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’s reply that same day approved the FAQ, but it addressed only a SourceForge username mix-up, the wording on backing up wallet keys, and a pitch for password-protecting wallets as a security edge over banks — nothing about the investment line. That objection surfaces in Satoshi’s June 11, 2009 reply, the same email in which he first floated the term “cryptocurrency” for describing Bitcoin. Satoshi had written:
Satoshi Nakamoto (email to Martti Malmi, June 11, 2009, 9:24:25 PM UTC)There 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 several months earlier, when he responded to Hal Finney’s investment framing without ruling it out.
It would not be the last time Satoshi went back over that page’s wording — the corrections continued for another year, into a 2010 round of bug reports he forwarded himself.
