In an interview published by Uncommons on April 15, 2025, P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens looked back on his brief but direct contact with Satoshi Nakamoto.
He said the exchange was limited but memorable:
Michel Bauwens (Blockworks interview, April 2025)Satoshi wrote me a few times.
According to him, one message explained why Satoshi wanted to publish the Bitcoin white paper on the P2P Foundation site. Another offered him a few bitcoins:
Michel Bauwens (Blockworks interview, April 2025)And offering me a few bitcoins. Unfortunately I didn’t answer that proposal.
Bauwens also recalled that Satoshi later wrote to deny being “the Japanese guy” identified in the press, and at one point promised to write again but never followed up. This private message postdates Satoshi’s final known email of April 2011, but the corresponding email itself is not preserved on this site, leaving it as a secondhand account.
Although he said he was not enthusiastic about Bitcoin’s energy requirements, he described its historical importance in much stronger terms:
Michel Bauwens (Blockworks interview, April 2025)It was the first globally scalable, socially-sovereign currency that was not created by a firm, nor by the state.
He also argued that Bitcoin introduced a new kind of universal ledger, moving accounting from closed institutional systems toward open ecosystems.
Bauwens framed Bitcoin as a post-capitalist invention rather than a simply anti-capitalist one. In his view, Bitcoin created a new coordination layer for value, but still lacked a strong connection to productive, local, commons-based reality.
Bauwens’s 2025 recollection that Satoshi privately denied being Dorian Nakamoto sits beside the 2014 P2P Foundation post denying the same identification, the only 2014 event on the Satoshi activity timeline.
