The Story of Martti, a College Student, and Satoshi Nakamoto

Forward the Original Title‘加密史第一个暴富的「大学生」故事——重读 Martti 的中本聪邮件’

In 2009, while a second-year student at the Helsinki University of Technology, @marttimalmi"">@marttimalmi Martti Malmi discovered bitcoin.org and sent an email to Satoshi Nakamoto, stating, “I would like to help with Bitcoin, if there’s something I can do.”

To put it bluntly, this was a rather hurriedly written application email. However, it set the gears of destiny in motion. Martti Malmi became Satoshi Nakamoto’s first collaborator and his most trusted confidant, with Bitcoin dramatically altering his life. The cryptocurrency world is rife with tales of college students striking it rich by going “All in,” and Martti certainly laid the groundwork for this myth. Last month, he released his historical email exchanges with Satoshi Nakamoto (https://mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/), providing us with a richer perspective to reflect on Bitcoin’s tumultuous history. Here are some intriguing discoveries made by OneKey.

The early days of Bitcoin operated much like a startup

They secured the “bitcoin.org” domain and had extensive discussions about product features, the user interface, and the website, similar to many startups of that era. However, unlike typical startup environments, all their communication was done via email, and nobody had ever met the elusive boss, “Satoshi Nakamoto.” Today, remote work has become commonplace in the crypto industry, with major companies like Binance, Paradigm, and our own OneKey embracing global collaboration to various extents. Satoshi Nakamoto’s first remote assignment to the university student Martti Malmi was to create an FAQ. Satoshi noted that the site primarily needed content since he was “not good at writing but better at coding.” He suggested, “If you can write a FAQ, I can give you a compilation of my replies to questions in e-mail and forums for facts and details and ideas.”

Satoshi Nakamoto proved to be a thoughtful leader, genuinely taking into account the suggestions of a young college student, Martti. In these discussions, Satoshi functioned much like a product manager, deliberating over Bitcoin core client features such as “minimize to tray” and “start on boot.” Similar to many software programs of that era, there was an ongoing effort to engage users and reduce “user churn rate.” Bitcoin implemented these strategies specifically to encourage more users to operate full nodes, thereby enhancing the security of the network during its formative years. Original text:

“Now that I think about it, you’ve put your finger on the most important missing feature right now that would make an order of magnitude difference in the number of nodes. Without auto-run, we’ll almost never retain nodes after an initial tryout interest. Auto-running as a minimized tray icon by default was the key to success for the early file sharing networks. It wouldn’t have been appropriate for v0.1.0 when stability wasn’t a given yet, but now it’s good and stable. This is a must-have feature for the next release so any users that come back to try the new version we hopefully retain this time.”

As an “entrepreneur,” Satoshi Nakamoto also shared his frustrations with Martti about those internet startups that are “pie-in-the-sky planning” referring to projects without any real code. In the following email, Satoshi expressed that SourceForge no longer met the needs of the Bitcoin forum, suggesting a need for a new forum service provider. He vented his frustrations, stating: “I’ve seen projects that have major following just from forum talk and pie-in-the-sky planning without even having any code yet. Having a lot of forum talk gives a project more presence on the net, more search hits, makes it look big, draws new users in, helps solve support questions, hashes out what features are most of wanted. (so this forum is important)”

When it came to marketing for his startup, Satoshi Nakamoto wasn’t strictly an “extreme geek.” In one of his emails, he expressed concerns that highlighting “anonymity” as a feature on the official website might come across as overly suspicious. He implied that it might be better if this feature was understood implicitly rather than advertised explicitly.

Original text: “Also, anonymous sounds a bit shady. I think the people who want anonymous will still figure it out without us trumpeting it.

I made some changes to the bitcoin.org homepage. It’s not really crucial to update the translations. I tend to keep editing and correcting for some time afterwards, so if they want to update, they should wait.”

In the end, it was Martti who shouldered all

Throughout their emails, Satoshi Nakamoto repeatedly stated he did not want to be publicly recognized as the face behind Bitcoin (even though he is the one most people ultimately associate with it). Satoshi encouraged Martti to use his real name and address for public dealings and requested that Martti use his own credit card and ID to manage servers and bank accounts.

If you were Martti, would this situation have made you consider ‘running away’?

Original text: “I got a donation offer for $2000 USD. I need to get your postal mailing address to have him send to. And yes, he wants to remain anonymous, so please keep the envelope’s origin private.”

In terms of some Bitcoin promotion points, Satoshi Nakamoto also asked Martti to speak on his behalf, while reminding some of the marketing risks. Original text:

“There are a lot of things you can say on the sourceforge site that I can’t say on my own site. Even so, I’m uncomfortable with explicitly saying “consider it an investment”. That’s a dangerous thing to say and you should delete that bullet point. It’s OK if they come to that conclusion on their own, but we can’t pitch it as that.”

There seems to be nothing wrong with leaving the interview task to newcomer Martti. Original text “There’s a blog writer who wants to write a story about Bitcoin, but I don’t have time right now to answer his questions. Would you be interested in answering his questions if I refer him to you? We might get a good link out of it.”

The boss Satoshi Nakamoto suddenly disappeared for a month, but it was Martti who took over the operation of the forum. Original text: “I’ve also been busy with other things for the last month and a half. I just now downloaded my e-mail since the beginning of April. I mostly have things sorted and should be back to Bitcoin shortly. Glad that you’ve been handling things in my absence. Congrats on your first transaction!”

Recharging Martti’s faith

Satoshi Nakamoto also foresaw that if Bitcoin entered the mainstream, it would use a lot of energy. This may have been a very “explosive” view at the time: the banking system was more of a waste of resources than PoW.

“Ironic if we end up having to choose between economic liberty and conservation.

Unfortunately, proof of work is the only solution I’ve found to make p2p e-cash work without a trusted third party. Even if I wasn’t using it secondarily as a way to allocate the initial distribution of currency, PoW is fundamental to coordinating the network and preventing double-spending.

If it did grow to consume significant energy, I think it would still be less wasteful than the labour and resource intensive conventional banking activity it would replace. The cost would be an order of magnitude less than the billions in banking fees that pay for all those brick and mortar buildings, skyscrapers and junk mail credit card offers. “

Last Email

We all know that on December 12, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto posted on the Bitcoin forum for the last time to discuss DoS (denial of service attacks), and then stopped forum activities. And this was not Satoshi Nakamoto’s last email.

A month later, in this email sent by Satoshi Nakamoto to Gavin Andresen (copied to Martti), Satoshi Nakamoto once again confirmed that he did not want to participate in any media PR content and interviews. And it can be seen here that Satoshi Nakamoto is very worried that Bitcoin is growing too fast, resulting in various functions, attack defense and other needs being unable to be met. At the same time, they were worried about the frenzy of public opinion, when some unofficial Bitcoin spokespersons appeared to over-hype, and even promoted that it would replace Paypal or even the euro. They hope to emphasize more in the media that Bitcoin is a cutting-edge test and has not yet reached the level of large-scale application.

A month later, this was the last email sent by Satoshi Nakamoto to Martti, arranging some administrator password matters, and then disappeared again. This farewell lasted 13 years, and there is a high probability that he would never see him again.

The disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto is full of legend, but in these emails, we see a closer side of Satoshi Nakamoto. It seems that “God” is not out of reach, it seems that he is around us, as if everyone is Nakamoto Cong.

Martti’s story is not a mirror image. In the new bull market wave, how many “college student” legends will we witness?

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [Twitter]. Forward the Original Title‘加密史第一个暴富的「大学生」故事——重读 Martti 的中本聪邮件’. All copyrights belong to the original author [OneKey 中文]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
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