According to journalist Benjamin Wallace’s account of Gavin Andresen’s early role in Bitcoin, in September 2010 Satoshi Nakamoto privately told Andresen he was working on other projects:
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.
— Benjamin Wallace, New York Magazine
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 fact is referenced in Andresen’s later interviews; the biographical entry on Andresen in this archive likewise notes that “by approximately September–October 2010, Satoshi granted him commit access to the Bitcoin source code repository on SourceForge, along with the network alert key.” 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 by three months:
- December 3, 2010: Satoshi recommended Andresen to Martti Malmi — “It should be Gavin. I trust him, he’s responsible, professional…”
- December 12, 2010: Formal SVN handover and Satoshi’s last public BitcoinTalk post closing with “I plan to pass the baton.”
- 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. The “pass the baton” line on December 12 is not a sudden announcement but the public conclusion of a transition that had been underway privately for three months.