Nicholas Bohm (1943–2024)

On January 25, 2009, two weeks after Bitcoin v0.1’s release, a British commercial lawyer named Nicholas Bohm asked the bitcoin-list whether it was the right place to report a couple of problems he had had running the software. Satoshi Nakamoto replied the same day, asking for the debug.log file.

That reply opened a private correspondence of 62 emails that ran until July 2009. 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).

Interaction with Bitcoin

Bohm’s first problems were an antivirus program that flagged Bitcoin as a virus and a client that kept crashing. He sent Satoshi the details privately, and when Satoshi asked for more, he admitted that the crash dialog was “technically deep water by my modest standards - I’m just a humble lawyer.” After a week of Event Viewer logs, Satoshi traced the crash to a failed DNS lookup, and the v0.1.5 release notes said the release “includes the fix for the problem Nicholas had.” Along the way Satoshi sent Bohm a transfer unprompted, and Bohm’s report that the label on it had changed to Satoshi’s name was one of two behind a change in the same release: the client stopped letting users enter their own address in the address book.

The connection problems came that summer. In June 2009, Bohm reported a router issue, and Satoshi advised him to forward port 8333 so his node could accept incoming connections. That instruction is where the analysis of why half of today’s reachable nodes answer through Tor begins: an onion address needs no open port on the router. The following month, Bohm reported he had no connections at all; Satoshi’s reply that there might just not be anybody else running it 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.

Significance

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. Ten days later, the announcement of the release that fixed his crash named him.