COPA vs CSW - 14 March 2024

It is the Advancing Bitcoin Conference today in London. We could go an see Andrew Poelstra talk about OP_CAT, @robin_linus talk about BitVM, @ConorOkus talk about FOSS and @techgirl1908 talk on tbDEX

Instead we are not doing any of that. We are here in court, expecting the closing remarks from Lord Grabiner to continue. Should not be long though, maybe under an hour. Today should be the last day of the trial The judge has arrived, the court is now in session

COPA vs CSW - 13 March 2024

Court session has now started for today. COPA is continuing the closing arguments Hough mentioned two versions of CSW's blog on the Way Back Machine for a post dated August 2008

A 2015 snapshot (on the right) has the text "I have a cryptocurrency paper out soon". This text was not in a 2014 snapshot (on the left)

Neither side are relying on this, in that this is not one of the listed forgeries from COPA, nor does CSW use this as a reliance document

[1/4] Bitcoin ETF Flow - 12 March 2024

All data in. Record day with over $1 billion of net inflow. Blackrock with a record $849 million of inflow [2/4] Same data in BTC terms. A record 14,706 BTC inflow on 12 March 2024

COPA vs CSW Trial - Day 15

We are in court again in London for day 15. CSW is due for his second stint under cross-examination today. Court expected to start in 45 mins

🧵 CSW has arrived in court in a black suit

COPA vs CSW - Day 13

Session starts

@marttimalmi is sworn in, he is remote

@adam3us is in the courtroom and is up next Lord Grabiner is not here today and not asking the questions, instead its CSW’s 2nd KC asking questions

COPA vs CSW - Day 12

@TurkeyChop will continue his cross-examination this morning, due to start in 5 minutes

After lunch @moneyball is set to be the first COPA witness, followed by John MacFarlane

On Wednesday morning @marttimalmi is up first, followed by @adam3us if all goes to plan

🧵 In court right now, Mr Matthews says he spoke to CSW 12 times on the phone on the day of the botched 2016 Sartre blog post, while CSW was at Disney in Paris. Mr Matthews says it was CSW's intention to fix the blog and that it was an error

Mr Matthew's seems not to know CSW's ridiculous testimony last week, that his email was hacked at the time and it was not him sending emails to Mr Matthews

How did Mr Matthews not realise this with his 12 calls? Clearly because CSW was not telling the truth on 14th Feb 2024, and he was sending the emails

Bitcoin spot ETFs day 27 and COPA vs CSW trial day 11

We are here in court for day 11

Three CSW witnesses due today:

* David Bridges. He met Wright around 2006 (remote)
* Max Lynam: CSW's cousin (remote)
* Stefan Matthews: CEO of nChain (In court)

Stefan is expected to continue his cross-examination into tomorrow morning. After Stefan, it is the cross-examination of the COPA witnesses

Court due to start at 10:30am (7 mins time)

🧵 Neither CSW nor Stefan are in court yet. Much less crowded than last week at the moment

COPA vs CWS – Day 10

We are hearing an update to the schedule. Stephan Matthews (@TurkeyChop) is due to start on Monday afternoon next week (19th Feb), finishing the next day

After this is COPA witnesses, which are expected to finish on the 22 Feb

CSW is expected to be called back on 23 Feb for a final full day CSW's sister, Danielle DeMorgan, is now being sworn in via a video link

COPA vs CSW – Day 9

The day started with COPA saying CSW’s legal team had agreed three of their witnesses would not be cross-examined.

Pieter Wuille ,
Dustin Trammell and
Rory Cellan Jones First witness today is Ignatius Pang, CSW's witness. He is about to be cross-examined by COPA

Ignatius has not watched the evidence of CSW so far, but he has seen some CoinGeek reporting of the trial so far

COPA v CSW Trial - Day 8

We are in court for the 8th day of the trial. This is expected to be CSWs last day of cross examination

The trial is expected to continue into mid March. Some of the COPA witnesses may be interesting and may include early Bitcoin developers who may refute some of CSWs claims

Happy valentine's day 💘

Some BSV fans may be expecting a love message from CSW to his wife to be revealed to the court today, hidden in the whitepaper, in the box of documents found over the weekend 🤣🤣🤣 CSW arrives in court

He has a bright red shirt and bright red tie, along with a grey suit

🌹🌹🌹

COPA vs CSW – Day 7

CSW cross-examination enters the 6th day.

More emails between Satoshi and @marttimalmi were shown, from June 2009. In the email Satoshi askes @marttimalmi if he thinks "cryptocurrency" is a good name. @marttimalmi agreed and the term cryptocurrency was then used by Satoshi.

This email evidence directly refutes what CSW said yesterday in court, which was that @marttimalmi had come up with the term and the "earlier emails" show that% CSW was repeatedly asked whether David Kleiman was a trustee of the Tulip Trust. He would not respond, so the judge intervened. Please see a summary of the discussion with the judge below:

Judge: Was David Kleiman a trustee?

CSW: No.

Judge: Then why did you say he was a trustee to a court?

CSW: Well I didn’t know, but the judge forced me to answer and threatened me with contempt if I didn’t answer. Therefore I said he was a trustee, with the qualification that I was depending on a document

COPA: Your sworn declaration to the court saying David Kleiman had no such qualification.
Judge: A document states you are a trustee, so how could you carry out your duties as a trustee, without seeing the trust documents?

CSW: Because I was never a trustee my lord. I never signed the trust document.

Judge: So why did you nominate yourself as a trustee?

CSW: I did not know. I was under instruction from lawyers

Judge: Did you include in this declaration that you were not a trustee

CSW: I don’t actually know. At the time I was

Judge: So who created all these multiple trust deeds. Who was responsible for making the trust deeds

CSW: I set one up in 2011, post that I had no part in it.

Judge: Who initiated the trustees in 2016?

CSW: My wife

COPA vs CSW – Day 6

Proceedings have started this morning.

Emails were received by the judge from @agerhanssen and @shadders333, responding to allegations from CSW made in court last week

Also, apparently, over the weekend, CSW’s wife found a box of old papers, that CSW informed his lawyers of. He may want to put this into evidence Perhaps the strategy over this supposed new evidence is as follows:

1. Judge won't allow it in court because it's too late

2. CSW loses the case

3. CSW's narrative is that he lost because the new evidence was not allowed in court and the new evidence proves he is Satoshi

COPA vs CSW Day 3

CSW is on the witness stand for his second day of cross-examination. COPA began by questioning why CSW disputed the credibility of the forensic document experts, given their string CVs. The judge then intervened and asked CSW why he could not put forward a suitable expert document witness. CSW responded by claiming:

· All the good expert witnesses CSW put forward were fired

· CSW’s old lawyers Travers Smith and Christen Ager-Hanssen put forward the flawed experts

· This is ultimately why CSW fired Travers Smith and appointed new lawyers.

🧵 As for how Bitcoin rules are enforced, the judge started asking CSW some questions. CSW responded with confidence and aggression.

Judge: You mentioned it would be easy to get a legal order against a dishonest actor, how do you determine a dishonest actor?

CSW: If you have 2 or 3 large actors, that control say 60%, you can easily have an order against them. Many of the nodes are on AWS, I have many dealings with AWS. If they see an attacker they will shut off the network very quickly.

Judge: Is a dishonest actor anyone not following the rules?

CSW: By definition, as in the whitepaper. This means rules. Rules are more than the agreement. For example rules in a club include UK law. If I run a cricket club, that includes UK law. I can’t set the rules to be whatever I want

Day 17 of the Bitcoin ETFs, is also day 1 of the COPA vs CSW trial

We are here in court

The hearing started at 10:30 UTC. Today each side will present their skeleton arguments and tomorow CSW will begin his case

🧵 The opening skeleton argument by COPA:

"CWS’s conduct is deadly serious. He has terrorised bloggers who dispute his claim. This is done with the backing of Calvin Ayre"

Bitcoin Spot ETFs Day 7 Flow

Flow data out for all prioviders. Total net outflow for day 7 is $87.5m. Third net outflow day so far.

[1/5] 🧵 As the below chart shows, all the providers combined could not overcome GBTC in day 3, day 5 or day 7

$ million

[2/5] 🧵

SBF Trial – 27 October 2023 – SBF Direct Examination from the defense

Q. Did you defraud anyone?
A. No, I did not.
Q. Did you take customer funds?
A. No.
Q. We're going to talk in detail about what happened at FTX, but can you tell us big picture.
A. Yeah. At a high level, there are multiple different types of exchanges. There are spot exchanges, which is where a customer deposits a hundred dollars to buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin, or hundred dollars of Ethereum. And there are margin exchanges. On margin exchanges, customers might deposit a hundred dollars to buy $500 of Bitcoin or to sell $200 of Bitcoin that they don't have, to borrow; customers might also deposit a hundred dollars to withdraw $50 of Bitcoin that they don't have, going negative in Bitcoin. FTX was predominantly a margin exchange. The vast majority of activity happened on margin on FTX. When you have a margin exchange, you know, you can think of it in some ways like a mortgage. You know, if you have a hundred-thousand-dollar house, you might take out a $10,000 mortgage against that. That would be the equivalent of, you know, having a deposit of some number of Bitcoins, withdrawing dollars against that. And the biggest risk for margin exchanges in general, and for FTX, is what happens if one of those is threatening to go bad; that is to say
MS. SASSOON: Objection, your Honor. Narrative
Q. Mr. Bankman-Fried, did you make any mistakes along the way?
A. Yes, I made a number of small mistakes and a number of larger mistakes. By far the biggest mistake was we did not have a dedicated risk management team, we didn't have a chief risk officer. We had a number of people who were involved to some extent in managing risk, but no one dedicated to it, and there were significant oversights. Alameda’s first office

Q. Where was Alameda's first office?
A. The first office, it was in——it was a airbnb that we rented out in North Berkeley, California.
Q. Can you describe the layout of that airbnb.
A. Yeah. So it was listed as a two-bedroom airbnb. There were three of us, but it had an attic, so that seemed like three bedrooms to us. There was a living room which was a couch, so a fourth bedroom. And then the rest of the area here was the office. We packed that with desks and computers, and mostly boxes from Amazon. Eventually we had to start dealing with the cardboard box problem pretty soon. And after overflowing that apartment, after a few months, we got a more traditional office space in downtown Berkeley.

SBF Trial – 26 October 2023 - SBF Testimony (without jury)

Today SBF testified without the jury present. This appears to be a practice for the judge, to help judge Kaplan decide what the jury should and should not be allowed to hear. SBF will testify for real tomorrow, (unless he changes his mind overnight). The judge has not told the jury that this is going on.

THE COURT: There is something that has to happen at this point in the trial that will take a couple of hours, and that is not something that concerns you. In consequence, you've got the rest of the day off. We'll see you at 9:30 tomorrow morning.

THE COURT: Now just so that everyone who has taken the trouble to get here today understands what is going on and why, there are a number of areas of potential testimony from Mr. Bankman-Fried that the defense wishes to elicit. The government asserts that I shouldn't hear any of it, or, to be more precise, that the jury shouldn't hear any of it. And despite a great deal of effort on the part of everybody concerned, the amount of information that I have to date is, in my judgment, inadequate to resolve the admissibility of this testimony, in significant part because it's not sufficiently detailed or specific. I have the authority under the rules of evidence to conduct a hearing so that the defendant can put in the evidence for my ears alone, following which I'll be in a position to rule one way or another as to whether the evidence is admissible before the jury CROSS EXAMINATION

Cross examination began with discussions about the auto-deletion of Signal messages and document retention policies

Q. Is it your recollection that the policy expressly authorized deleting company communications that did not fall within the regulated categories?
A. That is my memory, yes.
Q. Where is this written policy?
A. I'm not sure if my answer is admissible.
THE COURT: Don't worry about that. You worry about Blockchain explorers. I will worry about what's admissible.
A. When I was a member of the company, I remember interacting with the policy and discussing it. As part of this case I think we have been unable to serve the subpoenas we have requested asking for it.
…
Q. I think you said you mentioned in passing that you set this auto-delete feature on Signal. Did you ever discuss with a lawyer whether that was covered by this policy?
A. Yeah.
Q. With who?
A. With Dan Friedberg.
Q. When?
A. This was around the time that he was discussing the auto deletion and data-retention policy with us, which my memory was late 2021.
Q. So which is it? Did you just mention that you were putting on this setting or did you seek approval from Dan Friedberg?
A. I think -- I apologize. I may have misinterpreted. I interpreted your early question as what conversations I had contemporaneous with when I originally changed that setting, which my memory it was prior to the discussions around the auto-deletion policy. So there is no formal policy around it when I had initially changed the default settings on my Signal
app to one week, but we did have formal discussions about it in connection with the data-retention policy which happened some number of months later.
Q. Just to make sure I follow your testimony, you implemented this setting and later this policy was put into place?
A. I believe that is correct, yes.
…
Q. Is that the document retention policy you've been talking about?
A. No, this is not.
Q. And does it resemble in substance what was in the retention policy you've been talking about?
A. No, it does not.
Q. So the supposed policy you've been testifying about, you have no record of it sitting here today.
A. That's correct. We have requested it numerous times.

SBF Trial - Nishad Singh Testimony – 16 October 2023

Just as for the other FTX insiders, a quick admission of the crimes committed at the start

Q. What was your job at FTX?
A. I was the head of engineering.
Q. Did you commit financial crimes while at FTX?
A. I did.
Q. What crimes did you commit while working at the company?
A. I defrauded customers, investors, I participated in money laundering, and I violated campaign finance laws.
Q. Did you commit those crimes on your own or with others?
A. With others.
Q. Who?
A. Sam Bankman-Fried, Gary Wang, Caroline Ellison, Ryan Salame. The $1 billion investment in Genesis Digital Assets. SBF, Ramnik, and Ryan Salame visited Kazakhstan to make the deal. SBF “called the shots” with the investment.

Q. Okay. So starting with the top of the sheet, do you see in column A2 and A3, Genesis Digital Assets?
A. Yes.
Q. And do you see the——in column E, what the category of that is?
A. Yes. Mining.
Q. So are you familiar with an investment in Genesis or a mining company?
A. Yeah. I don't——yes. I don't recognize the name Genesis Digital Assets, but I know that Sam, Ramnik, and Ryan Salame visited Kazakhstan sometime in late 2021 or early 2022 to look into making a deal with a mining firm there, and I heard later in 2022 from Ramnik that they had spent a billion dollars on it.
…
Q. What, if any, involvement did the defendant have in acquiring or investing in the mining company you heard about?
A. I think he was calling the shots there. He went to go visit them for multiple days. That's a pretty extreme sort of sacrifice in Sam's calendar.

[1/16] Bitcoin History: The Flash Crash to 1 cent in June 2011

In the summer of 2011, the Bitcoin price crashed down to just 1 cent.

Read the 🧵 below to find out more. [2/16] In the aftermath of the GFC, the price of monetary alternatives like gold was strong. Gold enjoyed a tremendous rally, causing considerable excitement among traders

SBF Trial – 11th October 2023 – Caroline Ellison Testimony Day 2

June 2022 market crash and Gensis asking for loans to be re-paid

Q. Apart from coins, the trading that Alameda was doing on various exchanges.
A. The day-to-day trading that we were doing during this time was profitable.
Q. And after the value of many of Alameda's cryptocurrency coins went down, what kinds of conversations, if any, were you having with the defendant about Alameda's assets and balances?
A. He started asking for a lot more frequent updates on Alameda's positions. I was sharing balance sheets and, yeah, talking about Alameda's assets and liabilities.
Q. How did the downturn in the cryptocurrency market affect the billions of dollars in loans that Alameda had around this time from third-party lenders like Genesis?
A. They started to be recalled a bit after the market downturn, so mostly starting in the middle of June.
…
Q. How did you learn about Alameda's third-party lenders asking for their money back?
A. A variety of sources. Some was from messages on Slack from other Alameda employees, some was from being in Telegram groups or in calls directly with lenders.
…
Q. Ms. Ellison, is that a Telegram chat?
A. Yes, it is.
Q. And what is the date of this Telegram chat group?
A. The date of these messages is on June 13, 2022.
Q. And generally who is part of this group? I see a number of names at the top, but generally who are these folks?
A. These are either Alameda employees or affiliates or Genesis employees.
…
Q. And can you read the top message from Matt Ballensweig. Who is Matt Ballensweig?
A. He was the head of lending at Genesis.
Q. If you could read that.
A. It says, "hey, guys - seeing a fair amount of continued outflows from retail deposit aggregators, so to get ahead of this, we're going to increase the OT loan pullback to $400 million. Can you please let us know once the first batch and second batch are sent. Do we have an ETA on the first 250 million?"
…
Q. What was your reaction to third-party lenders all asking for their money back around the same time in mid-June?
A. I was very stressed out, and we were talking about billions of dollars, and I knew that Alameda had lost a lot of money in the cryptocurrency market downturn and we didn't have the liquid assets to pay all of the money back and that we would have to be taking money from FTX.
Q. When you say "we would have to be taking money from FTX," what do you mean?
A. I mean in order to repay all of our loans, we would have to borrow money using our FTX line of credit.
Q. And whose funds would that be?
A. That would be coming from customer funds. Q. Ms. Ellison, I'll ask you again: What was your mental state when you realized that Alameda had billions of dollars in loans to repay and that it didn't have the money?
A. I was in sort of a constant state of dread at that point. I——I knew that we would have to take the money from our FTX line of credit and I knew that that was money that could be called at any time, and every day, I mean, I was worrying about the possibility of customer withdrawals from FTX and the possibility of this getting out and what would happen to people that would be hurt by that.
…
Q. And when you say you understood him to be telling you to use Alameda's line of credit on FTX, can you spell out what you mean.
A. I understood that he was telling me to use FTX customer funds to repay our loans.
Q. And why was that your understanding?
A. Because I had shared Alameda's balance sheet information with him that showed that that was the only source of capital large enough to repay all of our loans. We also had, you know, had many discussions in the past about using this FTX line of credit for various Alameda purposes, including discussions about using it as a——a backstop if our loans were called, so I——yeah, I considered that to be the most reasonable and really
the only option on the table.
…
Q. Over what time period did you repay Alameda's lenders?
A. A lot of it was in June, and there continued to be loan recalls over the next few months as well.
…
Q. By the way, we saw this term "FTX borrows" here and on a spreadsheet we looked at yesterday. Why did you call money being taken from customers "FTX borrows" in your spreadsheet?
A. I guess I wanted to strike a balance of identifying what it was, but, I mean, I didn't want to say explicitly something like FTX customer money.
Q. And why didn't you want to say explicitly in a spreadsheet FTX customer money?
A. Because Sam always directed us to be careful about what we put in writing and not put things in writing that might get us in legal trouble.
Q. And did you consider putting something like "FTX customer money" in that category?
A. Yeah, I did.
Q. So according to this spreadsheet, at the time that you made it, around mid-June, how much money had Alameda borrowed from FTX customers at that point?
A. Around $13 billion.

SBF Trial – 10th October 2023 – Caroline Ellison Testimony

Just like with other witnesses, quick admission of crimes at the start:

Q. When you were working at Alameda, did you commit any crimes
A. Yes, we did.
Q. When you say "we," who do you mean by "we"?
A. I mean Sam and I and others.
Q. What kinds of crimes did you commit with Sam?
A. Fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, and money laundering.
Q. Who did you defraud?
A. The customers of FTX, the investors in FTX, and lenders to Alameda.
Q. And just to be clear, did you commit these crimes alone?
A. No. They were committed with Sam.
…
Q. What are some of the ways that Alameda was able to steal customer money?
A. We had access to an essentially unlimited line of credit on FTX, and we received FTX customer funds directly into our bank accounts as part of the FTX fiat deposit system.
Q. And what was the defendant's role in taking that money and spending it on Alameda?
A. He was the one who set up the systems that allowed Alameda to take the money, and he was the one who directed us to take customer money to repay our loans.
…
Q. You said you defrauded Alameda's lenders with the
defendant. How did you defraud Alameda's lenders?
A. I sent balance sheets to our lenders at the direction of Sam that incorrectly stated the amount of our assets and our liabilities and made Alameda's balance sheet look less risky than it really was. Caroline joined Alameda in March 2018, she learnt things were bad pretty fast and SBF appears to have tricked her into joining

Q. When you started working at Alameda as a trader, what did you learn shortly after starting this new job?
A. Shortly after I started, I learned that the company was in much worse shape than I realized. Right before I had started working there, they had suffered large losses and just discovered them. Right after I started working there, the lenders pulled out a lot of their money and more than half of the company ended up quitting.
Q. When the defendant offered you a job at Alameda, had he shared with you the rough circumstances at Alameda?
A. No.
Q. And when you learned about it, did you discuss this with him?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. And what did you talk about?
A. I asked why he hadn't shared more of this information. He apologized and he said that he hadn't known how to tell me.