I took part in this trial as a witness (Judge Mellor discusses my testimony in the penultimate section). There are many remarkable things about this case. The

I took part in this trial as a witness (Judge Mellor discusses my testimony in the penultimate section). There are many remarkable things about this case. The judgement is very clearly written and keeps legalese to a minimum. Anyone could read this and understand the case perfectly well. The simplicity of the final judgement helps (Wright is a pathological liar), but still, it's well written and has some amusing sections. The British IP courts clearly have access to some very technical judges. Mellor says he was docketed this case due to concern it'd have a lot of technical claims due to being about Bitcoin, but in the end all the technical knowledge required was about Wright's forgeries. Having read parts of the judgement, it's clear that Mellor is fluent in all the knowledge required and wasn't fooled for an instant, even though Wright was constantly babbling about symlinks, Citrix, XCOPY and many other obscure technical topics. Mellor also included a (largely superfluous in the end) explanation of how Bitcoin works that's accurate and clear. My confidence in the abilities of the courts to try such cases has definitely improving having seen this one, though how well this expertise is replicated in criminal cases is unclear. The skill of the COPA lawyers and with Patrick Madden's ability to detect forgeries was also outstanding. Some of it was very Sherlock Holmes. At one point Wright presented hand-written notes he claimed were from the design phase of Bitcoin (i.e. pre-2009). Madden wrote to the company that manufactured the notepad and learned that specific type of pad post-dated Bitcoin's launch, thus proving the notes were a forgery. In other cases he wrote to the designers of fonts that Wright had used to prove documents had been backdated. There were hundreds of documents with problems like this and Madden/COPA managed to plough through them all. Wright's side were very well funded. He hired top class lawyers, and even a former judge and a professional prosecutor to run a mock trial for him before the real one. He lost his own mock trial, with the pseudo-judge convinced he wasn't Satoshi, but this somehow didn't stop them proceeding. It's a good reminder that despite the common stereotype, the best funded side doesn't automatically win in legal proceedings.