Two emails sent three days apart mark the end of Satoshi Nakamoto’s verified private correspondence. The first says the project is in Gavin’s hands; in the second, Satoshi transfers the network’s alert key and says he will probably be unavailable.
April 23, 2011 — to Mike Hearn
Satoshi wrote to Mike Hearn, a Google engineer who had been corresponding with him since April 2009:
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.”
He also expressed hope that Hearn’s BitcoinJ project would continue to be developed as an alternative client. Hearn later made the exchange public, publishing his full correspondence with Satoshi in August 2017.
April 26, 2011 — to Gavin Andresen
Three days later, Satoshi sent what is believed to be his absolute final email, addressed to Gavin Andresen, with the subject line “alert key”. He wrote:
Quote from: Satoshi Nakamoto on April 26, 2011, 10:29:00 AM UTC“I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them.”
He then announced his departure:
“I’ve moved on to other things and will probably be unavailable.”
Finally, he transferred the network alert key — a critical tool for broadcasting emergency messages to all Bitcoin clients — completing the last piece of the project handover.
Andresen replied, accepting the alert key and disclosing that he had been invited by In-Q-Tel to present Bitcoin at a CIA conference. Satoshi never replied. No verified communication from Satoshi has been recorded since. Andresen would revisit the handover himself years later, in a 2016 retrospective on working with Satoshi.
Later readings treat this farewell pair as their documentary endpoint: the genesis block entry (the closing bookend to the Times headline opening), the identification-asymmetry analysis (the silence after these emails), the Satoshi-design-vs-current-reality analysis (April 26, 2011 as the boundary of the post-Satoshi era), the 2011-11-20 Bitcoin v0.5 Crypto++-removal entry (the seven months successor maintainers waited before touching the cryptographic core) and the digital-gold structural-features analysis (the founder’s departure as a property of the asset).
Michel Bauwens’s 2025 recollection describes a private message from Satoshi around 2014 denying he was Dorian Nakamoto, but the corresponding email is not preserved in the archive (no published copy exists), so it does not revise the record of verified communication.
“Final” here is a property of the surviving record, not a claim about every message that may once have existed. What is documented is narrower and stronger: the last known exchange combines withdrawal from public explanation with the transfer of the network’s alert key. Silence begins where the handover ends.
