Lawyer who reported early Bitcoin software issues
On January 25, 2009, two weeks after Bitcoin v0.1’s release, a British commercial lawyer named Nicholas Bohm posted to the bitcoin-list mailing list reporting that the software wasn’t running on his machine, asking whether the list was the right place to report bugs. Satoshi Nakamoto replied the same day, asking for the debug.log file.
Bohm’s private follow-up email exchanges with Satoshi were eventually published in 2024.
Bohm was a British commercial lawyer with experience in a major City of London solicitors’ firm, active in UK discussions on cryptography, electronic commerce, and digital signature policy, and serving as E-Commerce Policy Adviser for Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties (UK).
The January 2009 bug report was the start of a connectivity thread that ran for months. In June 2009, Bohm reported a router issue, and Satoshi replied the next day advising him to forward port 8333 so his node could accept incoming connections. The following month, Bohm reported he had no connections at all; Satoshi’s reply that nobody else appeared to be running the software was followed the very next day by a debugging follow-up citing a specific connected IP address — later traced to Dustin Trammell’s node in Texas.
A London commercial lawyer filing a bug report two weeks after release is a small measure of how fast Bitcoin had already spread past the cryptography mailing list.
8 entries
Nicholas Bohm reports that v0.1.5 has been running trouble free with 201 transactions accumulated, and asks Satoshi: "What's next?"
Nicholas Bohm, a retired British solicitor and early Bitcoin user, writes to Satoshi that after installing a new router, his Bitcoin client can no longer connect to the network.
Satoshi advises Bohm to forward port 8333 on his new router so his Bitcoin node can receive incoming connections, explaining that without inbound-capable nodes online, the network fails to function.
Bohm reports to Satoshi that Bitcoin has failed to establish any connections for over a day, despite restarts. He had been maintaining 3-5 node connections prior to July 15th.
Satoshi's candid reply to Bohm's connectivity issue, admitting there may be no other nodes running at that moment. He encourages Bohm to keep his server online so new users have someone to connect to.
Satoshi follows up to say he is connected to IP 70.113.114.209 and notes Bohm may have an outgoing-connection issue if not. The IP was later identified as likely Dustin Trammell's in Austin, Texas.
The COPA v Wright record revealed that Nicholas Bohm — previously known only for a January 2009 bitcoin-list bug report — also exchanged a private series of troubleshooting emails with Satoshi.
Satoshi Nakamoto responds to Nicholas Bohm's report of problems running Bitcoin, asking for the debug.log file to diagnose the issue.