About six weeks after Satoshi’s advice to forward port 8333, Bohm reported a new connectivity failure:
Nicholas Bohm (email to Satoshi, July 18, 2009, 8:59:00 AM UTC)Bitcoin has failed to establish any connections for the last day or so, despite restarts. I’m not aware of having made any changes to my system, so this is puzzling. Can you suggest what I might check?
Satoshi’s reply asked how many connections he usually had. Bohm answered the next day: “It varied from 3 to 5 mostly.” In the same email he added that no blocks of coins had matured since July 15.
Three to five peers on an ordinary day, and none at all on July 18: a node that had made no changes could drop to zero, and restarting did not bring it back. That is a measure of how small the network was in mid-2009.
This exchange stayed private until COPA v. Wright trial evidence revealed the full correspondence in 2024.
