Kleiman vs. Wright Trial Continuing Coverage for Thursday
Live lunchtime report of the latest happenings of the Ira Kleiman vs Dr. Craig S. Wright Trial appear below. The case involves more than $66 billion in digital assets and intellectual property.
The trial is moving along at a brisk pace with Dr. Craig Wright possibly set to testify as early as today (Thursday).
Kleiman accuses Wright of improperly acquiring hundreds of thousands of BTC tokens that are known to have never moved from Ira’s brother Dave, whom Wright has credited with early assistance in Bitcoin’s development.
Dave passed away in April 2013 from an infection.
Wright has credited Dave with helping him edit the Bitcoin white paper’s early drafts. And it is this acknowledgement that has some would-be crypto cognoscenti—along with some committed Wright antagonists—to speculate that it’s Dave who ultimately deserves the Satoshi Nakamoto mantle, not Dr. Wright.
Kleiman vs Wright: Lunchtime Report | November 4 https://t.co/ukf8VL0zWx via @YouTube
— Brandon Ward (@l3randon_ward) November 4, 2021
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CoinGeek offered a recap of what transpired on Wednesday.
Wednesday’s events moved relatively fast: two pre-trial depositions were shown to the jury. The first of these was Jamie Wilson’s video deposition from before trial, in 2019—he testified about a sudden and apparent change in Dr. Wright’s wealth around the time Bitcoin was taking off (“he clearly had Bitcoin money”). The deposition of Jimmy Nguyen, founding president of Bitcoin Association, was also played, although little was made of it.
Then, of course, came Ira’s deposition. The plaintiffs got through their entire examination of Ira, and attorney for Dr. Wright Andres Rivero took up the last hour or so of the day with his cross examination. There’s likely still hours of cross-examination to go, and a number of threads were opened today which are likely to be picked up tomorrow.
Chief among these is a surprise claim by Ira that he was at one point sent an email from a third party which he says shows that Dave told another person about his involvement Bitcoin, outside of the Thanksgiving dinner which Ira has previously said is the only time it had ever come up. Rivero, acting for Dr. Wright, took immediate issue with this: the email was apparently never produced in discovery and the defense has never seen it, so what is Ira referring to? Ira was adamant that the email was sent after his depositions, but a frantic plaintiff’s bench seemed to say that Ira is mistakenly referring an already admitted e-mail from before.