Previously unreleased emails from Satoshi Nakamoto present the new puzzle: CoinDesk

The newly discovered emails between Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym creator of Bitcoin, and the late Hal Finney delve into the mystery about the origins of the cryptocurrency.

The three emails are from Bitcoin’s early days, when its future was uncertain. They show how closely Satoshi worked closely with early backers at the time of Bitcoin’s launch.

Although anything written or encoded by Satoshi is inherently valuable to the community, perhaps the most intriguing parts of these messages are neither words nor code, but something seemingly prosaic: timestamps, which present a new conundrum.

They were shared with me by journalist and author Nathaniel Popper, who was given access to Finney’s correspondence during his work on “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money”.

Finney, who died in 2014, was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction. A full-fledged legend, he developed the first reusable proof-of-work system, among other achievements.

[Editor’s note: In preparing this article for publication, CoinDesk contacted Fran Finney, Hal’s widow, who confirmed she had provided his correspondence to Popper, who in turn confirmed sending the messages to the author. “In March of 2014 we sent Nathaniel Popper those files, documenting email exchanges between Hal and Satoshi,” Fran Finney told CoinDesk. “The files were retrieved from the computer Hal was using for personal email in 2009 and were provided with Hal’s consent.”]

November 2008 was when Satoshi opened Bitcoin to public scrutiny. Until then, the project that Satoshi had spent a year and a half planning has only been shared privately with a select few. On August 22 of that year, he sent an email to Wei Dai, the author of “b-money” and, sometime earlier, Adam Back, the creator of Hashcash (whose proof of work feature is used in Bitcoin).

The initial reception was anything but ecstatic, Finney later recalled.

“When Satoshi announced Bitcoin on the crypto mailing list, it got a skeptical reception at best,” he wrote in 2013 in his penultimate post on the Bitcointalk forum. “Cryptographers have seen too many big projects of clueless noobs. They tend to have a gut reaction. “

On or about November 16, 2008, Satoshi shared a pre-release version of the Bitcoin code with several members of the Cryptography Mailing List, including James A. Donald, Ray Dillinger, and Finney. The first of the Satoshi emails I received from Popper was sent a few days later.

In that first email on November 19, Finney thanks Satoshi for some corrections and asks about the aspired size of the Bitcoin network as it would affect scalability and performance. Notably, Donald, the first person to respond to Bitcoin’s public announcement on the mailing list, had raised the same concern. “It does not appear to scale to the required size,” he wrote. This was a harbinger of the downsizing debate that ultimately led to the creation of chipped cryptocurrencies including bitcoin cash and so-called layer 2 solutions such as sidechain and Lightning Network.

For Finney, this wasn’t just a glitch. Apparently in his mind, it has an impact on Bitcoin’s future monetary value. A couple of months later, he said that if Bitcoin became the dominant payment system in the world, its value “should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world.” Extrapolating this logic further, it reached $ 10 million per bitcoin.

In a 2018 interview, Dillinger said that the discussion that began on the public mailing list shifted to private emails and eventually led to Finney and himself helping Satoshi with some parts of the Bitcoin code:

“It was when we started talking about floating point types in accounting code that I realized Hal was involved in the effort. Hal was examining the transaction scripting language and both the code it had and the code that I had interacted with the accounting code. “

Also, right after the November 19th email (in the first half of December 2008), Satoshi added Finney to the Bitcoin repository on Sourceforge, an open-source project management site similar to GitHub.

Although the Bitcoin Genesis block is dated January 3, 2009, the public Bitcoin network was not released until five days later, when the source code was released to the public and the first blocks were mined.

It is assumed that in the first few months of Bitcoin’s existence, most of the hash power was provided by Satoshi. However, the creator of Bitcoin was fully aware that if his peer-to-peer e-money was successful, he needed others to join.

The following two emails are from Satoshi to Finney. In the first, from January 8, 2009, Satoshi notified Finney of the release of version 0.1 of the Bitcoin software. It was sent a few hours after Satoshi made a similar public announcement on the Encryption Mailing List.

It appears that Finney replied to Satoshi, letting him know that he would try to look at the code over the weekend (January 8th fell on a Thursday).

The following day, January 10, Satoshi also updated Wei Dai (to whom he had emailed a few months earlier asking about the correct citation format for Dai’s “b-money”):

“I think [Bitcoin] achieves almost all the goals you set yourself to solve in your b-money paper. “

On the same day, a discussion ensued between Satoshi and Finney about the newly created Bitcoin mailing list on Sourceforge and via private emails that Finney subsequently provided for publication in the Wall Street Journal. (In that exchange, unusually, Finney used her Gmail account instead of [email protected]; it’s also worth noting that most of the email header data has been removed, the meaning of which will become apparent later. ). In the midst of these technical discussions, on the eve of January 11, the first ever bitcoin transfer occurred, transferring 10 BTC from Satoshi to Finney. Interestingly, no reference is made in any of the contemporary public emails or posts.

In the January 2009 emails, Satoshi’s time zone appears to be eight hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). If it is assumed that he was actually Japanese as suggested by his name, it could be assumed that this reflects his ancestral land. However, Japan was nine hours ahead of GMT at the time. Even more intriguing is that Finney’s email server somehow received both emails before Satoshi’s email server, which presents a conundrum.

Derek Atkins, a longtime colleague and friend of Finney, who was also a member of the Cryptography Mailing List, helped us compare these emails to Satoshi’s other emails with the list that Atkins kept in his archive . Atkins suggested that the problem could be attributed to the way Satoshi’s computer was configured:

“Let’s assume the sender’s system is set to local time instead of GMT (which is / was common for Windows), but let’s also assume there’s a configuration error in the sending computer’s local time zone. This could explain the discrepancy. . “

So, we compared it to the first email Satoshi sent to the Encryption Mailing List. Although the headers of that email are generally consistent with our emails, its timestamps are also consistent internally. Atkins suggested that the discrepancy could stem from changing the clock:

“However, if the system is set for local time and NOT for daylight saving time [Daylight Saving Time], so this would also explain the discrepancy. On October 31, 2008, there was a 12 hour difference from EDT to “GMT + 8”, while in January there would have been a 13 hour difference because the [U.S.] returned to solar time “.

In the United States, the clock has been moved one hour behind November 2, 2008. Thus, the difference between the United States and Japan has increased by one hour (Japan does not change the clock). At first, this seemed to be a plausible explanation (assuming Satoshi was not actually based in Japan), however Satoshi’s emails to the November 8, 2008 and January 8, 2009 Encryption Mailing List have no contradictory timestamps. .

It is possible that Satoshi initially set his computer clock to Japan time based on the time difference before daylight saving time and later forgot to make the adjustment. But it wouldn’t explain why his other post-DST emails don’t show the same abnormality.

Based on Satoshi’s email to Finney on January 12, we know that he was in a place with limited connectivity at this time, so perhaps his computer’s internal clock was out of sync:

“Unfortunately, I can’t get inbound connections from where I am, which made things more difficult. Your node receiving the inbound connections was the main thing to keep the network up for the first day or two. “

It is possible that right after he sent an email with “normal” timestamps on January 8, Satoshi went to a location in a different time zone with limited connectivity from which he emailed Finney on the day following.

Another possibility is that Satoshi Nakamoto (or the various team members behind the moniker) used several computers, some of which have been carefully configured while others have not. But none of these theories seem satisfactory enough.

A more extravagant theory is based on the popular hypothesis that Finney himself was Satoshi. If we assume that he linked Satoshi’s email to his main email account ([email protected]) for convenience, so that he doesn’t have to log into his Vistomail account every time, this could explain why the Finney.org server would received before the Anonymousspeech.com server.

This would also explain why Finney chose not to share these emails with the Wall Street Journal and why the ones he shared were missing most of the header data. But we must admit that, just like the other theories mentioned above, we have no hard evidence to support it.

These emails do not reverse the story of Bitcoin’s genesis, nor do they introduce unlikely new characters to the cast. They don’t even seem to solve the eternal mystery surrounding Satoshi’s identity.

At the same time, they present us with a new little puzzle. Sergio Demian Lerner took seven long years to understand the famous “Patoshi” motif. Hopefully, it will take a little less time for the community to suggest a better explanation for the odd timestamps.

The emails also provide further insights into the close collaboration between Satoshi and early adopters like Finney during the Bitcoin launch. Understandably, Finney later chose not to point out her initial involvement. “When Satoshi announced the first version of the software, I got it right away. I think I was the first person besides Satoshi to run bitcoin, “he wrote in his final post on the Bitcointalk forum, not mentioning their pre-release communications.

However, nearly seven years later, we have to agree with Finney’s other remark from the same farewell post:

“Today, Satoshi’s true identity has become a mystery. “