Previously unseen letters from Satoshi Nakamoto add another puzzle to Bitcoin’s history

Previously unseen correspondence between Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney, the recipient of the first transaction, has come to light. The report comes from CoinDesk, which possesses the three letters dating from late 2008 to early 2009.

The letters were provided to the publication by New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper, who came into possession of them while working on the book “Digital Gold: The Incredible Story of Bitcoin, or How Idealists and Businessmen Reinvent Money.”

Finney’s widow, Fran Finney, confirmed that she handed the letters to Popper.

Genesis Archives: Hal Finney – the man without whom Bitcoin would not exist

On 16 November 2008, Satoshi shared an early version of the Bitcoin code with several participants of a cryptography mailing list, among whom was Finney.

“How big do you see the network? Dozens of nodes? Thousands? Millions? […] Is it possible to scale it to such a degree that it would be used for almost 100% of financial transactions in the world? Or do you view it more as a root subset of transactions, to which special requirements would apply, while other transactions would use a different payment system, which perhaps would be based on Bitcoin?”

Letter Hal Finney sent to Satoshi Nakamoto on November 19, 2008.

For Finney, this question was not purely technical. He believed that Bitcoin’s scalability prospects would eventually determine its value. He later wrote that if Bitcoin becomes the dominant payment system, its value “should be equal to the total value of all wealth in the world.” Based on this, Finney forecast that Bitcoin could rise to $10 million per coin.

In the first half of December 2008, Satoshi added Finney to the Bitcoin repository on SourceForge:

Screenshot of the Bitcoin repository on SourceForge from January 6, 2009.

The next two emails, the recipient of which was Finney, were written by Satoshi himself. The first is dated January 8, 2009. In it, Satoshi reports the release of the Bitcoin software version 0.1. The letter was sent a few hours after the publication of a similar announcement in the cryptography mailing list.

The letter Satoshi Nakamoto sent to Hal Finney on Thursday, January 8, 2009. As shown in Satoshi’s reply, Finney said he would study the code over the weekend.

Letter Satoshi Nakamoto sent to Hal Finney on Friday, January 9, 2009.

On the same day, in the newly created Bitcoin mailing list on SourceForge and in private email messages, a discussion between Satoshi and Finney took place. Finney, however, used Gmail instead of hal@finney.org. In addition, a large portion of the data from the headers of the letters was erased.

During these discussions, on the evening of January 11, Satoshi sent Finney 10 BTC, which became Bitcoin’s first transaction.

Timestamps

In the January 2009 letters, the time zone corresponds to GMT+8. If one assumes, as the name suggests, that the Bitcoin creator hails from Japan, one might suppose the time zone of the country where he was located. However, at that time Japan was ahead of GMT by 9 hours. Interestingly, Finney’s mail server received both letters before Satoshi’s server.

Timestamps of Satoshi’s emails.

One theory suggests that the sender’s clocks were off, but researchers note that discrepancies are not observed in all letters. It is possible that Satoshi (or a group of developers using this pseudonym) worked on several computers, some of which were misconfigured.

Another theory rests on the assumption that Finney and Satoshi are the same person. If one assumes that Satoshi’s email was conveniently connected to the hal@finney.org account, this could explain why Finney.org’s server received the letters before Anonymousspeech.com’s server. Finney himself denied claims that he was Satoshi Nakamoto.

According to a recent study, Satoshi Nakamoto was working on Bitcoin while in London.

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