🥺 Last words

In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman would famously rid himself from awkward social entanglements with a quick: “I have to return some video tapes.” 

Bitcoin has its own version of that. Fourteen years ago to the day, Satoshi Nakamoto sent their last known email, which included the famous line: “I've moved on to other things.”

We’ll likely never know what Satoshi moved on to. Maybe not much of anything, just like how Bateman never really returned any video tapes.

I doubt it.

Satoshi’s last email

The final known Satoshi email was sent to Mike Hearn, one of the earliest Bitcoin contributors and former Google engineer, in April 2011. 

By that point, Bitcoin had been running for 840 days, or less than two and a half years. Satoshi previously said they had been working on Bitcoin’s design since 2007 — so at most they were active in Bitcoin development for about four years.

Hearn, who has since stepped back from Bitcoin, had kept up emails with Satoshi even after their final post on BitcoinTalk in December 2010.

“Satoshi did not leave the community because of Gavin's CIA visit. He had already stopped posting publicly by the end of 2010 but was willing to continue emailing back and forth with me for months after,” Hearn wrote on Reddit in 2017. “I realised this situation probably wouldn't last which is why I kept peppering him with technical questions.”

Bitcoin’s creator had recently encouraged other community members to take over, a move that led to Gavin Andresen stepping up as lead maintainer. Alongside Hearn, Andresen would go on to organize the forking of Bitcoin Core for BitcoinXT, which featured an increased block size limit that would also get larger every two years.

It was Bitcoin’s first great civil war, as portrayed by mainstream media. Hearn had sold all his bitcoin by January 2016, when coins were worth under $500, and eventually moved on to build enterprise distributed ledger Corda as R3’s lead platform engineer, a position he left in 2021.

“Can cryptocurrency work? Sure, I do believe that. It does need extensive competition between different coins, which we now have,” Hearn wrote in late 2020. “Unfortunately when it comes to currencies, competition works against gaining critical mass and none of them have managed to get the same levels of awareness Bitcoin did.”

“I did stoically plug away at it for many years, but fundamentally my answers to how you can build a global consensus network in which people peacefully co-exist looks like the Bitcoin Foundation or the Corda Network, and that was far too suit-wearing to ever be accepted by the cryptocurrency community.”

Certainly, we’ve all mused enough over the reasons for Satoshi’s departure. WikiLeaks “kicking the hornet’s nest” could be one. Andresen’s visit to the CIA could be too — Satoshi sent his last email to Hearn shortly after Andresen disclosed that he’d accepted the agency’s invite. 

And perhaps, Satoshi really did have other balls in the air. He’d used similar language 11 months earlier, when he told Martti Malmi via email that he’d “been busy with other things for the last month and a half” to explain his absence. 

Maybe, Satoshi knew there was going to be tension between the cypherpunks, with their energetic anarchism, and the suits, with their rules and business hierarchies, and simply thought it easier to go return some video tapes instead. Who could blame them?

— David

The tension between cypherpunks and suits persists to this day. It’s embodied by bitcoin ETFs, which Bitcoin Core developer James O’Beirne worries are muddying the waters.

“For example, in the BlackRock S1, they specifically spell out that if there’s ever a fork proposed, that BlackRock basically gets to choose which side of the fork is 

‘Bitcoin,’ and the holder of the ETF should have no expectation that they own the other side of the fork,” O’Beirne told Rizzo. 

O’Beirne warned that in future fork proposals, whether friendly from Bitcoin developers or coercive from regulatory regimes that want to change Bitcoin’s monetary policy, “someone holding the BlackRock ETF thinking they own Bitcoin — they don’t get to participate in that judgement of what Bitcoin is.”

Check out the latest Supply Shock episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple and X.

There history goes again, always rhyming. As David notes, the tensions in the community that Satoshi left may be alive and well, but then again, so is the inherent demand for Bitcoin, with the “positive feedback loop” he imagined working at a geo-political scale.

Yesterday, shockwaves were sent across the industry when it was revealed SoftBank, Cantor Fitzgerald and Tether are reportedly preparing to funnel bitcoin worth $3 billion into a new firm running the Strategy playbook, amassing capital to stockpile BTC.

The numbers alone are staggering. Could we have another Strategy? Another multi-billion company racing, alongside the ETFs, to capture 500,000 or more Bitcoin?

Certainly, the players involved are enough to make the suggestion plausible. The only question that remains is how much bitcoin can they buy? Regardless, it’s another example of how Satoshi’s own stash – and his foresight – only seem more impressive with time.

— Rizzo

• Tesla did not sell any bitcoin last quarter and still holds 11,509 BTC ($1 billion).

• Jack Dorsey’s Block is promising a wave of product upgrades focused on making Bitcoin more usable for everyday spending and private payments.

• Texas will hold another hearing on its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve today.