Today someone showed me an INCREDIBLE piece of evidence tha…

But, on closer inspection all is not as it seems.

This email was made public by journalist and can be found in a pdf of lots of emails from Satoshi to Hal Finney spanning 10-24 Jan 2009.

I’m not making any claim whether these are or are not authentic.

https://t.co/0AxWJVEkqH

But, the most glaring and immediate problem with the metanet-icu screenshot of the draft email is in the top right hand corner of the image, where the user’s membership expires on 13th of March 2019.

Anonymousspeech is a paid service. The web archive of their product page shows that going back to the earliest snapshots they have never offered a package that lasts more than 2 years.

So the earliest this screenshot could have been made was March 2017.

https://t.co/RRaVRZ84es

But there’s something else strange about this image as well, and that’s down in the bottom left hand corner.

Anonymousspeech allows a maximum of 50000 characters in an email and has a counter of spare chars at the bottom.

This email has 48932 chars left.

The number of chars applies to everything within the Message box. That is the body of the email.

The problem is if the body of the email has 48932 chars left, then the contents is only 1068 characters long.

Here is the full email. It is 1136 chars.

That count is according to my favourite text editor.

And, consistent with this, the “characters left” box in anonymousspeech says there are 48864 characters left when I copy and paste this into the email client.

This is 68 characters more than in the metanet-icu screenshot.

I was able to shave off 6 characters by removing all white space from the ends of lines. This left me with 62 characters too many. So the next option is to remove some linebreaks.

There’s clearly a line break after “and” at the end of the first line in the quoted text. The following line begins “>it” and if you take a close look at the bottom of the visible part of the message box there’s clearly enough space to avoid wordwrap.

So leaving that line break in place, I removed all line breaks in the text not visible in the metanet-icu picture.

Below is what the text now looks like.

But even this cutting only got me down to 1119 characters—still 51 too many.

The above leads to only one possible conclusion: the text not visible in the upper part of the scroll box from the metanet-icu picture cannot possibly be the same length as the quoted text in the email attested on the Wall Street Journal Website.

How to explain this?

Actually, it turns out there is an extremely straightforward answer.

Here is a screenshot of the email as it appears in the pdf available on the Wall Street Journal website. As you can see the email crosses over a page boundary.

The bottom three lines of the quoted text from Hal’s previous email are on the second page.

Now imagine a scenario where the text in the anonymousspeech email box had not been quoted from hitting “reply” and then typed.

What if text had been copied and pasted from the WSJ pdf?

If the text on the first page of the WSJ pdf had been copied and pasted—WITHOUT the three lines on page 2—and carriage returns are added to make it look tidy like in the metanet-icu pictures, then the text copied into the message box would look like this:

The number of characters in the above image is 1067, only one character away from 1068, the number of characters in the metanet-icu picture.

So, now imagine the copier continued to “tidy” the quoted text after the first line ending in “and”, they removed the spaces before “>”…

...and replaced them with carriage returns, including adding a carriage return at the end of the last line. The copied and pasted text now looks like a tidy email.

In my text editor it looks like this:

And the number of characters in this sloppy-copy-and-paste-with-a-little-touch-up-job?

Yes, you guessed it, exactly 1068. Exactly the number of characters that the metanet-icu screenshot of the anonymousspeech “characters left” box says are in the email.

So, what do we conclude from this?

Very simply, that this supposed screenshot of one of Satoshi’s earliest emails in the middle of being written, sourced from metanet-icu… this seemingly INCREDIBLE piece of evidence that Craig is Satoshi really is…

*IN*—(as in not)—credible.

This image is clearly a forgery.

And I would be very interested to know if it has been submitted in any lawsuits involving #CraigWright, @hodlonaut, or @PeterMcCormack

Nice catch from Juha

https://t.co/Ni2shvUYBS

2009 does not have "Other services" menu to start with.
— Juha Ronkainen\u26a1\ufe0f (@jronkain) February 2, 2021

Nice little observation about browser features.

Unchecked.

https://t.co/qFM3rXhF1Q

Any idea what browser was supposed to have been used for doing this screenshot? As far as I recall, spell-checker with curly red underlining was not exactly a default feature of the browsers back in those days...
— Jesper (@J_B_N_P) February 2, 2021

Today someone showed me an INCREDIBLE piece of evidence that #CraigWright is Satoshi.

This image, sourced from metanet-icu was shared with me.

It appears to be one of Satoshi’s earliest emails to Hal Finney, screen grabbed by Craig when he wrote it.

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Today someone showed me an INCREDIBLE piece of evidence that #CraigWright is Satoshi.This image, sourced from metanet-icu was shared with me.It appears to be one of Satoshi’s earliest emails to Hal Finney, screen grabbed by Craig when he wrote it.

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Today someone showed me an INCREDIBLE piece of evidence that #CraigWright is Satoshi.

This image, sourced from metanet-icu was shared with me.

It appears to be one of Satoshi’s earliest emails to Hal Finney, screen grabbed by Craig when he wrote it.