The bitcoin.org FAQ still exists today, at the same address it held in 2010. Open it, and none of the wording Satoshi fought over is there. No line telling readers to “consider it an investment” — because Satoshi had that one struck in 2009. No reference to a “section 2.3” that never existed — because he flagged that too. The site did not vanish. After Satoshi’s disappearance and Malmi’s own departure, bitcoin.org came under the stewardship of an anonymous administrator known as Cobra. On September 13, 2013, a contributor with no connection to Satoshi or Malmi replaced the old About page with a rewritten FAQ, and the page has been maintained by a rotating cast of volunteers ever since.
On May 3, 2009, Satoshi handed the job of building bitcoin.org and its FAQ to Martti Malmi. What followed was not a clean handoff. He corrected Malmi’s draft with a list of specific fixes, and, more than a year later, went back to the site again — editing the homepage himself and forwarding two more bug reports for Malmi to fix. Fourteen months after handing the page off, he was still the address readers wrote to when something on it broke.
1. The draft and the deal behind it
That handoff drew on a compilation of questions and answers Satoshi had given Malmi the same day. Malmi submitted the first draft the next morning, May 4, and Satoshi’s reply that day approved it on the whole — a SourceForge username mix-up, the wording on backing up wallet keys, a pitch for password-protecting wallets, nothing yet about the investment line. The objection, the section numbering, and a sentence Satoshi wanted struck entirely came five weeks later, in a second pass.
2. Three corrections, one afterthought
On June 11, 2009, Satoshi wrote back with specifics.
| What Satoshi flagged | What changed |
|---|---|
| A bullet telling readers to “consider it an investment” — he called it “a dangerous thing to say” | The line disappears from every surviving FAQ text |
| A cross-reference to “section 2.3,” in a document with no numbered sections | By 2010 the FAQ carries no section numbers at all |
| A sentence about a feature being hidden in a future release, which he said “wasn’t really something I meant to say publicly” | Removed |
Malmi confirmed the fixes the next day. The same June 11 email also carried a fourth, smaller moment that outgrew the FAQ entirely: Satoshi passed along a word someone else had coined — “cryptocurrency” — and asked what Malmi thought of it.
3. What survives
The FAQ text preserved from March 27, 2010 shows the corrections held, for as long as this version of the page lasted. No investment pitch. No section numbers to go stale. The document that reaches the earliest recoverable snapshot is the corrected one, not the draft.
Satoshi’s interest in the site’s wording did not end there. On July 6, 2010, he edited the bitcoin.org homepage himself, removing the word “anonymous” and adding Tor instructions — a second round of hands-on control, more than a year after the first, and this time without asking Malmi to make the change.
4. Two bug reports, forwarded a day apart
By mid-July 2010, bitcoin.org had been down for a stretch, and a highly visible Slashdot comment had sent readers to a leftover instead: the old SourceForge wiki, whose FAQ page was still live and still pointed at an outdated download. A reader named Sam wrote in to flag it — not for the first time, judging by an earlier complaint about the same stale download link quoted inside his own message.
Quote from: Sam on July 14, 2010, 9:52:46 PM UTCIt was an old FAQ on sourceforge that had been linked from slashdot (on a highly visible comment). people were going there because bitcoin.org was down for a while. … Probably not an issue anymore, but might be a good idea to delete or update that wiki page.
Satoshi did not fix the wiki himself. He forwarded Sam’s email to Malmi on July 14 with a one-line note that the old pages were still up. The next day, he forwarded a second, unrelated report — this one from Jim Nguyen, who thought the FAQ’s wallet-backup instructions were outdated and asked whether backing up the single wallet file, rather than the entire folder, would be enough:
Quote from: Jim Nguyen on July 15, 2010, 5:43:55 PM UTCIn the FAQ of bitcoin.org the backing up of the wallet had old instructions, right? Should it just be to back up wallat.dat instead of the entire folder???
Two complaints about outdated FAQ content, forwarded to Malmi a day apart. The surviving record shows a reply to only the first: on July 17, Malmi reported not a rewrite of the old SourceForge site, but a retirement:
Quote from: Martti Malmi on July 17, 2010, 1:33:46 AM UTCRelocated the old site to /oldsite, now there’s only the redirection.
The dead-end that had confused Sam, and everyone Slashdot had sent to it, stopped existing. Whether the wallet-backup wording Jim Nguyen flagged was ever updated does not appear in the surviving correspondence.
I keep coming back to the fact that neither bug report reached Satoshi because he was watching the FAQ. They reached him because he was still the address on file — the person people wrote to when something on bitcoin.org looked wrong, fourteen months after he’d handed the page to someone else to write. Malmi drafted it, argued the wording of a slogan, and fixed what was asked of him each time. Satoshi never let go of the pen. I don’t think either man thought of the FAQ as jointly authored; I think they thought of it as a page that had to be right, and took turns making sure it was.
None of that care outlasted them. The FAQ you can read on bitcoin.org today was written by people who never corresponded with either of them. Their sentence about investment, their argument over a section number that never existed, the line Satoshi didn’t mean to say publicly — none of it is there anymore, not because anyone erased it on purpose, but because a page that has to stay right eventually gets rewritten by whoever is still around to keep it that way. Bitcoin outlived its FAQ.
