Exactly 13 years ago, on December 10, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto published his last post on Bitcoin Talk.
Bitcoin Talk had become the reference point for Bitcoin development at the time, and had also become Satoshi’s main communication channel.
Summary
Satoshi Nakamoto and the creation of Bitcoin
The creator of Bitcoin launched the eponymous protocol on October 31, 2008 with an email sent to the “Cryptography Mailing List”.
In reality, he had already registered the bitcoin.org domain in August, so he had been working on it for months.
Minò il primo blocco della blockchain di Bitcoin il 3 gennaio 2009, e l’8 gennaio pubblicò la prima versione pubblica del software omonimo, Bitcoin v0.1, sempre sulla Cryptography Mailing List.
That year, the online forum Bitcoin Talk was also born, so much so that the first post published by Satoshi himself on that forum dates back to November 19, 2009. From that moment, for over a year, this forum was the main means of communication for Satoshi with the world.
After December 13, 2010, Satoshi Nakamoto slowly disappeared. In fact, on the same day, he released version 0.3.19 of the Bitcoin software on the “bitcoin-list” mailing list, and then nothing more.
His last communication is a private email sent to developer Mike Hearn on April 23, 2011, in which he stated that he had abandoned the development of the Bitcoin project.
In 2014, a comment was published on behalf of him on the P2P foundation forum, but doubts about its real authorship have always existed. In this comment, he simply stated that he was not Dorian Nakamoto.
The absence of Satoshi Nakamoto and the impact on the Bitcoin ecosystem
Most likely Satoshi’s disappearance has been good for Bitcoin.
Note that it happened a couple of years before the first halving (November 2012), and in the first year of BTC’s presence on online free trading platforms (exchanges).
When Satoshi disappeared, the price of Bitcoin had risen from $0.05 to $0.24 (+380%) in just five months of trading, and despite his disappearance, it continued to rise even in 2011.
In April, when Satoshi revealed to Hearn that he had abandoned the project, the price had already risen above $1, and closed the year at almost $4. In other words, in just a year and a half of presence on exchanges, its market value had grown by almost 8,000%, despite the disappearance of its creator.
The year after the first halving, the price had risen to $11, and during the first major speculative bubble, the one in 2013, it even skyrocketed to $1,100.
So not only does the disappearance of Satoshi Nakamoto seem to have benefited Bitcoin, but his subsequent absence also seems to have been very advantageous.
Also because it is estimated that between 2009 and 2010 Satoshi was able to mine over 1.1 million BTC, which he never seems to have used. It’s as if those BTC were lost, to the point that they have never been put on the market.
Who was Satoshi?
Satoshi Nakamoto was just a pseudonym, behind which no one knows who was hiding.
Many hypotheses have been made, but to date none have received any concrete confirmations.
The fact that he disappeared starting from April 2011, even though he left the Bitcoin project at the end of 2010, and that he never used his own BTC even after their value skyrocketed, suggests that he is deceased.
Moreover, two of the names that have been mentioned as possible candidates, namely Hal Finney and Dave Kleiman, are actually deceased, respectively in 2014 and in 2013.
Other people who are known to have been involved in the early stages of the project, after the publication of Bitcoin v0.1 on January 8, 2009, and who are still alive (such as Mike Hearn or Gavin Andresen), have used their BTC, therefore the most likely hypothesis to explain why Satoshi never used them seems to be his death.
On the other hand, in 2011 it was still very difficult to use them, and exchanges were still sporadic.
Bitcoin Talk
The Bitcoin Talk forum was initially created in a directory of the bitcoin.org website managed by Satoshi Nakamoto himself.
It quickly became the main platform for exchanging information about Bitcoin, more than the bitcoin-list mailing list.
At some point, it was moved to the domain bitcointalk.org, and both the forum and the original website were later transferred by Satoshi to others.
The fact is that it was not wanted for there to be any “official” website or forum, and in this way it was made clear that even bitcoin.org and bitcointalk.org were just private websites dedicated to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, in fact, does not have any official website, and Satoshi’s disappearance from this point of view has helped a lot. The Bitcoin protocol has effectively become the property of everyone, and completely decentralized.
Today there are even alternative software available to manage a Bitcoin node. Satoshi’s original software has been renamed Bitcoin Core, it has reached version 25 and can be downloaded from bitcoin.org, but there are also Bitcoin Knots, btcd, Bitcore, and others.
The only thing that unites everything is the Bitcoin protocol, which is unique and unchangeable.
