In April 2013 a bitcoin had just run from $47 to $250 and fallen back to about $72, and Gavin Andresen was chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation. HuffPost’s Bianca Bosker opened her interview with the obvious objection: a currency that prides itself on being decentralized, supported by a decentralized group, has a chief scientist. How did that happen?
Andresen began with the Bitcoin Faucet, his first Bitcoin project in 2010, which gave five bitcoins to anyone who visited. Then he started sending code to Satoshi, and over time Satoshi came to trust his judgment on it. Then came the part he told as a trick:
Gavin Andresen (Huffington Post interview, April 16, 2013)And eventually, he pulled a fast one on me because he asked me if it’d be OK if he put my email address on the bitcoin homepage, and I said yes, not realizing that when he put my email address there, he’d take his away. I was the person everyone would email when they wanted to know about bitcoin. Satoshi started stepping back as leader of project and pushing me forward as the leader of the project.
The answer does not date the swap, and the archive holds no record of the day the contact address on bitcoin.org changed. What the dated records show is the rest of the sequence around it. Andresen’s first commit under his own name in Bitcoin’s SourceForge repository is r165 on October 11, 2010 (the repository’s committer record); around September, by Benjamin Wallace’s account, Satoshi had told him he was working on other projects. Satoshi’s last public BitcoinTalk post came on December 12, 2010, and a week later Andresen wrote:
Gavin Andresen (BitcoinTalk post, December 19, 2010, 4:41:39 PM UTC)With Satoshi’s blessing, and with great reluctance, I’m going to start doing more active project management for bitcoin.
Four months later, on April 26, 2011, Satoshi sent Andresen the network alert key with the line “I’ve moved on to other things and will probably be unavailable,” one of the two messages that make up Satoshi’s final known correspondence.
The HuffPost answer is where the phrase “pulled a fast one” comes from. CoinGeek reprinted it word for word in a May 2017 interview with Andresen and credited HuffPost as the source. The Gavin Andresen biography places it alongside the dated records of the transition, and the Bitcoin Core rebrand analysis reads it as evidence that development authority had gathered around Andresen years before the 2014 rename.
Satoshi never announced a successor on the forum. In Andresen’s telling, the public found out who was in charge the ordinary way, by writing to the contact address on the homepage and reaching Andresen instead of Satoshi. That is the truest account of the handover: it went through the contact line, not through a declaration.
