Bitcoin Institute
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Gavin Andresen (1966–)

Bitcoin's lead maintainer after Satoshi's departure

Figures Event Added Updated
lead-maintainerbitcoin-faucetbitcoin-foundationleadershiphistoricbitcoin-coresuccession

Illustration with a faucet dispensing coin symbols above small faceless silhouette figures, two faceless silhouettes linked by repository and alert-key icons on a timeline, and a baton passed between two more silhouettes along a bar spanning 2010 to 2014.

Between October 2010 and April 2011, Satoshi Nakamoto handed Gavin Andresen the keys to Bitcoin: commits to the source repository under his own name from October 11, 2010, then the network alert key on April 26, 2011.

In his same-day reply to that alert-key email, Andresen disclosed that he had been invited to present Bitcoin at CIA headquarters in Langley. No reply from Satoshi is known after that message. Andresen gave the talk on June 14, 2011.

Gavin Andresen (born Gavin Bell in 1966 in Melbourne, Australia) grew up in the United States, earned a degree in Computer Science from Princeton University in 1988, and founded Wasabi Software, a 3D graphics company. He encountered Bitcoin in 2010 and quickly became one of the most active contributors, creating the Bitcoin Faucet — a website that gave away free bitcoins to help people learn the technology. He served as Bitcoin’s lead maintainer from December 2010 to April 2014.

2010Bitcoin Faucet launched- one of the earliestadoption tools (Jun)Satoshi's first privatewithdrawal signal (Sep)First SVN commit underhis own name, r165(Oct)Public lead-maintainerannouncement (Dec)2011Satoshi's last privateemail - CAlert keytransfer (Apr)CIA / In-Q-Telconference, afterSatoshi went silent(Jun)2012Bitcoin Foundationco-founded; Andresenas Chief Scientist (Sep)2014Steps down as leadmaintainer, role passesto Wladimir van derLaan (Apr)2016States belief that CraigWright is Satoshi;Bitcoin Core commitaccess revoked (May)2023Acknowledges trustingWright was "a mistake"(Feb)

Satoshi’s successor — handover in stages (2010–2011)

The handover from Satoshi to Andresen was not a single appointment but a gradual transfer of operational authority over more than half a year, recorded across the following entries on this site:

DateEventScope
2010-09-01Private notice to Andresen: “working on other projects”Earliest documented withdrawal signal
2010-10-11First SVN commit under his own name (r165); earlier patches had gone in under Satoshi’s nameCodebase
2010-12-03Email to Malmi naming Gavin as the second holder of the bitcoin.org server’s root password. In it, Satoshi calls Andresen “technically much more linux capable than me.” The same email, seen from the recipient’s side, is in Martti Malmi’s own biography. The email is also the single most-cited piece of evidence in the analysis of Satoshi’s own Windows development environmentRecommendation
2010-12-12 18:22 UTCFinal BitcoinTalk forum postLast public communication
2010-12-19Public announcement: “With Satoshi’s blessing…”Public acceptance of role; same day Andresen creates the bitcoin/bitcoin GitHub repository
2011-04-23Email to Mike Hearn: “It’s in good hands with Gavin”Departure statement endorsing Andresen (private email; published later)
2011-04-26Last known private email: CAlert key transferNetwork alert broadcasting (status-bar warnings)

One of those earlier patches is still read by every Bitcoin Core node. In the JSON-RPC password thread, on July 21, 2010, Andresen surveyed twenty .conf files on his Debian system and voted for key=value lines with # comments. Satoshi agreed the same day: “Allright then, lets go with self-parsed mapConfig”. Andresen’s “Configuration file, HTTP Basic authentication” commit followed on July 23, and Satoshi merged it into the main line as version 0.3.3 on July 25, with the help text “Specify configuration file (default: bitcoin.conf)”. Bitcoin Core still reads bitcoin.conf under that name, cutting each line at # and splitting it at =.

What did not transfer with the role: the ~1.1 million BTC attributed to Patoshi mining patterns (almost all of it unmoved since it was mined), the Satoshi identity itself, and the genesis-block coinbase address private keys.

Andresen recalled the gradual nature of this transition in an April 2013 HuffPost interview:

Eventually, he pulled a fast one on me because he asked me if it’d be OK if he put my email address on the bitcoin homepage, and I said yes, not realizing that when he put my email address there, he’d take his away. … Satoshi started stepping back as leader of project and pushing me forward as the leader of the project.

Lead Maintainer (December 2010 – April 2014)

Andresen’s December 19, 2010 announcement opened with:

With Satoshi’s blessing, and with great reluctance, I’m going to start doing more active project management for bitcoin.

Andresen led Bitcoin development openly from that point, while Satoshi continued private correspondence into early 2011. Satoshi’s April 23, 2011 email to Mike Hearn — a private message at the time, published later — carried the departure line:

I’ve moved on to other things. It’s in good hands with Gavin and everyone.

Three days later, the last known private email — one half of Satoshi’s final known correspondence — accompanied the formal CAlert key transfer:

I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure.

Andresen later became the Chief Scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation when it was established in September 2012.

On March 11, 2013, a block that version 0.8 accepted and 0.7 rejected split the network. In the developers’ IRC channel Andresen first wrote “majority hashpower wins,” then joined the others in returning to the shorter 0.7 chain. He sent the network alert, and nine days later wrote the post-mortem, BIP 50. The full story of that night is in the entry on the March 2013 chain fork.

CIA Visit

On June 14, 2011, Andresen presented Bitcoin at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as part of an In-Q-Tel conference on emerging technologies. He posted that evening:

Gavin Andresen (tweet, June 14, 2011, 11:55:33 PM UTC)

My talk at the CIA went well today. The hallways there are REALLY wide, and full of interesting stuff.

Andresen had disclosed the invitation in his April 26 reply to Satoshi’s alert-key email, seven weeks before the talk; no reply from Satoshi is known after that message.

Later Years

On April 8, 2014, Andresen stepped down as lead maintainer, passing the role to Wladimir van der Laan. He continued to contribute to Bitcoin development and advocated for increasing the block size limit to improve transaction capacity — a Large-blocker faction lead in the 2015–2017 block-size war that followed.

In May 2016, Andresen publicly stated he believed Craig Wright was Satoshi Nakamoto, based on a private cryptographic demonstration Wright had given him in London. Bitcoin Core developers, suspecting his GitHub account had been compromised, revoked his commit access to the bitcoin/bitcoin repository on May 2, 2016. Andresen confirmed days later at the Consensus 2016 conference that he had not been hacked and stood by his belief, but the access was never restored. Wright’s cryptographic “proof” was shown within hours to be a reused 2009 transaction signature rather than a fresh signing.

In February 2023, after a UK Court of Appeal ruling revived a lawsuit Wright’s company, Tulip Trading Limited, had brought against a group of Bitcoin developers, Andresen added a note to that original 2016 post acknowledging his mistake:

Gavin Andresen (gavinandresen.ninja blog post, May 02, 2016)

I now know it was a mistake to trust Craig Wright as much as I did.

He said he was done playing the “who is Satoshi” game.

Related Entries

140 entries / 24 threads

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Who named bitcoin's smallest unit the satoshi: a 2011 forum nickname, an "Affirmative," and the Oxford English Dictionary

ribuck ↔ Satoshi Nakamoto, Mike Hearn, Gavin Andresen, Hal Finney, goblin, jon_smark, kiba, marcus_of_augustus, no to the gold cult

Satoshi's code had a COIN and a CENT and nothing smaller with a name. Bitcoin's smallest unit, the satoshi, was named by users on BitcoinTalk two months after his last post.
Event Added Updated Analysis

The block-size war (2015–2017) — Bitcoin XT, BIP148, the New York Agreement, and the Bitcoin Cash fork

Bitcoin Institute ↔ Mike Hearn, Gavin Andresen, Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, Amaury Séchet, Mike Belshe, Gregory Maxwell, Pieter Wuille, Wladimir van der Laan

Bitcoin's 2015–2017 block-size war by phase, faction and turning point: Bitcoin XT, the BIP148 UASF, the New York Agreement, Bitcoin Cash and the cancellation of SegWit2x.
Event Added Updated Analysis

Why Bitcoin's fork wars were not OSS fork wars — the vacuum Satoshi left, the money at stake, and the three layers that tie code to currency

Bitcoin Institute ↔ Mike Hearn, Gavin Andresen, Wladimir van der Laan, Peter Todd, Gregory Maxwell, Adam Back, Roger Ver, Jihan Wu, Mike Belshe, Vitalik Buterin, Daniel Larimer, Satoshi Nakamoto

Why Bitcoin's 2015-2017 fork wars were fights over what Bitcoin is, not OSS disputes: the authority vacuum after 2011, the money riding on rule choices, and three layers binding code to currency.
Event Added Updated Analysis

Why hasn't Satoshi been found? An asymmetry analysis of the public record

Satoshi Nakamoto ↔ Gavin Andresen, Adam Back, Wei Dai, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Craig Wright, Dorian Nakamoto, Peter Todd, Sergio Demian Lerner, Jameson Lopp, Leah McGrath Goodman, Andy Greenberg, Nathaniel Popper, Cullen Hoback, John Carreyrou, James Mellor

Satoshi has been hunted in public for years and left a large trail of material, yet remains unidentified. Why all that searching and all that material have not led to a name.
Event Added Updated Article

"The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin" — Wired's landmark feature on Bitcoin's first boom and bust

Benjamin Wallace ↔ Satoshi Nakamoto, Gavin Andresen, Laszlo Hanyecz, Jeff Garzik, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Stefan Thomas, Dan Kaminsky, Amir Taaki

Benjamin Wallace's Wired feature — an early major mainstream article on Bitcoin. Traces the whitepaper, mining boom, Mt. Gox hack, and growing pains, ending with Garzik's "We really don't care."