“History became legend. Legend became myth.” The quote describes the famous ring at the heart of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy series, but it could equally sum up the origins of Bitcoin and its mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto. Recall how Satoshi in 2011, a time when you could buy one Bitcoin for $2, declared he was stepping away from the project, and how, since then, he has become the crypto world’s version of a mythical figure.
It’s no wonder then that the publication of 120 pages of Satoshi’s email correspondence last week is a causing a stir. The emails, which came to light in a U.K. trial where poser Craig Wright is trying to pass himself off as Bitcoin’s creator, are between Satoshi and Finnish coder Martti Malmi, and describe a host of technical and administrative matters related to the then-nascent cryptocurrency.
Since the emails came to light, members of the crypto old guard, like Jameson Lopp and journalist-turned-Bitcoin-historian Pete Rizzo, have been posting excerpts while declaring them to be significant. Their Twitter commentary, which is a bit akin to scholars discovering a new trove of papers from George Washington, has focused on topics like Satoshi’s being okay with larger block sizes for the Bitcoin blockchain. And of course, there has already been trolling and memes—including a fake email that persuaded most of crypto Twitter that Satoshi liked pineapple and jalapeños on his pizza.
This is mostly inside baseball stuff for hard-core Bitcoiners, but as venture capitalist Nic Carter has noted, the emails also offer a host of new clues about Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity. Those clues are not obvious tells like his address or hometown but rather smaller ones like his predilection for spellings like “favour” that suggest he is not American, or the time stamps of his communication that show he likely lived in the U.K. or somewhere near there.
These latter clues are not exactly a revelation since there is plenty of other correspondence showing Satoshi’s preferred spellings and send times. But, as Twitter pal Nicholas Gross told me by DM, the emails also contain a lot of references to the numerous software services the Bitcoin creator used—providing a new trail of breadcrumbs for people to investigate. At the same time, the trove of newly found emails will also be fodder for AI-powered textual analysis software that detects writing idiosyncrasies to guess whether a document was written by a given person.
Such analysis has already been deployed to correlate Satoshi’s writing with that of Nick Szabo, a polymath tied to early cypherpunk circles whose politics very much align with Bitcoin’s anti-government philosophy. Szabo was also pals with the late Hal Finney, one of the very first to try out Bitcoin, and emerges as a Satoshi-like character in Digital Gold, a well-reported early history of the crypto movement. There’s also the matter of Szabo’s initials, which are a flipping of Satoshi’s S.N.
The new trove of emails will, I suspect, provide further circumstantial evidence that Satoshi is Szabo. But here’s the thing: It’s unlikely to matter. Just as people of faith prefer not to question the specific details of the miracles that underlie their religion, Bitcoiners—even those who know the answer—prefer not to discuss the true identity of Satoshi. Meanwhile, the broader public is happy to embrace whatever theory of Bitcoin’s creation suits them best—like the recent batch of “evidence{ claiming to show Satoshi is Elon Musk. By this point, history has become myth. And that’s fine.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
DECENTRALIZED NEWS
The Department of Energy said it would suspend a survey on Bitcoin mining after the sector’s biggest players sued the agency, complaining the methodology was flawed and that the process required sharing sensitive data. (Reuters)
Two Polygon veterans raised $27 million from Founders Fund and Dragonfly for a startup, Avail, that aims to improve the universe of layer-2 blockchains. (Fortune)
A federal judge signed off on the plea deal that will see Binance pay $4.3 billion to settle money laundering charges, leading the company to say it accepts responsibility for its actions. (The Block)
Anchorage, the custody firm with an OCC charter, announced a first-of-its-kind self-custody wallet for institutional clients. (Fortune)
Last week’s takedown of the notorious LockBit ransomware group saw law enforcement take control of thousands of crypto wallets holding around $110 million worth of Bitcoin. (Bleeping Computer)
MEME O’ THE MOMENT
How Craig Wright’s trial is going:
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