it. So you're right. It's, it's. We've covered a lot of years. Hundred thousand words. And Calvin's name doesn't get mentioned because it's, it's just not, it's not, it's everything that carries to that point. But book two starts from that point where Calvin and Stefan Matthews are kind of straight into it. So that's where we carry on from there. So, yeah, if you're. And I've now got to go and edit book two with this new wirecard stuff, by the way, I hate to. [01:34:12] Speaker C: Add. [01:34:14] Speaker A: I thought I was finished with it, but I'm not. [01:34:17] Speaker B: Oh God. You know, one of the. [01:34:23] Speaker A: Oh God. [01:34:23] Speaker B: The wirecast card stuff threw me. What was that? What was I about to say? Because it was with, it was with Calvin. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Yeah. So it was the, the element about the, the email. So I had. So basically we have evidence, which I don't think if I, if I did actually was exposed to this, I didn't remember. But Calvin Air was like Craig scammed Calvin Ayer. Like it wasn't like a partnership. Like he was convinced that he was satoshi, not that his plan was going to work and they were going to make a lot of money, but that he was actually satoshi and that it has only recently come out that Calvin Air's done believing him. Like the Calvin Air realizes that he just got screwed. That's interesting because I, my, my assumption or my thinking, especially with the kind of character Calvin Air is, is that Craig pitched a scam. You know, Craig pitched like we're gonna, this is how, this is how this is gonna work out for us as opposed to trying to sell the satoshi story. [01:35:38] Speaker A: But I mean, well, I mean, I'll let Arthur add some meat to these bones, but essentially that's, that's what. Where we kick off at the very beginning of book two is that Craig is in real trouble. He's in real financial trouble. He hasn't got any money and he's going to owe tens of millions of dollars potentially, and he might even go to prison. So he needs money from outside. And at the same time, his old friend Stefan Matthews has been tasked by Calvin Eyre to find him some tech based investments in the Asia Pacific region. So, so Stefan and Craig come together and together they hatch this, this plan to sell Craig as satoshi, which he's already started, as Arthur said earlier, started to dip his toe in that water. And they come up with this plan that that's how they're going to do it. Because if Craig had approached Calvin on his own, he maybe wouldn't have got anywhere but if you've got someone that you trust, if you've got a friend that comes to you, especially someone who you've tasked with finding you some investments, but someone you've known for years and years comes to you and says, oh, my God, I've got this great horse. This great horse is running. You've got to get in on it. I've put my money and you've got to get on this horse. It's going to win. What are you going to do? You're going to go, okay, mate, I believe you. Let's bet on the horse. So Stefan Matthews is the broker here. So Stefan Matthews used leverages, his relationship with Calvin Eyre and his new position as investment advisor to present Craig as an investable asset. And Craig talks up the companies, they talks up the work they're doing. And as we have found, Craig is very convincing, like a lot of con men are. He's very convincing face to face. If you. If you're not a technical person. Calvin has admitted he's not a technical person. He doesn't know. He knew Bitcoin for a good few years, but not on a technical basis. So when Craig writes, blathering at you for. For like a day straight about Bitcoin, it kind of sounds feasible if he's using all these long words and it sounds coherent. So Calvin Eyre, it buys in because he believes what Craig's telling him, and he buys in because Stefan Matthews is the one bringing him to the table. So that's. That's the really crucial point. Without those two elements together, this doesn't happen. So that's why he needed both of them to. To do this. [01:37:49] Speaker C: So. [01:37:50] Speaker B: So you think. So how did Stefan and Craig know each other? Or did Craig go to Stefan? Do you. Do we know? Yeah. Do we know when that connection started? [01:38:02] Speaker C: They knew each other from several years earlier, from other projects that they had been doing together. Actually, Craig Wright was also not a completely unknown name to Kelvin Eyre because Kelvin hired him. Well, not maybe Kelvin directly, but one of his personnel hired Craig Wright in the Bodach era to do some jobs for Bodach. So it was already a bit of an insider, a bit of a clique together. They knew each other and that's how the contacts were laid very sort of smoothly. I think they knew each other for a few years already. [01:38:49] Speaker A: And I'll tell you what, if you're a fan of changing narratives, chapter one of the second book just puts into very clear detail how much of a nonsense this story is. It's Stefan Matthews recollections of this era. Of this era, how he got back in touch with Craig across two or three interviews and a couple of court cases, he changed his mind on almost every single aspect of the timeline. When he met back up with Craig, what they said, what happened, all this sort of stuff, he upended it. He said he just changed his mind all the time. Could not keep his story straight. Then Coingeek came out with a piece saying, called How Bitcoin was Saved. That changed it again. He then had to stick with that news story for the Granaffee Right Trial because that was now in print. So he had to stick with that. And then at the Copa v. Right Trial, they found an email from 2014 that basically upended the entire three years worth of stories he'd been telling and backdated everything by an entire year because he forgotten he'd gotten back in touch with Craig in early 2014. It's just an. It's a nonsense. It's an absolute nonsense. So you just know, I mean, he couldn't tell the truth if he tried any at this point because he just changes his mind on absolutely everything. There's a great moment where he says in. I think it's for the Granathie Wright case. And he says, I knew that I met Craig in early 2015 because I went to Sydney to meet Craig with my wife. And it was the first time I've ever seen Sydney fireworks for New Year's Eve Live. They're like, okay, that's quite a memorable event. You know, you're going to remember the year that you went to see that for the first time. So roll around two years later for the Copa trial, he's sitting. He's sitting doing his witness statement. This email is bounced out that shows that he actually met Craig a year earlier than he said. So in his statement he says, I knew I met him in 2014 because I went with Sydney, went to Sydney with my wife. We met with Craig and it was the first time I've ever seen Sydney fireworks for New Year's Eve live. Which year, which year is this again? It's just. It's just these little moments that are just absolute. Just show that it's a nonsense. [01:40:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:40:57] Speaker C: And how he got the white paper, then it's in paper, print, and then it's a normal USB stick and then he printed it himself. And oh, man, I remember that. Justice Mallor, I think he is. He is referencing several of those anecdotes, what changed all the time. But there are many of them crazy. [01:41:20] Speaker B: There's literally a podcast on the white paper on the. The pre. Like the drafts of the white paper that he had, the. The times that it was published, the number of people he says he shared it with and how he put. I mean, just the number of the. Just the story about his creation of the white paper is wild. There's an unlimited amount of. [01:41:46] Speaker A: What's great as well is that he spends so long crafting the narrative because as you said earlier, he'll say something and then when he'll be at another trial or another interview and he'll add something else or change something else. So he's crafting this story as he goes. And we get to the Copa trial, and you're like, okay, we've got all these years worth of stories so far. This is what you're saying has happened so far. And he brings, he brings latex into it, and suddenly all those last nine years are rendered completely irrelevant because he's written the whole thing in latex but never mentioned it before. You know, he's got this way of just upending years worth of stories and not thinking anything about it and thinking, yeah, they'll believe this. Even though I've never ever referenced it. [01:42:31] Speaker B: Man, he's the perfect example of a confidence con man. And, And I think that makes sense why, like, like why he does he. He seems to have success in person, but doesn't in kind of the online world is, you know, with the exception of the. His little cult, but that, you know, like, you don't. Like, every time I experience some claim or whatever that he had, I didn't get it from him. I wasn't in some social situation where I had to worry about, like, like how overbearing he was or anything, or I had to make a signal in the group one way or the other. I just, like, heard his claim, and then it's like, well, that seems completely bonkers. There's no. You didn't back this up at all. You know, and it's interesting that, you know, kind of the, the information age, the, the way we're exposed to things give us such different perspectives, because it's, it's. It's literally about like the funnel. Like, like where. Where did you get exposed to this? How did this get introduced to you for your. To build your entire perspective around, which obviously has positives and negatives, but still just. It probably lends itself to why they wanted to stay quiet for so long, because he does seem to have that. That is a charisma. Is it? I don't know what. It's just. Just the sheer dumb confidence in person that if you're quiet and you're just talking to people that people can't resist. Like, people can't say no to you because you're just like. You're so. Like, I am this. And, you know, like, it just like, weigh people down until they wear people down until they have to say yes. [01:44:20] Speaker A: There's a thing, I think I referenced it in book two. It's called the confidence heuristic. And it first came about in 1970s psychological research. And apparently the confidence heuristic is where it is the level to which you believe someone speaking because of how they come across, not what they're saying because of how they come across and the intensity that they're speaking with. So politicians, good politicians, cult leaders, con men, they find people who they. Whose confidence heuristic they can exploit. And so they are what they say, and what they say is ignored. And. But how they say it is is what is, is embedded. So Craig Wright is very good at exploiting this confidence heuristic because he finds the people that will not analyze the words he's saying, but will listen to how he's saying it, listen to the passion he's got for this subject, listen to what sounds like it could be feasible. They put that all together and that equals truth for them. Whereas others, they cannot exploit the confidence heuristic. So that was something, some research I did for the book. And I think Craig and a lot of other con men have got this ability to exploit the confidence heuristic where they can just sound. They can sound knowledgeable, sound important, sound authoritative, and they are believed. [01:45:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Especially just with the way, I mean, he. He will literally, you know, there are times where I've watched him on video and he will say something, and not even necessarily when he's caught in the corner, like, almost out of pure habitual nature, he will say something and I'll. I'll listen to it and I'll just be like, he just pulled that out of his ass. You know, like, he. He didn't think about this going into it. He didn't know he was going to be asked that question. He totally just yanked that out of his ass. And, and, and it's gonna. It has effects, you know, like, it just. Like this actually has, like, concrete consequences in his narrative. And he's totally just. Again, just not, like, not like nothing. Like, just know all I have to do is just be. All I have to do is Just say it with conviction and doesn't matter what it is. Doesn't matter what it is. [01:46:45] Speaker A: And doing the best example of that, best example of that was right before the climb of the right case where he was talking to his online followers about the ip, about the value of the intellectual property that was really also at the heart of that case, he said, because he was obviously boasting about how good and amazing his work is, he reckoned that the value of the ip, the W and K that he brought back over was worth $250 billion. So he was trying to make himself the big I am. Oh yeah, the work I was doing is now worth $250 billion. So what our clients team did, they said, okay, well if you think it's worth that, we're going to sue you for that. But Florida law allows us to either double or trip or treble the amount of damages that a civil plaintiff can be awarded. So because, purely because of him boasting about what the value was worth, he was sued for $600 billion in IP just because of his boasting. So that is a prime example of what you're talking about. [01:47:48] Speaker C: I remember it was even slightly higher because it's, at some point it was called the one trillion dollar case or something. [01:47:55] Speaker A: Also probably once you added the Bitcoin in with the ip, it probably would around that. [01:48:00] Speaker B: Yeah, that's so funny. So cases are still ongoing. I mean, not even just with this wire card thing that has come out, which may have, may be dragging him back into court. But there's still stuff unfolding. Right. Where is what's happening with Craig at the moment other than cucumber growing? [01:48:20] Speaker A: I think. Well, the only two that I can think of. We still don't know what's happened with the Roger Ver libel case in Antigua because Craig tried to sue Roger Ver in the uk but that was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. But he sued him in Antigua and that went ahead. But crickets since then, we have to assume he's folded it because it's been nothing since then. And you know, we have to assume that. But also Christian Agarhansen sued End Chain and I think he sued Calvin Eyre, he sued Craig Wright, he sued Stefan Matthews as part of his, part of his going rogue. And he sued a bunch of these guys. I forget what even for now, but again, he filed the lawsuit months and months ago and there's been nothing since then. But apart from that, legally Craig is done, dead, gone. So. [01:49:11] Speaker B: Okay, yeah. [01:49:12] Speaker C: And there's still the, the bsv, mass action, something BSV claims. Yeah. [01:49:22] Speaker B: Okay, well, that's not worth anything because BSV is not worth anything. But. [01:49:27] Speaker A: That'S not. Craig isn't involved in that directly. [01:49:30] Speaker B: Yeah, so this is the thing that, you know, trying to have, as I don't have any respect for it, so that's probably nonsense, but trying to give as much credit as possible, especially considering he didn't win a lot of these lawsuits, as much credit as possible to the legal system. How is he not in jail? Like, how do you. How do you falsely sue a dozen people? People. How do you submit over. Was it over 500, like, provably forged documents into court cases? [01:50:13] Speaker A: How. [01:50:14] Speaker B: How do you do everything that has happened, try to commit tax fraud for four years and not. How is he not in jail? [01:50:30] Speaker A: I'll answer from the UK perspective and Arthur can maybe speak to the issues in Australia. So I completely agree. It is unfathomable that someone can forge things to that extent and can get away with it. So what happened after the COPA case? It took a few months for the written ruling to come out. And in that written ruling, I even think it wasn't even in that written ruling, it was a. A form of order case, maybe afterwards, but at the very, very earliest, we're talking months after the verbal ruling, Justice Mellor came out and said, I'm going to refer Craig Wright to the Crown Prosecution Service for potential perjury charges and Stefan Matthews. So what happens then is that the case is forwarded to the cps. They look at the case and see, right, is there enough evidence to secure a conviction? Is it in the public interest to spend public money prosecuting this person? And how important is this case in the grand scheme of things? In the public interest? So Craig's file is in a massive stack with rapists, murderers, child molesters, all these people in the UK that have committed a crime, that the Crown Prosecution Service have to assess their case and see whether they are worth spending public money to prosecute them. That's where his case was stuck. And I put out a statistic a few months ago. I forget what it was, but there's like tens of thousands of cases that came up in the three months or four months after that moment. So he is. Yeah, I forget what it was, but it was so, so high. And so he's basically, as far as I'm concerned, he's dropping down the list on a quarterly basis. And it's been, you know, a year and a half now and there's been not a peep. So they're either still looking at the case or they have decided that for whatever reason, they're not. They're not going to pursue it. It would be fantastic if they made an example of him, but I'm not sure that they will. The other side of it is that he should be in jail for contempt of court. I won't go into a lot of detail on this, but this time last year, roughly, he was pulled back into. He was supposed to be pulled back into court because he violated the injunction that COPA won, where he basically was not allowed to sue anybody based. This is a misconception and needs clearing up. After the COPA lawsuit, after the COPA trial finished, there was a bunch of. COPA wanted some remedial action, and his lawyers argued against it. COPA wanted to stop Craig Wright from being allowed to say he's Satoshi Nakamoto. They said, you're not allowed to call yourself satoshi. The argument was that breach is his human rights because he's allowed, just like any of us are, to stand on a street corner and shout, I am satoshi. Without fear of being arrested. Perfectly, perfectly valid. So what was decided was that Craig was not allowed to sue anybody based on his satoshi identity, perceived satoshi identity, but he's going around telling people he's not allowed to call himself satoshi because he wants to be a martyr. So that's an important point to note. So he filed a lawsuit straight after losing to Coppa, in which he effectively said, I created bitcoin. So copper suits, copper said, no, you've breached the injunction. You've said you're satoshi. You said you created bitcoin. You need to go to prison now because it's contempt of court. Long story short, he was found guilty of contempt of court, but by that point, he already skipped to Asia to avoid being potentially caught up in this. And he was called back to the UK to face trial in this. In. For this case. He refused to come back and it wasn't deemed necessary to try and fight for extradition for this case, so he got a suspended sentence for that. So that's. That's where we are with the UK cases. But, Arthur, I'll let you handle the Australian side of things. [01:54:29] Speaker C: Now, the thing. One. One thing that I want to mention, when it comes to the. To the English case you just mentioned, you need an example. But is Craig Wright an example that needs to be taken as an example for likewise people? Not many people are that crazy. Not in this same way. I mean, for how many people will he be an example. He is a clown. He has been doing fraud. But if you want to, to, to use an example that not many other people will do it, well, not many people are doing it anyway. So indeed I can imagine that cps, the Crown Prosecution Service is not putting him high on the list. And I've been. It disappoints me because I really would like to see him in jail. I mean, I'm honest about that. On the other hand, being realistically, I don't think there's a high chance anymore because to whom will he be an example who is done justice when he is in jail, you have to keep him on a leash that he is not what Mark just explained that he should not be able to do any lawsuits anymore, so he cannot harm people anymore. But if you want to have an example against other people who might want to try to do the same, then I think child molesters and rapists and I mean that is happening way more and causing way more personal damage in society. So they should be, and I'm very realistic about that now, they should be higher on the list. Let's be fair. You know, sort of the same thing is probably playing out in Australia too. What we do know however, is that Australia is sort of strict with tax fraud. They tried to put everybody already for several tens of thousands of dollars for a few years in, in jail to take an example because tax fraud is actually happening and happening. I'm not saying a lot, but it's happening in Australia. So they, they, they do take these people from the street, even from foreign countries, from America for example. I remember a case where a guy, I think he was a trader, exchange trader or something, and he fled to America, but he was also brought back to Australia to put in, in jail. So do I expect Craig Wright to see the consequences of his Australian tax fraud? I hope so, but they take a long, long time, 10, 11, 12 years easily after ramping it up to a criminal case. And when was it ramped up to a criminal case? That was in 2015 when his house and his offices were raided. That is, that was the kickoff of the criminal case against. Now we know that in 2018 the criminal case was still running, so I expect it to be still running. But the counter for 10, 12 years started only in 2015 and then we arrive in 2025, 26, 27. Will it happen? Yeah, we don't know. I, I sort of hope so because of course this guy is such a criminal, he deserves to be in jail and not being able to harm on the Internet because now he is. Well when he's leeching on. On Calvin Air, I don't care. But he still has this, this cult that is losing money in. In the thousands and tens of thousands of money that they put in his products in bsv. And the belief of Terra Note being. [01:58:39] Speaker B: The thing is that all still going on? Is. Is there still. [01:58:43] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Chain end. Chain has. [01:58:48] Speaker A: Has. [01:58:52] Speaker C: How do you call it has been brought back to the, to the. To the bones. It's not much anymore. They had two, I think between 200 to 300 developers but they sold everything or fired several people. I think it's only a few dozen people only working there but it's still, it still has something going. The token has dropped from the highest point on the market that placed was number five. Number four even I, I heard something say but I. What I saw was number five several years ago in the heydays but currently it's hoovering between 150 and 200 somewhere. [01:59:39] Speaker B: Oh, it's not even being tracked on CoinMarketCap anymore. [01:59:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I think, I think so. With it it should be around between 150 and 200. [01:59:50] Speaker B: Okay. It's just showing up in the. Not showing up in the thing. So it's 20 bucks. [01:59:53] Speaker C: Yeah. A few months ago okx that was one of. Has always been a big supporter of bsv but even they delisted bsv so you can already predict that Terra Node, which is the, the. The latest product that they're going to release or it's actually already released. That should bring scaling to. To bsv. Now we don't see any enterprise running in drones. [02:00:30] Speaker A: I've always said that this whole BSV scaling Terrano thing reminds me of that North Korean Superhighway where it's 26 lanes of motorway and five cars on it. [02:00:39] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is. So we. There's still so much. I still can't even believe we, we literally even didn't even touch on the white paper and I didn't even register until you brought that up and I was like, oh my God, that's like a whole thing. So obviously we can't cover, we can't cover the whole book, let alone all three books. But to be respectful of both of your times, what would you say to anyone who's still bought into this at this point to somebody in. Because without a doubt we're going to get some major haters listening to this. In fact they, they seem to do it like a job sometimes and like, if they made it this far, how do you. What do you say to, you know, whether or not you're trying to get through. Through to them or not? I don't care. What do you. What do you want to say to. To those people who may still be here for me? [02:01:52] Speaker A: Like you just said, the. The one thing I wouldn't say is anything about looking at facts and look at this and research, but could. They're past it. Anyone that is still believing him now is past redemption. So that is pointless to have that conversation. So all I would say is don't put any more money into this. If you've lost money, if you've put money in, just do yourself a favor, stop putting money into it. I'm not saying go and buy Bitcoin, not saying go and buy anything else. Just stop putting any more money into this because you're just going to keep losing it. You're past saving now, so just save what little money you've got left, please, Arthur. [02:02:30] Speaker C: Yeah, same for me, actually. I hardly interact with BSV fans anymore these days. [02:02:37] Speaker B: I. [02:02:39] Speaker C: After the client. Sorry. After the Copa case, I completely lost interest in at least communicating with the, The BSV fan club. I. And I'm still blocking them, not on a daily basis anymore because that. That fan club is not so big anymore. But every now and then you run into new people. And then there was this Kate, Kate Mosso girl I think recently who popped up and I, I think I only responded to her twice and she already blocked me because she already immediately noticed that I was not a fan of Craig Wright. So I'm following it sort of of the sidelines, but on the sidelines of the sidelines. And yeah, I only have one message. If you can give me evidence. [02:03:33] Speaker A: That. [02:03:34] Speaker C: Is dated, it's genuine evidence and is dated before July 2011 that Craig Wright is indeed Satoshi bring it to me. But I know already it's never coming. [02:03:46] Speaker B: Yeah, If. [02:03:48] Speaker A: If I was going to try and challenge them, I would say take one page of the book and try and debunk anything that I've said that anything that we've said in there, any. Any point we've made anything, any thing negative against Craig you can find on one page, debunk that, please. But you. They just can't. Because the thing is, as well, I won't keep going on about it. But Craig often debunks himself. He will usually tell a story, as you said, he'll tell a story and then he'll undermine that story a few weeks or months or years later. So he's doing my job for me. I don't need to go and research why that's a lie because he'll lie about it again in a few months time anyway. So, you know, it's like if you. [02:04:30] Speaker B: Just kind of wait for him to do it. [02:04:33] Speaker A: So find something in there. Take one page of the book at random and tell me that I'm wrong. [02:04:40] Speaker B: I like it. I like it. All right, so now we have some since we're finally published and book and audiobook and everything. So for anybody who's listening and wants a free version of the audiobook, Mark, how do we do that? [02:04:57] Speaker A: So this is coming out on Friday the 28th. I believe it's going to be. I think I've got the date right there. Yeah, so that's the date today. So what we're going to do, we're going to give away 10 free copies to Audible listeners. So between between Friday 28th and Tuesday 2nd of November, email us this very specific email address we've got and we will, on after Tuesday, we'll pick 10 people that have emailed through to receive a code where you can redeem to get a free copy of Faketoshi Volume 1 on Audible. So just email, you can put a message, you can swear at us, you can give us praise, whatever you want to do. Make sure you email us faketoshitcoinaudible.com so faketoshitcoinauDible.com and then we will pick the 10 winners on the. On Tuesday 2nd of December and email you back with your code. Good luck. [02:05:52] Speaker B: Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Guys. Thank you. Sorry for the, officially publicly, for the, a little bit of a mishap in trying to get this scheduled and my dropping the ball there. I, I want to respect your time and I, I thank you so much for coming back and making this work and joining me and for the just insane amount of work in detailing and telling this story because it really is just fascinating. I loved, I love doing the audiobook. I'm, I'm stoked to get volume two and three and just. Thank you. Thank you. It's been, it's been a hell of a thing. [02:06:31] Speaker A: It's been great. Thank you. And thank you for doing volume one. [02:06:34] Speaker C: We will see you with book number two, but will be next year in, in March. [02:06:39] Speaker B: Hell yeah. Hell yeah, stud. Keep me, keep me updated. Shoot me an email. You know, y' all can get in touch with me if you ever need anything. And thank you for coming home. Maybe Maybe we'll have to do another one of these. [02:06:51] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Next year, definitely. We've got two more. See you. [02:06:56] Speaker B: Cheers. [02:06:57] Speaker A: All right, Thanks a lot. [02:06:58] Speaker B: Later, guys. [02:06:59] Speaker A: See you. [02:07:02] Speaker B: All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. There's literally so much to unpack and I cannot recommend this book and the series enough. You'll probably hear about it again when volume two comes out, especially particularly the audiobook, because I consume everything through audiobook if I'm not explicitly reading it, usually for an audiobook or the show or something. These days it's just my. It's the only avenue that I have that I really have access to all the time. I will be listening to Mark Hunter. Listen to reading part two and part three to me and you'll be able come back up undoubtedly. And he actually sent me a few other links as well as the details to get a free copy of the audiobook. Again, we have 10 different codes and if you send an email to faketoshitcoinaudible.com you should be able to find the links that he sent as well as the details down in the show notes. But just shoot an email, whatever it is, to that email address and we'll put you in the running and Mark will pick them out on Tuesday. So good luck with that. I hope you get a free copy. But if not, I've got the link so that you can go snag your. Snag your own version off of Audible anytime that you like. And yeah, don't forget to check out follow Arthur Van Pelt for his writing Mark Hunter the podcast, the content that works, just the incredible amount of work that they do. And don't forget to follow the show. Shout it out. Tell everybody you know about it. Everybody who doesn't know about the fake Toshi story, man, it's wild. Even outside of whether or not you know anything about bitcoin, it's a fascinating story. And a shout out to Leden for bitcoin backed loans and for supporting the show to Synonym and the pub key stack that they have created to to redecentralize the web. Please. If you are a builder, check it out. You might find something fascinating. And then get chroma. They actually have. I just noticed somebody sent me a message. They actually have a 21% off sale. So I've got a 10% discount for you. But right now because of Black Friday stuff, they have a 21% off sale. So check that out. Especially if you're thinking of getting nightshades. Really good product that I swear by my friend was thinking of getting the Radiance, which is a red light. Definitely check those out. And then lastly, the HRF and their Financial Freedom Report and the Oslo Freedom Forum and the insane work that they do and for supporting my work. Thank you all to the audionauts as well, who zap, who stream sats, who listen to this show, who share it out, and who enjoy me getting together with people and reading about and talking about and ranting about bitcoin. So with that, thank you guys so much for listening. And until next time, that's my two zats. Sam.