On May 4, 2009, Malmi submitted his initial FAQ draft to Satoshi, covering topics including Bitcoin’s definition, how to acquire bitcoins, how the system works, and security considerations.
Satoshi praised the FAQ but raised a critical concern about how Bitcoin was being positioned. He wrote:
Satoshi NakamotoThere are a lot of things you can say on the sourceforge site that I can’t say on my own site … Even so, I’m uncomfortable with explicitly saying ‘consider it an investment’. That’s a dangerous thing to say and you should delete that bullet point. It’s OK if they come to that conclusion on their own, but we can’t pitch it as that.
It is an early, explicit instance of Satoshi steering Bitcoin away from a “consider it an investment” pitch toward a payment-system framing, and of his caution about regulatory exposure — a hardening of the tentative engagement he had shown four months earlier, when he responded to Hal Finney’s investment framing without ruling it out.