Nicholas Bohm, a retired commercial solicitor from a major City of London firm and an e-commerce policy adviser for Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK), had been running Bitcoin since January 2009. He was one of the few early adopters who engaged directly with Satoshi via private email.
He wrote:
Nicholas Bohm (email to Satoshi, June 04, 2009, 9:21:00 AM UTC)I’ve installed a new router and cannot get Bitcoin to connect.
I’ve altered the firewall rule to allow inbound services via SMTP, which seems to be the name for port 25. Is that right? Should there be anything else I ought to do?
Port 25 is the mail port. Bitcoin listened on port 8333, and Bohm had opened the wrong door. The next morning he wrote again that he had achieved a connection through the new router after all, so whatever he did must have been right, and asked Satoshi to disregard his last message. Satoshi replied later that day, telling him to forward port 8333 anyway.
The router was not the first problem Bohm had brought to Satoshi. In January 2009 his question to the bitcoin-list about a couple of problems running bitcoin turned into a week of private crash reports, until Satoshi traced the crash to a failed DNS lookup. Satoshi acknowledged Bohm by name in the v0.1.5 release notes: “includes the fix for the problem Nicholas had.”
This exchange stayed private until COPA v. Wright trial evidence revealed the full correspondence in 2024.
