The day after telling Bohm there might be nobody else running Bitcoin, Satoshi wrote again. Bohm had sent his IP address, and Satoshi’s node had tried it:
Satoshi Nakamoto (email to Nicholas Bohm, July 20, 2009, 3:05:00 PM UTC)I guess something must be preventing you from receiving incoming connections. Mine has been trying to connect to your IP without success. I’m currently connected to 70.113.114.209 since yesterday. If you’re not at least connected to that one, then you can’t connect out either.
The test was simple. Satoshi’s node could not accept incoming connections and could not reach Bohm’s. If Bohm’s node was not connected to the one address Satoshi named, it was not getting out to the network at all. That afternoon Bohm stopped and restarted Bitcoin and wrote back that he now had two connections, fewer than for some weeks.
The IP address 70.113.114.209 was later identified by researchers (documented in a Decashed analysis) as likely belonging to Dustin Trammell, who was based in the Round Rock/Austin, Texas area. That one line, naming the address Satoshi’s own node had been connected to since the day before, is the evidence his biography cites for his standing as one of the network’s most consistent early operators.
Trammell later gave his own account of the network’s earliest days: in a 2021 interview he described possibly being the second node to ever join, after connecting and seeing only one other peer for hours — see Trammell’s 2021 testimony about possibly being Bitcoin’s second node for that account.
The exchange is an operational snapshot of the Bitcoin network in July 2009: the node of the person who wrote the software could accept no incoming connections, could not reach a user who had been running Bitcoin since January, and was connected to an address later traced to the Austin area.
This exchange stayed private until COPA v. Wright trial evidence revealed the full correspondence in 2024.
