The attorneys of Craig Wright, in a recent court filing, urged the court to lift the sanctions imposed on him for contempt of court.
The lawyers argued that Wright was unable to produce all his public Bitcoin addresses before December 31, 2013, as it is impossible to gain access to all these addresses used years ago.
“A two-day evidentiary hearing yielded uncontroverted testimony and other evidence establishing that (1) it was impossible for Dr. Craig Wright to produce a complete list of all bitcoin that he mined nearly a decade ago, and (2) even though producing such a list was impossible, Dr. Wright had taken extraordinary steps to create a list of the most probable Bitcoin addresses that he had mined,” the filing stated.
Same arguments in defense
Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart imposed sanctions on Wright in August after he was found in contempt of court for failing to disclose a complete list of his bitcoin addresses, reportedly amounting to 1.1 million bitcoin.
The lawyers are using the same arguments used before to lift the imposed sanctions.
According to the defense attorneys, the Bitcoins were locked due to a complicated encryption system used by David Kleiman, the key of which cannot be recovered after his death.
“The algorithm necessary to generate a complete list of his Bitcoin public addresses is in an encrypted file that is protected by a Shamir encryption scheme,” the court filing noted. “To unlock the encrypted file, Dr. Wright would need at least 8 of the 15 key slices, but he has only 7.”
In August, the court ruled against Wright and ordered him to transfer half of his Bitcoin holdings and intellectual property rights by the December 2013 to the Davi Kleiman’s brother. He, however, defaulted on the payment claiming that he does not have sufficient funds to make any payment.
