Newly discovered emails between Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, and the late Hal Finney deepen the mystery around the cryptocurrency’s origins.
The three emails come from Bitcoin’s earliest days, when its future was uncertain. They show how closely Satoshi collaborated with early supporters at the time of Bitcoin’s launch.
While anything written or coded by Satoshi is intrinsically valuable to the community, perhaps the most intriguing parts of these messages are neither words nor code, but something seemingly prosaic: the timestamps, which present a new riddle.
Michael Kaplikov is an adjunct professor at Pace University in New York; since discovering Bitcoin, he has been interested in its origin story.
They were shared with me by journalist and author Nathaniel Popper, who during his work on “Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money” was provided access to Finney’s correspondence.
