New details have emerged in the ongoing lawsuit in the U.S. filed
last year against Craig S. Wright, the technologist who claims to be the
pseudonymous creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto.
A redacted declaration filing from Kleiman v. Wright surfaced
today, which details Wright’s purported ownership and the trustee
scheme of the Tulip Trust, which supposedly holds over one million
bitcoin. According to the filing, access to the holdings of the trust
requires participation of all trustees, at least one of whom he hasn’t
been in contact for several years.
The court document was originally
filed on May 8, and also points to the existence of a second Tulip
Trust, known as Tulip Trust II.
Days before the document was filed, a federal court ordered Wright to disclose his bitcoin addresses in the ongoing lawsuit. Wright is being sued by
Ira Kleiman on behalf of the estate of his brother, the late Dave
Kleiman. The nChain chief scientist is accused of scheming to “seize
Dave’s bitcoins and his rights to certain intellectual property
associated with the bitcoin technology.”
Kleiman is seeking half of the 1.1 million bitcoins the two are said
to have mined together, or its “fair market value,” as well as
compensation for infringement of intellectual property. The initial
complaint did not seek to ascertain whether Wright is the person behind
the Nakamoto identity, stating that “it is unclear whether Craig, Dave
and/or both created Bitcoin.”
According to the declaration released
Thursday, the Tulip Trust consolidated the bitcoin Wright mined and
purchased between 2009 and 2011.
The trust first came to public attention through a leaked document
on December 9, 2015. Allegedly written in 2011 by Dave Kleiman, a
forensic computer investigator and author, the document describes a
trust fund containing exactly 1,100,111 bitcoin, “to be managed by at
least three people but not more than seven at any time.” The document
also declares the bitcoin holding is to be returned to Craig Wright on
January 1, 2020.
These new developments come amid an ongoing mediation process, which as of June 18 has yielded no results — in the words of the mediator, as reported by attorney Stephen Palley, “we are at an impasse.”
As it stands, Wright is due for deposition in Florida on June 28.
Trust details
According to Wright’s court
declaration, seven trustees were named, including Craig Wright, David
Kleiman, and Ms. Uyen Nguyen — whom Wright claimed he has had no contact
with since 2016. That said, Kleiman was the initial, and sole, trustee
before others were appointed.
Panopticrypt Pty Ltd, an Australian
entity now in liquidation was also named alongside an unnamed Seychelles
entity and CO1N Ltd., a U.K. entity liquidated in 2017.
“The contacts at CO1N were Dave
Kleiman and Ms Nguyen, who was terminated as director on June 1, 2016.
Presently, there is no one other than myself who was a contact for this
entity.” Nguyen was allegedly terminated as director of CO1N in June
2016.
The final trustee listed is “the holder of PGP key IDs, which is Satoshi Nakamoto,” with Craig Wright parenthetically related.
In the past, Wright has said that the trust is encrypted using a a
method called Shamir’s Secret Sharing Algorithm. The only way to access
them, he’s said, is to accrue the collective private keys in order to
decrypt it.
Wright complied with the directive
pursuant to a court order to produce bitcoin holdings for all bitcoin
Wright mined prior to December 31, 2013. The filings were subsequently
sealed.
The Tulip Trust II was settled in 2014 in Seychelles with Equator
Consultants listed as a trustee. Wright and his wife Ramona Watts are
the primary beneficiaries. The holdings of this second trust are
unknown.
Wright also hinted at an inaccessible trove of bitcoin mined between
2011 and 2013 by staff at HighSecured and Signia Enterprises under his
direction, to be held on behalf of the original Tulip Trust. Wright
alleges the principles of HighSecured were arrested in 2015.
Wright has claimed in the past the Tulip Trust is currently inaccessible. In the court document Wright said:
“Access to the encrypted
file that contains the public addresses and their associated private
keys to the Bitcoin that I mined, requires myself and combination of
trustees reference in Tulip Trust I to unlock based on Shamir scheme.”
Dave Kleiman passed away in 2013. Last December, the court denied Wright’s
attempt to dismiss the lawsuit, saying that he “converted at least
300,000 bitcoins upon Dave’s death and transferred them to various
international trusts.”
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