Alongside his Thanksgiving turkey, Ira Kleiman may have served himself a side dish of perjury in the Kleiman v Wright civil lawsuit against Bitcoin creator Dr. Craig Wright.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, Ira Kleiman appeared in a Florida federal court to offer testimony supporting his civil case against Dr. Wright, whom Ira accuses of improperly purloining hundreds of thousands of BTC tokens (worth tens of billions of dollars) that Ira claims his late brother Dave Kleiman mined in partnership with Wright.<\/p>\n
Dr. Wright has acknowledged that Dave helped him edit the Bitcoin white paper ahead of its 2008 release, but denies that he and Dave ever had a formal partnership to mine BTC. Dr. Wright has also accused Ira of irresponsibly handling Dave\u2019s tech gear following the latter\u2019s death, including Ira\u2019s wiping of digital devices on which the private keys to significant caches of BTC could conceivably have been stored.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s much to be critical about in Ira\u2019s actions following Dave\u2019s April 2013 death, including giving some of Dave\u2019s hard drives to Patrick Paige, Dave\u2019s partner in a forensic computer business, based on Paige\u2019s claims that they contained data related to the business. Ira doesn\u2019t appear to have inspected the drives to ascertain their contents before handing them to Paige. Ira later attempted to sue Paige to recover these drives but failed to secure their return.<\/p>\n
Equally baffling is Ira\u2019s decision to effectively overwrite several of Dave\u2019s hard drives seemingly without care for whatever existing information might be permanently compromised. In his testimony to the court this week, Ira admitted tossing one drive in the trash because \u201cit never powered on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Within months of Dave\u2019s death, Ira had already formatted two of Dave\u2019s drives with new Windows software because \u201cwe were looking for a computer for my wife to use.\u201d Asked by Andrew Brenner, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, whether he had \u201cany memory of ever deleting any of the stuff that was on there from Dave\u2019s from the drives,\u201d Ira replied \u201cI don\u2019t believe so, no.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, during extended cross-examination Thursday by Wright\u2019s attorney Andr\u00e9s Rivero, Ira admitted that he\u2019d erased or overwritten nearly all of Dave\u2019s drives despite negligible knowledge of (or apparent interest in) the files contained therein. Rivero also got Ira to admit that he\u2019d lied when he claimed to have secured Dave\u2019s drives in a safety deposit box, instead leaving the drives piled in a backpack in Ira\u2019s residence.<\/p>\n
Ira told the court that he had no reason to think Dave\u2019s drives might contain anything of value until the possibility was suggested to him in a February 2014 email from Wright. Ira further claimed that, at the time, he believed Wright\u2019s suggestion that Dave\u2019s files could contain valuable information, but Ira no longer believes there was anything of value related to Bitcoin on the drives (a convenient stance that absolves Ira of any responsibility for the potential destruction of valuable data).<\/p>\n
Leggo my logo<\/strong><\/p>\n Ira testified Wednesday in support of claims he made in his 2018 amended complaint against Wright, including a conversation Ira claims to have had with Dave at a Thanksgiving dinner at their father\u2019s home in 2009. Once the plates had been cleared away and with all the other guests out of earshot, Ira claims Dave revealed that he was involved in a \u201cdigital money\u201d project that would ultimately be \u201cbigger\u201d than Facebook.<\/p>\n Ira further claimed that Dave then took a business card from his wallet and \u201cdrew a \u2018B\u2019 with a line or two through it, and commented on how \u2018we\u2019 were working on a logo\u201d for this unspecified digital money project. Dave allegedly said he was working with \u201ca relatively wealthy foreign man\u201d that Ira took as a reference to a formal partnership.<\/p>\n But Ira\u2019s timeline for Dave\u2019s alleged description of the Bitcoin logo doesn\u2019t match the official record. At the time of that November 26, 2009, dinner, the Bitcoin logo was simply the letters \u2018BC\u2019 on a gold-coin backdrop. It wasn\u2019t until February 24, 2010\u2014three months after Thanksgiving\u2014that the logo was changed to include two vertical strokes protruding from both the top and bottom of a capital \u2018B\u2019.<\/p>\n This change may have been in response to a February 5, 2010 suggestion by a forum member known as NewLibertyStandard, who proposed the Bitcoin community \u201cadopt the Thai baht currency symbol, \u0e3f, as the official bitcoin currency symbol.\u201d Asked Thursday (under oath) if Ira had any evidence that his brother was behind the NewLibertyStandard identity, Ira admitted he had nothing.<\/p>\n When Rivero pointed out that the logo Ira was referencing \u201cwas not the logo for Bitcoin\u201d at the time of the Thanksgiving dinner, Ira could only state that Dave had previously sought Ira\u2019s help \u201cto create, like, logos for him \u2026 so at the time I thought maybe he was asking me \u2026 \u2018we\u2019re working on a logo check this out.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The investment path not taken<\/strong><\/p>\n Ira can\u2019t say for sure what Dave\u2019s intentions were in showing him this mysterious \u2018B,\u2019 as Ira doesn\u2019t appear to have asked Dave any follow-up questions whatsoever. And if Dave ever mentioned the word \u2018Bitcoin,\u2019 Ira doesn\u2019t remember it. Not at this dinner, nor at any other point in their lives.<\/p>\n Dave also doesn\u2019t appear to have made any full court press to convince his brother of the financial opportunity at hand. While Wright was pushing relatives and friends to get involved in Bitcoin mining while the block reward was high and the difficulty was low, Dave evidently didn\u2019t advise Ira to expend some minor CPU labors in the possibility of a major payday down the road.<\/p>\n Dave also apparently didn\u2019t suggest that Ira simply buy some Bitcoin tokens while they were still relatively worthless. This, despite Ira admitting on the stand that he and his brother \u201chad lots of email exchanges about different stocks,\u201d including Dave\u2019s recommendations that Ira buy shares in a variety of tech firms, including Apple, Facebook and Twitter.<\/p>\n Ira confirmed Dave\u2019s lack of effort to get his family on the Bitcoin bandwagon in a December 2017 email in which Ira wondered \u201cwhy the heck didn\u2019t [Dave] tell us to buy some [Bitcoin] when it was selling for pennies?\u201d<\/p>\n Stuff this turkey<\/strong><\/p>\n That Thanksgiving dinner would seemingly have offered the perfect opportunity for Dave to pitch Ira on the investment opportunity of a lifetime. That is, if the brothers had actually discussed Bitcoin as Ira claims, and the whole incident isn\u2019t simply something Ira conjured out of thin air in order to justify his pursuit of a quick payday.<\/p>\n Ira has testified to his knowledge of Dave\u2019s increasingly precarious financial situation in his final years. Ira was equally aware of Dave\u2019s prolonged physical decline, the sad and occasionally gruesome details of which were related in court this week. Yet despite living only a few miles apart, that Thanksgiving dinner was the last time the brothers ever saw each other face-to-face.<\/p>\n Ira\u2019s disinterest in Dave\u2019s welfare seems to have been matched only by his disinterest in (a) preserving the integrity of Dave\u2019s digital devices and (b) investing any time\/effort to understand the first thing about Bitcoin. All of which suggests that the fabled Bitcoin conversation over Thanksgiving dinner may simply be the product of Ira\u2019s imagination\u2014one of many conversations Ira may now wish he\u2019d had with Dave before his death. Those conversations can never happen now, but the chance to score some ill-gotten gains remains. So pass the gravy\u2026<\/p>\n Check out all of the CoinGeek special reports on the Kleiman v Wright YouTube playlist.<\/p>\n