According to the account of Gavin Andresen’s early role in Bitcoin, in September 2010 Satoshi Nakamoto privately told Andresen he was working on other projects:
(Benjamin Wallace, New York Magazine article, 2025)Around September 2010, Nakamoto told Gavin that he was getting busy with other projects, and over the coming months he would hand over control of both the code repository on SourceForge and the project’s “alert key,” which allowed the broadcasting of urgent messages to all machines running the bitcoin software.
This September 2010 communication is the earliest documented signal of Satoshi’s intent to step back from active leadership of Bitcoin. The exact date within September is not preserved in the public record, and the message itself has not been published verbatim. The dated records that follow fit that timing: Andresen’s first commit under his own name in the SourceForge repository, r165, is dated October 11, 2010 (the repository’s committer record), while the network alert key reached him only on April 26, 2011.
Satoshi nonetheless kept shipping software under his own name for months afterward, including Bitcoin v0.3.12, released that same September.
The September signal preceded the more visible transition events:
- October 11, 2010: Andresen’s first SVN commit under his own name (r165).
- December 3, 2010: Satoshi named Andresen to Martti Malmi as the second holder of the bitcoin.org server’s root password — “It should be Gavin. I trust him, he’s responsible, professional…”
- December 12, 2010: Satoshi’s last public BitcoinTalk post closes on a technical note about DoS controls and says nothing about stepping back (how the project passed to Andresen).
- December 19, 2010: Andresen’s public acceptance of the project-management role.
- April 26, 2011: Final email to Andresen (alert-key handover).
Recognizing September 2010 as the chronological start of the documented withdrawal — rather than December 2010 — substantively shapes how the December events read. It measures how long Satoshi kept his own departure private: three months after telling Andresen he was stepping back, Satoshi wrote his last public post on December 12, and it said nothing about Andresen or about his own departure. Andresen’s December 19 announcement made the administrative transition public, but Satoshi himself never confirmed it — his own farewell surfaced only in the private April 2011 emails, four months later.
