Satoshi hands over the Bitcoin alert key to Gavin Andresen (April 26, 2011)

Satoshi Nakamoto sent what would become his last known private email. With the subject line “alert key,” it handed over the network alert key and announced his departure.

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:

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.

The CAlert key signed the alerts that Bitcoin clients relayed across the network and showed on their status bars, warning of security problems or required upgrades. By the time it reached Andresen it could do nothing more than that: in December 2010 Satoshi had removed its power to put nodes into safe mode, a history traced in the analysis of the alert key’s eight years. By transferring this key, Satoshi was completing the final piece of the leadership handover.

Satoshi never replied to Andresen’s subsequent response.

This handover sits inside a tightly clustered corpus from Satoshi’s last months: Andresen’s reply on the same day (Andresen → Satoshi on the CIA visit), Satoshi’s final known email to Martti Malmi two months earlier handing over the bitcoin-list mailman password, and the Forbes crypto-currency story days before, which Andresen’s reply took to be what Satoshi’s complaint about the “pirate currency angle” was answering. Months later, Wired’s feature on Bitcoin’s rise and fall quoted Andresen’s paraphrase of this same email — that Satoshi wanted to de-emphasize “the whole ‘mysterious founder’ thing” — but read it only as passing PR advice, not as the farewell it actually was. When Andresen later told how he became the leader, he pointed to a different handover: the email address Satoshi swapped on the Bitcoin homepage, which he called Satoshi’s having “pulled a fast one” on him.

The Gavin Andresen biography tracks Andresen’s lead-maintainer arc through this handover. Other pages treat this email as the documented departure point: the Satoshi self-statements inventory, the Sassaman identity hypothesis, the Satoshi activity timeline, which marks this email as the last confirmed point before the record goes silent, and the final-known-email entry.