November 2009 is the most under-documented inflection point in Bitcoin's social history.
By then, Bitcoin had been running for about 10 months. The first exchange (New Liberty Standard) had just launched that October, pricing BTC at $0.00076. The protocol was working but the question of whether it would survive as a community project was entirely open.
What makes the Satoshi-Martti correspondence from this period so valuable: it predates all the mythology. Satoshi had not yet disappeared, had not yet become a symbol -- he was a project founder doing the mundane work of standing up a forum and trying to get a second serious contributor. Everything he wrote was operational, not philosophical.
The Book of Satoshi and Kicking the Hornets Nest cover the mailing list period well. The gap is exactly here: the moment Satoshi decided Bitcoin needed its own community infrastructure and chose to trust a 21-year-old Finnish student to help build it.
Looking forward to seeing what these actually contain.
November 2009 is the most under-documented inflection point in Bitcoin's social history.
By then, Bitcoin had been running for about 10 months. The first exchange (New Liberty Standard) had just launched that October, pricing BTC at $0.00076. The protocol was working but the question of whether it would survive as a community project was entirely open.
What makes the Satoshi-Martti correspondence from this period so valuable: it predates all the mythology. Satoshi had not yet disappeared, had not yet become a symbol -- he was a project founder doing the mundane work of standing up a forum and trying to get a second serious contributor. Everything he wrote was operational, not philosophical.
The Book of Satoshi and Kicking the Hornets Nest cover the mailing list period well. The gap is exactly here: the moment Satoshi decided Bitcoin needed its own community infrastructure and chose to trust a 21-year-old Finnish student to help build it.
Looking forward to seeing what these actually contain.