Researcher publishes never-before-seen emails between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney

Just recently, three unedited emails from Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto were made public. The emails reveal the correspondence between Satoshi and first Bitcoin developer Hal Finney. Communications between Nakamoto and Finney date back to November 2008 and January 2009, the same month that Bitcoin was launched.

On November 27, three emails that had never been seen before were made public in an editorial written by Michael Kaplikov, a professor at Pace University. According to Kaplikov, the emails originated from the New York Times contributor Nathaniel Popper. The NYT reporter also wrote the book “Digital Gold” and Hal Finney’s wife Fran Finney sent Popper the emails right now. Kaplikov posted the emails alongside his editorial after confirming that the emails were indeed legitimate and came from the now deceased Hal Finney’s old computer.

The first email is dated November 19, 2008, nineteen days after the mysterious creator of Bitcoin published the white paper. Kaplikov, who has studied the history of Bitcoin’s origin, said that prior to the email, Nakamoto shared an early version of the Bitcoin base code with a few people, including Hal Finney. The story of the origin of the early release is well known, as Ray Dillinger and James A. Donald also received pre-release copies. In the email, Finney asked Satoshi about the number of nodes and scaling of the Bitcoin network.

“Some of the discussion and performance concerns may relate to the ultimate size of the P2P network,” Finney wrote to Nakamoto. “How big do you think it gets? Dozens of nodes. Thousands? Millions? And for customers, do you think this could scale up to be usable for nearly 100% of the world’s financial transactions? Or would you see it used primarily for a “core” subset of transactions that have special requirements, with other transactions using a different payment system that is perhaps Bitcoin based? “

The Pace University researcher also pointed out that soon after this particular email, the creator of Bitcoin allowed Finney to commit to access the Sourceforge repository. Then another email dated January 8, 2009, shortly after the network was launched, Satoshi wrote to Hal. “I thought you would like to know, Bitcoin v0.1 with EXE and full source code is available on Sourceforge,” wrote Nakamoto. The creator also explained that the release notes and screenshots have also been uploaded to the bitcoin.org web portal. The next day, Finney responded to Nakamoto’s release email.

“Hi, Satoshi, thank you very much for this information,” Finney said on Jan.9. “I should have a chance to check this out this weekend. Can’t wait to learn more about the code.”

Running bitcoin

– halfin (@halfin) 11 January 2009

The next day, Hal Finney went on Twitter and he told his followers was “running bitcoin”. Finney appears to have had a chance to look at the code after his recent correspondence with Nakamoto. In addition to the three unedited emails, Kaplikov also discussed the email correspondence between Finney and Nakamoto that was given to the Wall Street Journal in 2014.

The reason is that Kaplikov discusses the discrepancies with the email timestamps. Kaplikov points out that the January 2009 emails appear to be about eight hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). Just recently, new research by The Chain Bulletin collaborator Doncho Karaivanov tried to pinpoint the location of Satoshi’s house by taking advantage of all his activities and scatter charts of all timestamps.

Karaivanov’s study assumes that Satoshi Nakamoto was living in London (GMT) when he or she created the Bitcoin project. However, past studies show that Nakamoto may have also resided in California on the west coast, and some have claimed that he lived in the eastern United States. Furthermore, in some studies it is also assumed that Satoshi Nakamoto took out many “full nights” and filled his work before leaving the project.

Finney passed away on August 28, 2014, after suffering complications from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Bitcoiners and cryptocurrency advocates everywhere think of Finney with the utmost consideration, as he once said the computer could help free people.

“It seemed so obvious to me,” Finney explained before his death. “Here we are faced with the problems of privacy loss, creeping computerization, huge databases, greater centralization and [David] Chaum offers an entirely different direction to go, which puts power in the hands of individuals rather than governments and corporations. The computer can be used as a tool to free and protect people, rather than to control them. ”

The recently posted emails are interesting and provide some new insight into Nakamoto and Finney’s early relationships. Finney’s emails and Twitter post on January 10 clearly show that he was very excited about this project and made time to look at Bitcoin right away. The email timestamps simply add more to the mystery of Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity and the uncertainty about the inventor’s location during the cryptocurrency’s creation period.

What do you think of the email correspondence between Nakamoto and Finney? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.

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