One of the more interesting post-trial discoveries from COPA v Wright concerns Nicholas Bohm.
Before the trial, Bohm was publicly known mainly from a January 25, 2009 bitcoin-list message in which he asked whether the list was the right place to report a couple of problems running Bitcoin, and Satoshi invited him to send a debug.log file directly. But the judgment records something more important:
Mr Bohm provided evidence of his email communications with Satoshi that had not previously been made public.
That detail matters because it shows that a participant first visible on the public mailing list was also corresponding privately with Satoshi for months afterward.
What the newly disclosed emails show
Bohm’s exhibit, which his witness statement describes as copies of all his correspondence with Satoshi, holds 62 private emails written between January 25 and July 21, 2009.
- A crash traced to DNS (January 25–31). Bohm’s first private email reported that his NOD32 antivirus flagged Bitcoin as a virus and that the client had crashed four or five times. A week of Event Viewer records, a detour through the Eraser disk-wiping tool, and an evening of attachments that never arrived ended with Satoshi’s email of January 31: “Good news! I pinpointed the bug. The bug could occur if a DNS lookup failed.”
- The first transfer and a confusing label (February 1–3). Satoshi sent a transfer to Bohm’s address without being asked. Bohm saw +100.00 received with the label ”!Me”, and the next morning the label had become Satoshi’s name. Satoshi called address labelling “inherently confusing” and said he would make the client check addresses entered into the address book. Bohm then sent Satoshi a test payment, and the bc19.01 came back pretty swiftly.
- What v0.1.5 took from it (February 4). The release notes list the fix “for the problem Nicholas had”, a disk full warning, a check that stops users entering their own address in the address book, and a reworded description for transactions received with a Bitcoin address, and thank “Nicholas and Dustin for all their help and feedback.”
- The blocks figure (February 12–13). Bohm could not tell what the “blocks” count on the status bar described. Satoshi explained that it was the total number of blocks in the network’s chain, and asked for wording that would fit in a word or two: “any ideas?” Two months later he floated “%d network blocks” or “%d block chain” to Mike Hearn. The status bar kept “%d blocks” from the v0.1.0 source to Satoshi’s last commit, “get external ip from irc,” on December 15, 2010.
- Generation and fees (February–July). Bohm noticed that Bitcoin always got exactly 50% of his CPU, and Satoshi answered that it was about time he launched one generating process for each processor. A block credited +50.10 turned out to include a transaction fee, and in July Satoshi explained that the fee setting was what you give, not what you demand.
The connection problems came last. On June 4, 2009, Bohm wrote that he had installed a new router and could no longer get Bitcoin to connect, and on June 5 Satoshi told him to forward port 8333 so his node could receive incoming connections. On July 18, Bohm reported that Bitcoin had failed to establish connections “for the last day or so.” Satoshi asked whether Bohm’s IP address had changed and wrote:
Satoshi Nakamoto (email to Nicholas Bohm, July 19, 2009, 3:07:00 AM UTC)There may just not be anybody else running it right now.
The following day’s follow-up named the specific IP address Satoshi was connected to, later traced by researchers to Dustin Trammell’s node in Texas. In the last email of the exchange, on July 21, Bohm hoped his misunderstandings would prove “a useful contribution to the eventual ‘Bitcoin for Dummies’.”
The Nicholas Bohm biography builds its account of Bohm’s direct private exchange with Satoshi on the 2009 correspondence disclosed in 2024 and recorded here.
