From Infancy to Giant — Tracing Bitcoin’s Roots in Satoshi’s Final Communication

Roughly thirteen years ago, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, posted their final message on the bitcointalk.org forum on Dec. 12, 2010. Nakamoto’s brief yet impactful message alerted the community to the ongoing need for enhancements in denial of service (DoS) attack prevention. Interestingly, although Nakamoto’s final communication was dated Dec. 12, Bitcoin’s originator had some level of activity on the forum the subsequent day.

Nakamoto’s Final Forum Post and the Network’s Youth

Thirteen years have passed since Satoshi Nakamoto, the enigmatic figure behind Bitcoin, made their final post on bitcointalk.org. This retrospective examines the condition of Bitcoin at that juncture and Nakamoto’s sudden departure. On Dec. 12, 2010, Nakamoto addressed the community regarding Bitcoin version 0.3.19, where the elusive engineer remarked that DoS limits had been implemented and safe mode alerts had been turned off.

“As Gavin and I have said clearly before, the software is not at all resistant to DoS attack,” Nakamoto told the community. “This is one improvement, but there are still more ways to attack than I can count.”

On the day Nakamoto posted that message, the price of bitcoin (BTC) stood at a mere $0.23 per unit, with 2,625,000 BTC in circulation. This pegged the cryptocurrency’s market value at just $603,750 in USD. Fast forward to the present, and the market capitalization has skyrocketed to an astounding $809 billion, marking an increase of 134,160,733%. However, the circulating supply has also expanded, now encompassing 19,568,312 BTC, compared to the initial 2.625 million BTC.

Additionally, the overall hashrate was significantly lower at the time of Satoshi’s departure. On that particular day, it was about 103.88 gigahash per second (GH/s), which is just over a tenth of a terahash per second (TH/s). To offer some context, a single one of today’s leading mining devices can generate between 150 to 300 TH/s. While the difficulty is 67.31 trillion today, the difficulty stood at 12,251 when Nakamoto left.

The difficulty changed three days before Nakamoto’s last forum post and it increased by 51.66% at block height 96,768 on Dec. 9, 2010. Now, while Bitcoin’s inventor posted the last forum post on Dec. 12, 2010, they were active on Dec. 13, the following day in some capacity. It’s possible Nakamoto simply logged in to check for replies or maybe even sent a direct message. At the time, two people responded to Nakamoto’s final post, unaware that this would be the last.

Bitcointalk user “davout” asked, “Can, you provide some more details? Or a link to some documentation about these changes?” Yet Nakamoto never replied back. Bitcointalk user “ribuck” replied to davout and shared some information. The user wrote back and asked one last question that would go unanswered:

“@satoshi: What do you call a longer invalid [blockchain]? Like a longer one but representing a smaller [proof-of-work]?”

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