On November 26, 2020, CoinDesk published “Previously Unpublished Emails of Satoshi Nakamoto Present a New Puzzle” by Michael Kapilkov, revealing three emails between Satoshi Nakamoto and Hal Finney.
Chain of custody: In March 2014, Fran Finney (Hal’s widow) sent journalist Nathaniel Popper files from Hal’s personal computer for his book Digital Gold. Popper later shared the email files with Kapilkov. CoinDesk confirmed the chain of custody directly with Fran Finney.
Email 1: November 19, 2008 (Finney → Satoshi)
Finney thanked Satoshi for corrections and asked about network scalability:
Hal Finney (email to Satoshi, November 19, 2008, 3:20:46 PM UTC)How large do you envision it becoming? Tens of nodes? Thousands? Millions?
This was during the pre-release code review period, two months before Bitcoin’s public launch.
Email 2: January 8, 2009 (Satoshi → Finney)
Subject: “Bitcoin v0.1.” Sent just hours after the public announcement on the Cryptography Mailing List:
Satoshi Nakamoto (email to Hal Finney, January 09, 2009, 4:54:55 AM UTC)Thought you’d like to know, the Bitcoin v0.1 release with EXE and full sourcecode is up on Sourceforge:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rarwww.bitcoin.orghas release notes and screenshots. Satoshi
This email was sent from satoshi@vistomail.com.
Email 3: January 12, 2009 (Satoshi → Finney)
A follow-up after Bitcoin’s launch:
Satoshi Nakamoto (Email to Hal Finney, January 12, 2009)Unfortunately, I can’t receive incoming connections from where I am, which has made things more difficult.
The phrase “from where I am” is examined alongside the cadence of Satoshi’s launch-week activity in a forensic reading of his launch-period environment.
The Timezone Mystery
Satoshi’s January 2009 email headers showed a timezone eight hours ahead of GMT (UTC+8) — inconsistent with Japan’s UTC+9 offset. This initially fueled speculation about Satoshi’s location. However, Doncho Karaivanov of Chain Bulletin argued the UTC+8 timestamp came from AnonymousSpeech.com’s email server — the same anonymous-registration intermediary behind Satoshi’s satoshi@anonymousspeech.com address and the anonymous registration of bitcoin.org itself — (a service whose own site advertised a Tokyo base “since 1996”; the relay IP in the headers is allocated to a Malaysian host), not Satoshi’s local machine. When using webmail, the Date header timezone reflects the server, not the user’s location.
Karaivanov had separately built a broader case for a London-based Satoshi from 742 timestamped BitcoinTalk posts, SourceForge commits, and mailing-list emails converted to GMT — a GMT-consistent pattern this UTC+8 email header does not contradict, since it traces to the mail server rather than to Satoshi himself. In the analysis of Satoshi’s nationality, this GMT reading is weighed against a separate code analysis that found a commit-time gap more consistent with EST or CST. The UTC+8 header explained here is a third data point in that same disagreement, one that resolves to the server rather than to either candidate timezone.
Finney himself recalled this email correspondence with Satoshi in his 2013 essay “Bitcoin and Me”, where he described reporting bugs to Satoshi in the days following the v0.1 release.
