The question was not about who should lead Bitcoin. On December 2, 2010, after bitcoin.org had been down for several hours, Satoshi asked Martti Malmi what had caused the outage and whether anyone was keeping backups. Malmi answered the next morning: a reboot had fixed it, there were no automatic backups, and once he had moved bitcoinexchange.com to another server they should have more server admins. He could give the root password to Satoshi and somebody else. Xunie had volunteered, but they might find someone more professional on the forum. Should they open a recruitment thread?
Satoshi’s answer, that evening, quoted that paragraph and named the somebody else:
Satoshi Nakamoto (email to Martti Malmi, December 03, 2010, 7:58:40 PM UTC)It should be Gavin. I trust him, he’s responsible, professional, and technically much more linux capable than me.
He added that he didn’t know Xunie, who hadn’t posted for months. On December 6 Malmi wrote that he was ready to send Satoshi the password and asked for his PGP key, and replied to the recommendation with “Ok, I’ll ask him.” The encrypted root password went to Satoshi on December 7.
So “It should be Gavin” chose a second administrator for the project’s web server. It did not hand Gavin Andresen the code: he had been committing to the SourceForge repository under his own name since r165 on October 11, 2010, as the repository’s committer record shows. What the email does record is the reason Satoshi gave. The next jobs Malmi had listed for the new admin were moving the site to lighttpd and optimizing the server, and Satoshi, who had built Bitcoin on Windows, ranked Gavin above himself on exactly the skill those jobs needed. Bitcoin had been initially released as a Windows-only application, with Linux support added in version 0.2 largely through Malmi’s work.
The public side of the transition came later and from Gavin’s own hand. Satoshi’s last public BitcoinTalk post on December 12 said nothing about it, and on December 19 Andresen announced that, with Satoshi’s blessing, he would do more active project management. The sequence around this email, from the September 2010 “other projects” notice to the December announcement, is laid out in how the project passed to Andresen. Years later, in a 2013 HuffPost interview, Andresen told his own side of it: Satoshi asked to put Andresen’s email address on the Bitcoin homepage and took his own away, which Andresen called having “pulled a fast one” on him.
Satoshi’s praise of Gavin in this December 2010 email was written about a root password. That is fitting rather than disappointing: his trust shows up here as an operational judgment, made in two lines, about who should be able to log in to the server.
