Tracking Satoshi Nakamoto: His Never Before Seen Emails With Hal Finney

30/11/2020

It was way back in 2008, that Satoshi Nakamoto published a research paper called “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”

Nakamoto then implemented Bitcoin as open source code and released it in January 2009.

When the Bitcoin software went live with code attributed to Nakamoto, the genesis block was mined. And soon after that, the Bitcoin community started gaining traction. Nakamoto was active in the community until 2010 when control was given to U.S. software developer Gavin Andresen.

In 2011, Nakamoto wrote a final goodbye to the community and vanished.

Despite self-described as a Japanese national born in 1975, nobody at this time know who Nakamoto really is. Nobody knows whether he is a male, a female or a group of people. Nobody knows whether if he/she/they acted alone.

Since "his" disappearance, people started guessing who could Nakamoto be. And this time, three previously undisclosed emails between Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, and the late Hal Finney deepen the mystery around the cryptocurrency’s origins.

Satoshi Nakamoto - Hal Finney, email
Hal Finney to Satoshi Nakamoto, November 19, 2008. (Credit: Nathaniel Popper)

Hal Finney, who died in 2014 from complications of ALS, was the recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction.

And here, never been seen before emails were disclosed on November 27, in an article written by Michael Kaplikov, a professor at Pace University, to CoinDesk.

According to Kaplikov, the emails derived from the New York Times journalist and contributor Nathaniel Popper. Kaplikov who published the emails alongside his editorial confirming that the emails were legitimate, and stemmed from Finney’s old computer.

Popper, during his work on “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money” was provided access by Fran Finney, Hal’s widow.

The emails reveal the correspondence between Satoshi and the early Bitcoin developer Hal Finney. The communications between Nakamoto and Finney stem from November 2008 and January 2009, the very month Bitcoin was launched, the time when its future was uncertain.

The emails show how closely Satoshi collaborated with Hal Finney, who was one of the earliest supporters of his work.

Hal Finney and his wife, Fran, in 2013
Hal Finney and his wife, Fran, in 2013. (Credit: Max S. Gerber)

The most notable, was the 2008 email, where Satoshi shared a pre-release version of the Bitcoin code with several members of the Cryptography Mailing List, including Finney, James A. Donald and Ray Dillinger and Finney.

"How large do you envision it becoming? Tens of nodes? Thousands? Millions?" asked Finney in the email.

In the email from November 19, Finney thank Satoshi for some corrections and asked about the aspired-to size of the Bitcoin network as it would affect scalability and performance.

There are also two emails to Finney, in which the first was Satoshi notifying Finney about the release of version 0.1 of the Bitcoin software. It was sent just a few hours after Satoshi made an analogous public announcement on the Cryptography Mailing List.

It appears that Finney had replied to Satoshi, letting him know that he would try to look at the code over the weekend.

What makes the emails interesting to the community, isn't only limited to the contents. Another thing that makes the emails interesting, is the timestamps, which give a glimpse of clues about Satoshi's whereabouts.

In the January 2009 emails, Satoshi’s time zone appears to be eight hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). If Satoshi was in Japan, he should be having nine hours ahead of GMT at the time. Even more intriguing is that somehow Finney’s email server had received both emails before Satoshi’s email server, which presents a conundrum.

Derek Atkins, a colleague and friend of Finney, who was also a member of the Cryptography Mailing List, suggested the issue might be attributed to the way Satoshi’s computer was configured:

“Let’s assume the sender’s system is set in local time instead of GMT (which is/was common for Windows), but also assume there is a misconfiguration in the local timezone of the sending computer. That could explain the discrepancy,” he said.

Satoshi Nakamoto - Hal Finney, email
Satoshi Nakamoto to Hal Finney, January 8, 2009. (Credit: Nathaniel Popper)

And if comparing the first email Satoshi sent to the Cryptography Mailing List, the headers of that email are generally consistent, with timestamps that are also internally consistent. Atkins suggested the discrepancy could arise from the clock change.

At first, the most plausible explanation is Satoshi was not in Japan. This the only way for Satoshi’s emails to the Cryptography Mailing List from November 8, 2008, and January 8, 2009, to not have contradictory timestamps.

However, there is also another possibility: Satoshi had initially set his computer’s clock to Japan time based on the pre-DST time difference, and later purposefully (or forgot) to make the adjustment.

Based on Satoshi’s email to Finney from January 12, there is also a chance that Satoshi's computer had its internal clock out of sync.

“Unfortunately, I can’t receive incoming connections from where I am, which has made things more difficult. Your node receiving incoming connections was the main thing keeping the network going the first day or two.”

Another possibility, is that Satoshi travelled to a location in a different time zone, immediately after sending out an email with “normal” timestamps on January 8. And that unknown location had a limited connectivity from which he emailed Finney the next day.

Last but not least, there is also the possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto used several computers, some of which were configured accurately while some were not.

A more outlandish theory suggested that Hal Finney himself was Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi Nakamoto - Hal Finney, email
Satoshi Nakamoto to Hal Finney, January 9, 2009. (Credit: Nathaniel Popper)

The hunt for Satoshi Nakamoto has led to numerous false leads. A number of people have claimed to be the creator of Bitcoin, but little they did to prove themselves.

Hal Finney is one of the more likely candidates because he was involved in cryptography research in the 1990s, and claimed to have direct contact with Satoshi Nakamoto due to being members of the same mailing lists.

Finney was some of the earliest people who saw potential in Nakamoto’s work, when most other cryptographers were at the time skeptical, As seen in the emails, it was Finney who also helped Nakamoto with troubleshooting.

He received the first-ever Bitcoin transaction as a test of the system and became wealthy through mining Bitcoin during the time when the process could still be done using desktop computers.

Hal Finney's claim to have had direct contact with Satoshi Nakamoto while Bitcoin was still under development led to at least one journalist to conclude that Hal Finney was actually the creator of Bitcoin.

But at this time, that is still a mystery.

Finney died and kept this secret with him. At this time, Finney's body remains cryogenically frozen by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

Related: Tracking Satoshi Nakamoto: Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto