The cryptography list and the whitepaper

After the decline of the cypherpunks list, part of the community migrates to the "cryptography" list hosted on metzdowd.com, moderated notably by Perry Metzger. It is a restricted network of cryptographers, the direct successor of the cypherpunk milieu, and it is there that everything becomes public.

On October 31, 2008, at 2:10 PM New York time, a message signed Satoshi Nakamoto arrives on the list: "I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party." Attached, nine pages: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." The context is no accident: six weeks earlier, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial crisis is in full swing. Read the whitepaper (summary, references, PDF).

The first reactions are skeptical. James A. Donald replies the very next day that the system will not scale. Hal Finney, for his part, is enthusiastic and becomes the first active supporter. On January 3, 2009, Satoshi mines the genesis block, in which he engraves a headline from that day's London Times: "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." On January 9, version 0.1 of the software is released. On January 12, Hal Finney receives the first transaction in history, 10 BTC sent by Satoshi.

Satoshi remains active for about two years: hundreds of posts on the bitcointalk forum, emails, code. Then, in April 2011, a last private message to Mike Hearn: "I've moved on to other things." He vanishes, leaving behind about a million bitcoins mined in his early days (the pattern known as "Patoshi," identified by the researcher Sergio Demian Lerner), never spent since.