Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto?
The world's most comprehensive archive of Satoshi Nakamoto's complete conversations, emails, forum posts, and related historical documents.
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The final published Bitcoin whitepaper, 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,' the foundational document describing the design of Bitcoin. Originally hosted at bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf and announced on the Cryptography Mailing List on October 31, 2008.
Satoshi Nakamoto registered the 'bitcoin' project on SourceForge.net, establishing the first public repository and project page for Bitcoin's source code and releases.
Satoshi Nakamoto mined the Genesis Block (Block 0) of the Bitcoin blockchain, embedding the now-famous headline from The Times: 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.'
Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin v0.1, the first public release of the Bitcoin software, on SourceForge. This Windows-only release made it possible for anyone to run a Bitcoin node and mine coins.
The first known tweet about Bitcoin. Hal Finney posted 'Running bitcoin' on January 10, 2009 (PST) / January 11, 2009 (UTC), the same day the Bitcoin v0.1 software was publicly released. He was the first person other than Satoshi to run Bitcoin.
The first person-to-person Bitcoin transaction in history. Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney in Block 170, confirming that Bitcoin's peer-to-peer electronic cash system worked as designed.
Complete record of all four developers who had commit access to Bitcoin's SourceForge SVN repository. 252 revisions were recorded from August 30, 2009 to September 13, 2011.
Satoshi's first post on the new Bitcoin Forum (later renamed BitcoinTalk), announcing Bitcoin and describing its key properties.
Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John's pizzas — the first purchase of a physical good with Bitcoin. The transaction, completed on May 22, 2010, is celebrated annually as 'Bitcoin Pizza Day.' At the time, 10,000 BTC was worth approximately $41.
Satoshi Nakamoto gives Gavin Andresen control of the source code repository and endorses him to lead the Bitcoin project. Andresen publicly announces the transition on the Bitcointalk forum.
One of Satoshi's last known communications. He tells Mike Hearn he has moved on to other things and that Bitcoin is in good hands with Gavin and everyone.
Bitcoin's migration from SourceForge SVN to GitHub, and the chronological record of developers who received commit access to the GitHub repository in 2011.
Introduced hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, allowing an entire tree of key pairs to be derived from a single master seed. This eliminated the need for frequent backups and enabled organized key management with parent-child key derivation.
Defined the standard for generating human-readable mnemonic seed phrases (typically 12 or 24 words) from random entropy. Combined with BIP 32, this became the universal backup method for Bitcoin wallets, allowing users to recover funds by writing down a word list.
Proposed Segregated Witness (SegWit), the most significant protocol upgrade since Bitcoin's creation. By separating signature data from transaction data, SegWit fixed transaction malleability, enabled the Lightning Network, increased effective block capacity, and introduced a new transaction format — all via a backward-compatible soft fork.
Introduced Taproot, the most significant Bitcoin protocol upgrade since SegWit. By combining Schnorr signatures (BIP 340) with Merkelized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST), Taproot makes complex spending conditions as private and efficient as simple payments, while enabling more sophisticated smart contracts.
HBO documentary 'Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery,' directed by Cullen Hoback, names Peter Todd as a Satoshi Nakamoto candidate. The film's central evidence was a 2010 BitcoinTalk forum post where Todd replied to Satoshi's description of Replace-by-Fee, and Todd's later formalization of RBF in BIP 125. Todd denied the claim, calling it 'ludicrous.' The documentary was widely criticized by the Bitcoin community.