Decoding Satoshi Nakamoto's Emails

*Forward the Original Title：Most Likely Person to Be Satoshi Nakamoto: Knowing Hal Finney through Newly Unveiled Emails

TL;DR

Editor’s note: Recently, Martti Malmi (Foresight News’ Note: A prominent early Bitcoin developer also known by the community as Sirius), an early collaborator with Satoshi Nakamoto, disclosed the entire email correspondence with Nakamoto, becoming the most crucial addition to the canon of what we know about Satoshi Nakamoto.

Hal Finney, a Bitcoin developer and pioneer, was the first person to receive Bitcoins through a transaction. On January 11, 2009, Finney posted the first tweet referencing Bitcoin, and Satoshi sent him 10 Bitcoins.

As a result, Finney has long been considered one of the most likely candidates for being Satoshi Nakamoto himself. This article aims to unravel the details of the newly revealed email correspondence and explore potential connections between Hal Finney and the identity of “Satoshi Nakamoto.”

I have always believed that Hal Finney is the primary figure behind the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto (possibly with 1 or 2 secondary characters), and I think Martti Malmi’s latest disclosure of the email records with Nakamoto strongly supports this point.

Firstly, we can learn that in July 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto indeed had another job, while Hal Finney was working at the PGP Corporation, provider of email and data encryption software solutions, during the same period, indicating overlapping timelines. In those months, Hal Finney’s health deteriorated significantly, and he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) in August.

During this time, email records show that Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned Hal would be busy during that period.

Between March 7, 2010, and May 16, 2010, Nakamoto disappeared for a period and mentioned being busy with other matters.

This coincided with the period when PGP Corporation was sold to antivirus software developer Symantec in April 2010 and Hal began experiencing declining health.

In November 2010, after a period of minimal contributions in his own name, Hal “resumed” Bitcoin-related work.

He joined Bitcointalk, became active, initiated proposals for faster Bitcoin signatures, and released these proposals a few months later.

On December 5, 2010, Satoshi suggested that WikiLeaks should not use Bitcoin due to concerns about retaliation.

Subsequently, on December 11 and December 12, we received his final public messages about WikiLeaks facing a hornet’s nest with DDoS attacks.

On December 7, 2010, Satoshi sent an email to all major contributors, asking to list them on the website.

Simultaneously, he removed his own information from the website, indicating that he had understood he would eventually exit, without explicitly mentioning it to anyone.

During 2010 to 2011, a significant number of top Bitcoin holder wallets were created and never withdrew (which later became exceptionally important).

On February 22, 2011, Satoshi sent Martti Malmi the final email between them, including a PGP signature providing the mailman password.

On April 26, 2011, Satoshi’s last known private email was sent to Gavin Andresen (Foresight News’ Note: Gavin Andresen was an early technology pioneer in the Bitcoin community and led the establishment of Bitcoin Core and the Bitcoin Foundation after Satoshi’s departure).

He mentioned in the email that he moved on to other things.

This was also after Hal began contributing to and participating in Bitcoin signature verification efforts.

Around September 2012, Hal began exploring the idea of Trusted Platform Module (TPM).

By March 2013, he submitted code for BFlick Bitcoin Flicker on GitHub, announcing the news on March 17, 2013.

On March 19, 2013, Hal Finney published a post called “Bitcoin and Me”. He talked about being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ASL) in 2009 and mentioned that in this Previously, he noticed that his body was beginning to weaken (around the same time that Satoshi disappeared in 2009).

He stated he was “forced to retire in early 2011,” a period when Satoshi had transferred control of Bitcoin to others.

However, Hal left PGP Corporation during its acquisition by Symantec in April 2010, and according to available information, he had no other employer by early 2011.

At this time, he was evidently not talking about working for himself because he continued writing code, such as BFlick, until March 2013.

In this post, he mentioned that he was still coding but at a slow pace, and programming “gives him goals.”

So, when he mentioned retiring in 2011, where was he retiring from?

He also claimed that in 2010, when he picked up his work on Bitcoin, he transferred most of the Bitcoins to an offline wallet for his heirs.

This could explain the significant influx of funds into some wallets from late 2010 to mid-2011, with corresponding minimal outflows, and also why the expenditures were so scarce.

As for the original Satoshi wallet, we learn from a post in 2012 that Hal received the wallet’s private keys on an old computer, the first time he engaged in a Bitcoin transaction.

Based on his described progression of the illness, it is likely that Hal switched to a non-traditional computer interface for interacting with users around late 2009 to early 2010 (Foresight News’s note: possibly a computer providing interaction in forms such as voice, touch, or other sensory modalities, designed for individuals with conditions like ALS).

The last outgoing transaction from Satoshi’s initial wallet address was in January 2009.

On March 22, 2013, Hal praised Satoshi’s decision to gracefully disappear from the project. This is peculiar because Satoshi did not explain the reasons for leaving to anyone.

He vanished, and many people made the opposite decision.

Later, in a 2014 interview, we learned that Hal’s health had deteriorated to the point where he could only answer yes or no questions.

However, according to his former boss at PGP Corporation, Zimmerman (Foresight News’ Note: founder of the PGP encryption algorithm), Hal was, in fact, responsible for writing most of PGP 2.0.

Moreover, Zimmerman had narrowly avoided prosecution due to export control violations related to encryption tools.

This may also explain why Satoshi Nakamoto was afraid of WikiLeaks and the controversy it faced, as he may have seen similar pressure on his former boss.

This interview took place approximately 20 days after the P2P Foundation account released the statement “I am not Dorian Nakamoto” (Foresight News’ Note: On March 7, 2014, an article by Newsweek claimed that the creator of Bitcoin was a 64-year-old Japanese-American named Dorian Nakamoto. Following this, Satoshi Nakamoto’s P2P Foundation account posted a clarification – “I am not Dorian Nakamoto”).

In reality, this statement could have been made by a family member, as it required no PGP key for easy access, and Hal passed away in August 2014.

What to do when Hal is running?

Interestingly, on April 18, 2009, Hal participated in a 10-mile running race that concluded at 9:18 Pacific Standard Time. During that time, Satoshi was sending emails and working on Bitcoin.

In both the Bitcoin whitepaper and early emails sent to Adam Back (Foresight News’ Note: CEO of Blockstream), the summaries of Bitcoin are written as “we propose.”

People often point out that certain aspects of Bitcoin do not match Hal’s writing style and cover a broad range of disciplines.

However, as seen in his emails with other contributors, Satoshi frequently sought support and collaboration from others, and all of his communication times fell within the PST time zone. Some of his emails, though, still used British Commonwealth spelling.

Despite using the term “cheque” in an email from 2010, he eventually had to inquire with Martti Malmi about European payment methods.

The United Kingdom is part of the European Union / European Economic Area, which is common knowledge for people in the UK.

In 2009, he also used “realize,” which is the American/Canadian spelling, seemingly excluding Australian/British English.

Ultimately, I believe that Hal, along with some other early contributors, left Bitcoin in its early stages, but “most of it is him” being Satoshi.

By 2010, knowing he was dying, he realized that the death of a “Bitcoin developer” would kill his beloved project.

So, Satoshi disappeared, Hal re-entered, contributing as much as he could in his declining health.

He transferred his Bitcoins to a cold wallet, leaving them for his children and descendants, and let others take up Bitcoin’s responsibilities, becoming Satoshi to some extent.

In seeing his former boss Zimmerman nearly charged for arms trading due to his encryption code, Hal desperately hid his identity.

From the start, he changed his writing style, incorporating British elements but privately revealed his lack of understanding of the European Economic Area / EU.

Perhaps Dorian Nakamoto was an early contributor, sent BTC by Hal during his running, or maybe just a local name Hal chose, believing Bitcoin would never reach such scale.

Hal, in his final post, spoke of Satoshi, saying that how do you find someone who has been hiding their tracks for a lifetime.

It wasn’t until 2014 that we truly understood the significant role Hal Finney played in PGP 2.0. Even by comparing the code, many people wouldn’t have guessed how much of it was completed by Hal.

BTC Maximalists disliking Hal being Satoshi claim he was open-minded about Bitcoin’s future:

He desired it to be more environmentally friendly, supported forks, BitDNS, zerocoins, and used OP_PUSHDATA for other protocols on top of Bitcoin.

This contrasts with the unchanging Bitcoin Maximalism narrative.

He wished it to become more environmentally friendly, supported forks, BitDNS, zerocoins, and used OP_PUSHDATA to support protocols beyond Bitcoin.

This contrasts with the narrative of unchanging Bitcoin Maximalism.

But Hal was a great visionary and intelligent. He saw what it could become, not just what it is now.

While some may never want to know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, believing it disrupts the “we are all Satoshi” narrative, I disagree.

If Satoshi were a deceased, captured, or shut down anonymous figure from a government project, I would be less interested.

If he truly foresaw and humbly executed his exit to allow Bitcoin to persist, that is fascinating to me. I believe the latter is the truth, and all credit goes to Hal.

By stepping into the shadows, he made Bitcoin something collectively owned by everyone, making each person a Satoshi, a decision that sets Bitcoin apart from other pure Proof-of-Work (PoW) coins.

That moment defined Bitcoin, not by handing it over to the next leader but by endowing it with a soul: the soul of a ghost that can never be fully assimilated.

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1. This article is reprinted from [foresightnews], Forward the Original Title‘Most Likely Person to Be Satoshi Nakamoto: Knowing Hal Finney through Newly Unveiled Emails’,All copyrights belong to the original author [Adam Cochran]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
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