Satoshi's successor — how the Bitcoin project passed to Gavin Andresen (October–December 2010)

Leadership did not pass in one ceremonial moment, and no record names a day on which it did. Between October and December 2010, Gavin Andresen gained the code, then a private word of trust, then the public role, in that order and weeks apart. Satoshi kept working throughout, which is why the sequence has to be read from its dated records rather than from a handover date.

The code came first. Andresen’s earlier patches had gone into Bitcoin’s SourceForge repository under Satoshi’s name; his first commit under his own, r165 on October 11, 2010, added the -rpcssl option for HTTPS JSON-RPC, and by the end of November he had made fourteen (the repository’s committer record). Around September, by Benjamin Wallace’s account, Satoshi had told him he was working on other projects.

When Martti Malmi proposed giving the root password of the bitcoin.org server to Satoshi and one more person, Satoshi named that person:

It should be Gavin. I trust him, he’s responsible, professional, and technically much more linux capable than me.

Satoshi was still shipping. He released v0.3.18 on December 8. On December 12 he committed new DoS limits and the removal of safe mode (r199 and r200) and described them in his last public BitcoinTalk post, which says nothing about stepping back. The same post announced a quick build as version 0.3.19; he committed that release the next day (r201), and his last commit, r202 (“get external ip from irc”), is dated December 15.

Four days after that, Andresen made the role public:

With Satoshi’s blessing, and with great reluctance, I’m going to start doing more active project management for bitcoin.

The rest came later. The network alert key reached Andresen on April 26, 2011, with Satoshi’s note that he had moved on to other things. Andresen maintained the reference client, later renamed Bitcoin Core, until he handed it on in 2014.

Four months before the announcement, sole-author authority is exactly what had let Bitcoin survive the August 2010 value-overflow incident: Satoshi alone could push an emergency patch and expect the network to trust it. The move to Andresen is the first step in dispersing that same authority away from any single person.

The record preserves a practical succession, not a ceremonial one. By the time Andresen said “with great reluctance,” he had been committing under his own name for ten weeks, and Satoshi had written his last commit four days earlier. The announcement named what had already happened; it did not make it happen.