Mike Hearn, a Google engineer who became an early Bitcoin contributor, exchanged a series of emails with Satoshi Nakamoto between 2009 and April 2011. Hearn had first contacted Satoshi after reading the Bitcoin white paper and becoming interested in the project.
In their correspondence, Satoshi discussed technical aspects of Bitcoin’s future, including how the system could scale, how simplified payment verification (SPV) clients would work, and how he envisioned the evolution of mining from CPUs to more specialized hardware.
On April 20, 2011, Hearn asked Satoshi directly:
Quote from: Mike Hearn on April 20, 2011, 1:55:00 PM UTC“…are you planning on rejoining the community at some point (eg for code reviews), or is your plan to permanently step back from the limelight?”
Three days later, Satoshi replied:
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto on April 23, 2011, 3:40:00 PM UTC“I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.”
It was among the last known private messages from Satoshi before he went silent.
Hearn published the full correspondence in August 2017. Nearly five years after receiving it, he restated this exact handover in his own words in “The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment”: “When Satoshi left, he handed over the reins of the program we now call Bitcoin Core to Gavin Andresen.”
In a 2025 CoinGeek interview, Hearn reflected on Satoshi’s personality and why he disappeared, drawing on this same direct correspondence.
This April 23, 2011 farewell to Hearn and the April 26 alert-key transfer to Andresen form the ‘farewell pair’ that closes Satoshi’s public correspondence (see the Satoshi final-known-email entry).
