Satoshi’s reply contained one of the most revealing admissions about Bitcoin’s early fragility:
There may just not be anybody else running it right now.
He asked whether Bohm’s IP address had changed, and encouraged Bohm to keep his server online so that new users would have at least one node to connect to when they started the software.
This exchange paints a stark picture of Bitcoin’s precarious existence in July 2009 — roughly six months after launch, the network was so small that Satoshi genuinely worried there might be no other active nodes. The survival of Bitcoin through this period depended on a handful of dedicated early adopters like Bohm, Dustin Trammell, and Hal Finney keeping their nodes running.
[Source: COPA v. Craig Wright trial evidence, filed as part of Nicholas Bohm’s witness statement {C/10/1}.]