Social spaces

Nakamoto was active in the following spaces throughout the early Bitcoin timeline.

The cryptography and cryptography policy mailing list

Nakamoto posted and replied to the cryptography and cryptography policy mailing list¹ approximately 18 times. This mailing list has historically appeared hosted in many places, and one of most popular such hosts is Metzdowd. You can search their archives² to find all Nakamoto posts.

2008

Satoshi posted 14 times in 2008 all in the months of October and November, all with the subject "Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper", and the first³ post being the announcement:

• Fri Oct 31 14:10:00 EDT 2008

• Sun Nov 2 20:37:43 EST 2008

• Mon Nov 3 11:23:49 EST 2008

• Thu Nov 6 15:15:40 EST 2008

• Sat Nov 8 13:54:38 EST 2008

• Sat Nov 8 20:58:48 EST 2008

• Sat Nov 8 22:09:49 EST 2008

• Sun Nov 9 11:31:26 EST 2008

• Sun Nov 9 21:14:30 EST 2008

• Mon Nov 10 17:18:20 EST 2008

2009

2010

Bitcointalk forum

Nakamoto founded Bitcointalk in 2009 as a forum for discussing all things Bitcoin.

The Nakamoto account appears to be the third user to register with the original Bitcoin Forum as you'll note in the table of the first 20 accounts to register on the site.

Users

user id	username	date registered	posts
1	admin	November 17, 2009, 11:12:33 PM	7*
2	💀	N/A	N/A
3	satoshi	November 19, 2009, 07:12:39 PM	575
4	sirius	November 20, 2009, 08:16:03 AM	429
5	💀	N/A	N/A
6	nandnor	December 04, 2009, 10:03:54 AM	15
7	💀	N/A	N/A
8	💀	N/A	N/A
9	💀	N/A	N/A
10	Xunie	December 09, 2009, 02:38:03 AM	132
11	madhatter	December 09, 2009, 05:21:10 AM	4
12	nanaimogold	December 09, 2009, 07:23:55 PM	661
13	SmokeTooMuch	December 10, 2009, 12:35:04 PM	860
14	The Madhatter	December 10, 2009, 01:41:37 PM	626
15	💀	N/A	N/A
16	xuO4k04c6Ng	December 12, 2009, 02:07:23 PM	1
17	The Doctor	December 18, 2009, 03:05:41 PM	1
18	💀	N/A	N/A
19	💀	N/A	N/A
20	💀	N/A	N/A

The first 20 Bitcoin Forum accounts are an interesting dataset, with notable curious points and some inconsistencies in the data.

• user ID 1 is the default forum administrator user.

• User ID 2 is also of keen interest, but its user page is inaccessible on the live site, since at least May 19, 2013. Despite the existence of archive.org's Wayback Machine since 2001, it has no snapshots of the user page before 2013. It's worth considering that this account could have been part of the group that comprise those working on Bitcoin, and that this entity had familiarity with running forums and added their own account immediately after setting up the forum with the initial user ID 1 account.

• Nakamoto's user id is 3. This implies that he could have been part of a group establishing the forum, but is unlikely to be the individual who actually deployed the forum software, its domain name, etc.

• User ID 4 is sirius (Martti Malmi).

• The first 20 accounts registered between November 17, 2009 and approximately December 31, 2009 with account number twenty-one created January 01, 2010, 05:52:19 PM in a flurry of activity over a traditional holiday break period for some.

• 9 of the accounts are inaccessible; the server returns HTTP/200, but the forum software responds with:

  "An Error Has Occurred!" and "The user whose profile you are trying to view does not exist." 

  for each of the accounts marked with 💀. In this way, half of the first ten accounts appear deactivated or deleted.

• 2 of the first 20 accounts posted just one time ever.

• 2 of the first 20 accounts chose usernames which are a variation of "Mad Hatter", indicating a possible sybil account.

Posts

Just as with the user data, some notable inconsistencies with the forum state emerge.

• The first 16 posts are missing from the live site.

Forum lifecycle

It's important to keep in mind that Bitcoin Forum in its current state represents a forum system that migrated through 3 distinct phases of operation, which are:

1. bitcoin.org/smf

2. forum.bitcoin.org

3. bitcointalk.org

This explains inconsistencies which can initially puzzle some researchers, such as the bitcointalk.org domain registration date occurring in 2011 while Nakamoto's account has existed since 2009. The Bitcoin Forum was originally a SourceForge forum, and Nakamoto registered the account during that era, migrated along in the database through host and platform changes.

It could also be worth deeper investigation into the software used throughout the forum lifecycle to determine if there are potential points of information leakage or other ways to extract more information from current or past forum instances.

Related:

• SourceForge forum: the original forum was hosted on SourceForge and is now quite conveniently "lost".

• Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is the current forum software.

Summary

The timelines and communication venues which produced durable artifacts are likely still full of small breadcrumbs which help fill in the picture of the persons who initially worked on Bitcoin.

Intense research into the network graphs and timelines of key suspected individuals should yield a clearer picture of at least their public interaction. It's worth digging much deeper into all available artifacts while bearing in mind the anonymity and privacy focus of the suspected participants and the likelihood that sybils can exist in the graph.

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Footnotes

1. cryptography -- The Cryptography and Cryptography Policy Mailing List ↩

2. The cryptography Archives ↩

3. The first and only post of October ↩