Satoshi Nakamoto’s First Bitcoin Email — October 31, 2008

PREV_HASHthe Satoshi investigation

Block #001

The first email: Friday, 31 October 2008, 14:10

Document on file: email no. 1, list cryptography@metzdowd.com · prev_hash: block #000

Satoshi’s first trace is not a website or a press release. It is an email sent to a niche mailing list read by perhaps a few hundred cryptographers, researchers and cypherpunks. Before we read the letter — let’s look at the envelope. In an investigation, the envelope is often worth more than the letter.

A note on order: the whitepaper carries the same date, but it enters the public record only as an attachment to this email. When the document was written we do not know; we know only the moment it entered circulation. So we read the envelope first, and the document itself from block #002 onwards.

Artifact 001-A · reconstruction of the header and the opening line

From: Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshi@vistomail.com>      [1]
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:10:00 -0400               [2]
To:   cryptography@metzdowd.com                     [3]
Subject: Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper

  „…a new electronic cash system
   that's fully peer-to-peer…”                      [4]

[1]Vistomail was an anonymous email service. We do not know on what terms this account was set up — we record the fact itself: the author’s first public step was taken through a tool that conceals identity, not an ordinary mailbox.
[2]A Friday afternoon, US Eastern time. The “-0400” zone marker is the first data point for our future timezone analysis — we record it, no conclusions yet.
[3]Not Reddit, not the press — a closed circle of experts who could have crushed the project on the merits. The author sought review, not publicity. That says more about him than many a sentence in the body.
[4]One matter-of-fact opening sentence, zero marketing, the tone of someone writing to peers. The style of this and the following texts will be our main stylometric material.

There is one more fact that changes the picture: the bitcoin.org domain was registered on 18 August 2008 — two and a half months before this email, also through an anonymising service. The publication was not an impulse. It was the final stage of an operation prepared since at least the summer, with attention to anonymity at every step — before anyone had a reason to look for the author. Who, in 2008, thought about privacy this way — before it was necessary? We leave that question open. For now, we pin the facts to the board.

Block sources (originals): metzdowd · emails

Findings #1–#2 — pinned to the board#1: Anonymity was prepared before publication: the domain was registered in August 2008 through an anonymising service, and the correspondence went through anonymous email. #2: The project’s first audience was a narrow circle of cryptography experts, not the public.

In block #002We open the attachment. Eight sentences of the abstract contain the entire system — and the form of the document will tell us as much as its content. Friday, 14:10.

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