Martti Malmi

A curated way in: questions about Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin history, each pointing to where this archive answers it in full.

A reply that read like the continuation of Satoshi's thought — and two days later, Satoshi went silent. The evidence for HBO's Peter Todd identification, weighed.

On April 13, 2024, Bas van Dorst published Where is Satoshi?, a large-scale stylometric corpus comparing Satoshi against 75,000+ cryptography mailing-list authors and 70,000+ Reddit commenters.

Adam Back reflects on his August 2008 email exchange with Satoshi, his regret at not reading the whitepaper carefully, and his COPA v Wright testimony where the complete chain became public.

During Day 13 of COPA v Wright, Martti Malmi testified via video link and submitted 260 emails (140,000 words) exchanged with Satoshi between May 2009 and February 2011, published on GitHub.

Jameson Lopp argues Hal Finney could not have been Satoshi: on April 18, 2009, Finney was running a 10-mile race in Santa Barbara during a window of Satoshi network activity.

Cobra (also Cøbra): Pseudonymous operator and guardian of bitcoin.org, the website originally registered by Satoshi in 2008. Chose to lose a copyright suit by default rather than reveal his identity.

The only candidate who claimed the identity himself — declared in coordinated BBC and Economist interviews in May 2016, cryptographic proof in hand. The evidence, weighed.

Craig Steven Wright (born 1970): Australian computer scientist who publicly claimed to be Satoshi in May 2016. UK High Court (COPA v Wright, March 2024) found he fabricated evidence on a grand scale.

He built RPOW, received the first Bitcoin transaction, and lived blocks from Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto. The evidence for Hal Finney as Satoshi, weighed.

The Bitcoin Forum, set up by Martti Malmi at bitcoin.org/smf, migrates to the independent bitcointalk.org domain in August 2011. Theymos managed the migration; all posts and accounts were preserved.

The Mixmaster developer who died 68 days after Satoshi's last known email. The evidence for Len Sassaman as Satoshi, weighed.

Satoshi's last known private email. He transfers the Bitcoin network alert key to Gavin Andresen, asks him to stop portraying him as a 'mysterious shadowy figure,' and says he has moved on.

One of the first major print magazine features on Bitcoin. Greenberg interviews Andresen, who calls Bitcoin "better gold than gold." Satoshi's withdrawal signals predate it by seven months.

Satoshi's last email in the Malmi archive (Feb 22, 2011). Reply to Gavin (Martti in third person), handing over the bitcoin-list mailman password as PGP blocks to each.

Satoshi sized the 21 million cap so amounts would land between 0.01 and 1000. The cent ran through his code, his fees and more than two years of his writing. Yen never appears once.

When correspondents wished Satoshi merry Christmas, predicted Bitcoin at $10M per coin, or hoped he was doing well, his replies opened on the technical topic and never returned. Five-pattern audit.

Gavin Andresen announces on BitcoinTalk topic 2367 he is taking over active project management of Bitcoin with Satoshi's blessing. Same day, he creates the bitcoin/bitcoin GitHub repo.

Bitcoin v0.3.19 was released on SourceForge as Satoshi Nakamoto's final release, adding DoS protections and removing safe mode alerts before his departure.

No single day handed Bitcoin to Gavin Andresen: his own commits from October 11, a server-admin pick on December 3, Satoshi's last post on December 12, and his December 19 announcement.

Malmi, planning more bitcoin.org server admins after an outage, offers the root password to Satoshi and one more person; Satoshi answers that the other person should be Gavin Andresen.

In September 2010, Satoshi privately tells Andresen he is working on other projects — the earliest documented signal of his intent to step back. The repository and alert key followed.

The August 2010 overflow recovery rested on knightmb's snapshot. Secondary sources have since attached a misattributed 10%-holder claim and a contested Tennessee identification to the same handle.

Bitcoin v0.3 was released on SourceForge with JSON-RPC control, a daemon version, Mac OS X support, and 20% faster hashing, coinciding with the famous Slashdot posting.

Software developer (born 1966), founder of Wasabi Software, creator of the Bitcoin Faucet. Chosen by Satoshi to lead the project; served as Bitcoin lead maintainer from 2010 to 2014.

Neil McAllister's InfoWorld roundup gave Bitcoin four paragraphs on May 24, 2010, naming Satoshi and the word "cryptocurrency." Downloads rose for three days, then fell back.

Laszlo Hanyecz pays 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas — the first known purchase of a physical good with Bitcoin. Celebrated annually as Bitcoin Pizza Day. ~$41 at the time.

Bitcoin's first price was a production-cost estimate. Satoshi predicted in 2010 that market price would come to dictate production cost — not the reverse. The arc from 2009 to modern models.

BitcoinTalk administrator (handle theymos) from 2010, Bitcoin Wiki admin, later r/Bitcoin moderator. Satoshi transferred forum control to him before departing; led the 2011 bitcointalk.org migration.

Bitcoin v0.2 was released on SourceForge, introducing Linux support, multi-processor mining, proxy support for Tor, and GUI improvements contributed by Martti Malmi.

Martti Malmi sells 5,050 BTC to NewLibertyStandard for $5.02 via PayPal — the first known Bitcoin-to-fiat exchange, establishing a real-world price of ~$0.001 per BTC.

Four exchanges opened between October 2009 and July 2010, none of them Satoshi's: NewLibertyStandard, Malmi's bitcoinexchange.com, Bitcoin Market and Mt. Gox — and the advice he sent from the side.

Pseudonymous individual who published the first BTC-USD rate on October 5, 2009 ($1 = 1,309.03 BTC) based on electricity cost. Made the first BTC-fiat trade with Martti Malmi; proposed the BTC ticker.

NewLibertyStandard publishes the first exchange rate for Bitcoin: $1 = 1,309.03 BTC ($0.000764 per BTC), calculated from the electricity cost of mining — a rudimentary but historic first valuation.

Word-count and interval statistics for all 164 of Satoshi's SVN commits (r15-r202), plus diff-size stats for 158: after his 75-day silence, Satoshi's messages got shorter, not longer.

Complete record of all four developers who had commit access to Bitcoin's SourceForge SVN repository, from August 30, 2009 (r1) to September 13, 2011 (r252).

Malmi proposes a Bitcoin-to-euro exchange service. Satoshi answers with a fixed support-price idea and says he will not run an exchange himself; Malmi's own bitcoinexchange.com followed in 2010.

Satoshi and Malmi spent 2009 to 2010 correcting the bitcoin.org FAQ word by word — and Satoshi was still the address readers wrote to when it broke. None of that wording survives on bitcoin.org today.

In earlier answers compiled for Malmi, Satoshi weighs Bitcoin's energy use against banking's costs and names the tension between economic liberty and conservation.

Satoshi's first reply to Martti Malmi, who had offered to help with Bitcoin. Satoshi praises Malmi's understanding of Bitcoin and asks him to help write website content and a FAQ.

Satoshi responds to Trammell's MITM analysis by classifying attacks into two types (chain-of-communication vs. anyone on the Internet), proposes a combined IP+address fix, and notes wallet encryption.

Trammell's detailed security analysis of Bitcoin's send-to-IP feature, identifying MITM vulnerabilities including ARP poisoning and ISP-level interception. Recommends always using Bitcoin addresses.

Satoshi informs Trammell that bugs are fixed in v0.1.3 and offers to send him some coins via the send-to-IP feature, one of the earliest known direct Bitcoin transfers.

Statistical analysis of Satoshi's Bitcoin source (v0.1.0–v0.3.19): coding-style fingerprint, commit times suggesting EST/CST, growth from 19,901 to 31,909 lines over 23 months, final-commit traits.

Editorial reading of Bitcoin v0.1's unusual distribution and tooling absences (.rar packaging, no version control, no tests), placed against Warez-scene conventions and Kaminsky's 2011 security audit.

By 2008 Microsoft's free compiler wanted a Passport sign-in. Satoshi built Bitcoin on a 1998 Visual C++ 6.0 and free MinGW. The registration era, pseudonymous sign-ups, and a design with no account.

Satoshi coded Bitcoin on Windows for 27 months, mainly with MinGW. In November 2009 he finished the Linux build Martti Malmi had started; by mid-2010 there were Windows, Linux and Mac releases.

Donald gave the difficulty its 1982 name; Satoshi claimed a solution outright, swapping the fixed world of known generals for an open one. The King's wi-fi answer became a page on bitcoin.org.

In 2008 Satoshi wrote that only coin creators would eventually need to run nodes. Mining did leave ordinary computers; nodes did not. Who runs the 25,489 reachable addresses, and why, with no reward.

Bitcoin's 'digital gold' status rests on two layers of decentralization — system and people/organization — and six structural features no later cryptocurrency combines to the same degree.

Editorial reading of Satoshi's relationship to cypherpunk, from three primary observations: he didn't know b-money, Wei Dai testified Satoshi was "not previously active," alignment with Hughes 1993.

Structural reading of how "Satoshi Nakamoto" remained unidentified across development, public phase, and withdrawal. Six layers: pseudonym, channels, language, env, genesis constants, handover.

Reads the asymmetry between public attempts to identify Satoshi, the surviving material trail, and the persistent identification gap.

Recurring Satoshi candidates aligned across four independent layers — profile match, stylometric attribution, direct correspondence, and development environment.

Unidentified individual or group who authored the Bitcoin white paper (October 31, 2008), wrote the software, mined the genesis block, and guided early development before disappearing in April 2011.

Doubters called it unscalable in 2008. A famed hacker failed to break the code. A judge, a dictionary, and a Nobel nominator weighed in. What others said about Satoshi, read as one record.

On August 20, 2008 Satoshi called his C++ code nearly finished. Which precursors were in front of him by then? The earliest record for Hashcash, b-money, MicroMint, Bit Gold, DigiCash and RPOW.

Inventory of every Satoshi self-reference in the public record (Aug 2008 – Apr 2011): identity claims, dev disclosures, operational state, farewells, authenticity-disputed. Each row anchored.

Documented record of AnonymousSpeech.com, the anonymous intermediary behind bitcoin.org: the Japanese-law sales pitch, the Malaysia-allocated mail relay, and an operator trail that ends in silence.