Router issue — Bitcoin can't connect
Nicholas Bohm, a retired commercial solicitor from a major City of London firm and an e-commerce policy adviser for Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK), had been running Bitcoin since its earliest days. He was one of the few early adopters who engaged directly with Satoshi via private email.
In this email, Bohm reported that after installing a new router, his Bitcoin client could no longer establish connections to the network.
[The specific text of this email was entered as exhibit evidence in the COPA v. Craig Wright trial but has not been published in full. Bohm’s witness statement (C/10/1) included his private email correspondence with Satoshi.]
Bohm had previously reported bugs to Satoshi via the bitcoin-list mailing list in January 2009, which led to fixes included in Bitcoin v0.1.5. Satoshi acknowledged Bohm by name in the v0.1.5 release notes: “includes the fix for the problem Nicholas had.”
[Source: COPA v. Craig Wright trial evidence. Bohm’s witness statement was filed as {C/10/1}. Justice Mellor noted at paragraph 271.9 that Mr. Bohm “sadly died just before the Trial commenced.”]
Satoshi replied to Bohm’s connectivity issue the next day, advising him to forward port 8333 on his new router. He explained that without port forwarding, Bohm’s node could not receive incoming connections from other peers.
Satoshi noted that if nobody currently online could accept inbound connections, nodes would fail to connect to the network entirely — highlighting just how fragile the Bitcoin network was in mid-2009 with only a handful of active nodes.
[The specific text of this email was entered as exhibit evidence in the COPA v. Craig Wright trial but has not been published in full.]
[Source: COPA v. Craig Wright trial evidence, filed as part of Nicholas Bohm’s witness statement {C/10/1}.]
Approximately six weeks after the port forwarding fix, Bohm reported a new connectivity failure:
Bitcoin has failed to establish any connections for the last day or so, despite restarts.
Bohm noted he had been maintaining 3-5 node connections prior to July 15th, providing a valuable data point about the size of the active Bitcoin network in mid-2009. The fact that even a connected node with proper port forwarding could lose all peers suggests the network was extremely small at this time.
[Source: COPA v. Craig Wright trial evidence, filed as part of Nicholas Bohm’s witness statement {C/10/1}.]
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}.]
In a follow-up the next day, Satoshi provided debugging information:
I’m currently connected to 70.113.114.209 since yesterday.
He noted that if Bohm wasn’t connected to that IP, then the problem was on Bohm’s end — he couldn’t make outgoing connections either.
The IP address 70.113.114.209 was later identified by researchers (documented in a Decashed analysis) as likely belonging to Dustin Trammell, who was based in the Round Rock/Austin, Texas area. This aligns with what is known about Trammell being one of the most consistent early Bitcoin node operators during this period.
This exchange provides a rare operational snapshot of the Bitcoin network in July 2009: Satoshi’s own node was connected to just a single other peer — one of the few remaining active nodes on the entire network.
[Source: COPA v. Craig Wright trial evidence, filed as part of Nicholas Bohm’s witness statement {C/10/1}. IP address analysis by Decashed (March 2025).]