Two emails sent three days apart are the last of Satoshi Nakamoto’s private emails on record. The first says the project is in Gavin Andresen’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:
Satoshi Nakamoto (email to Mike Hearn, 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:
Satoshi Nakamoto (email to Gavin Andresen, April 26, 2011)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. He added that the key should not stay with Andresen alone:
Here’s the CAlert key and broadcast code in case you need it. You should probably give it to at least one or two other people. There are a few long time users who are always around all the time.
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. In a 2013 HuffPost interview, Andresen gave his own account of the handover: it came on the day Satoshi replaced his own email address on the Bitcoin homepage with Andresen’s.
Bitcoin began with the Times headline embedded in the genesis block; with these two emails, to Hearn and to Andresen, Satoshi handed the project to the developers who came after him. From April 26, 2011, Bitcoin went on without Satoshi. In November 2011, seven months after the second email, those developers released v0.5, which replaced the Crypto++ SHA-256 code with OpenSSL. Satoshi has left no verifiable message since these emails, and that silence is one reason he has never been found. With no founder left to steer it, Bitcoin also gained one of the traits that make it digital gold.
In a 2025 interview, Michel Bauwens recalls that around 2014, after the press named Dorian Nakamoto as Satoshi, Satoshi wrote to him privately to say he was not that man. That message has never been published and is not reproduced on this site, so Satoshi’s last verified message is still the April 26 email to Andresen.
In those last two emails, Satoshi said almost nothing about himself: only that he had moved on, and a request that people stop calling him a mysterious shadowy figure. Even for that request, his reasons were the press’s pirate-currency angle and the developers’ motivation. He was writing himself out of Bitcoin’s story. Eight months earlier, when a forum user asked what would happen if a government arrested him and demanded the key, his reply opened with “WRT the alert system, who cares?” and never mentioned his own safety. Everything else he wrote looks ahead: BitcoinJ, so impatient new users could start without waiting for the block chain; developers motivated by credit; an alert key he advised passing to one or two more people. From the 0.1.5 announcement, where he thanked Nicholas Bohm and Dustin Trammell, he kept naming his helpers in release announcements. Down to his last email, what Satoshi wrote about was Bitcoin after he was gone.
