The following are a series of emails from Satoshi Nakamoto to Hal Finney, written in January 2009 as the
two were working on early versions of the bitcoin software. Mr. Finney supplied these emails to The Wall
Street Journal in the spring of 2014.
Since these emails were all coming from Nakamoto to Mr. Finney, they are Nakamoto’s responses to Mr.
Finney’s emails, the body of which is marked by the > symbol. The exchange begins on Jan. 10, 2009, and
ends on Jan. 24, 2009, and comprises the time they were working on versions 0.1.0 through 0.1.3 of the
bitcoin software.

-------- Forwarded message -------
From: Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshi@vistomail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 11:52 AM
Subject: RE:Crash in bitcoin 0.1.0
To: hal.finney@gmail.com

Normally I would keep the symbols in, but they increased the size of the EXE from 6.5MB to 50MB so I
just couldn't justify not stripping them. I guess I made the wrong decision, at least for this early version. I'm kind of surprised there was a crash, I've tested heavily and haven't had an outright exception for a while. Come to think of it, there isn't even an exception print at the end of debug.log. I've been testing on XP SP2, maybe SP3 is something.

I've attached bitcoin.exe with symbols. (gcc symbols for gdb, if you're using MSVC I can send you an MSVC build with symbols)

Thanks for your help!

>Hi Satoshi
- I tried running bitcoin.exe from the 0.1.0 package, and it crashed. I am running on an up to date version of XP, SP3. The debug.log output is attached. There was also a file db.log but it was empty.

>The crash allowed me to start up a debugger, but there were no symbols. The exception was at address 00930AF7. The displayed call stack was 942316 called by 508936.
>
>When I have a chance, I'll try building it, although it looks like it would take me a while to acquire all the dependencies.
>
>Hal


From: Satoshi Nakamoto <satoshi@vistomail.com>
Date: Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 2:59 PM
Subject: Re: Crash in bitcoin 0.1.0
To: hal.finney@gmail.com

I was temporarily able to reproduce the bug and narrowed it down to the "mapAddresses.count" in the
following code. It was absolutely the last piece of code to go in and mainly only got tested with the MSVC build. It's not essential and I'm inclined to turn off optimization and delete the section of code
until I figure out what's going on.

I'm attaching a dbg exe you can try that deletes the line of code and turns off optimization. I'm not able to reproduce it anymore at the moment.
irc.cpp:
if (pszName[0] == 'u')
{
CAddress addr;
if (DecodeAddress(pszName, addr))
{
CAddrDB addrdb;
if (AddAddress(addrdb, addr))
printf("new ");
else
{
// make it try connecting sooner
CRITICAL_BLOCK(cs_mapAddresses)
if (mapAddresses.count(addr.GetKey()))
mapAddresses[addr.GetKey()].nLastFailed = 0;
}
addr.print();
}
else
{
printf("decode failed\n");

"In 2008 it was a ‘hodgepodge’, he said. I asked him if he felt the development of bitcoin was, at some level, a response to the financial crisis. ‘It was already in process. I saw [the crisis] coming though. It was a kind of perfect storm. During that year, I spoke to Wei Dai. So between him and Hal Finney there were a lot of really good ideas about making money work … [Finney] was the one who actually took what I said seriously. He received the first bitcoin.’"

The Satoshi Affair.
Andrew O’Hagan in the #LRB:
30 June 2016
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

Lectura altamente recomendada para este verano, prepárate para lo que viene!!!

The Satoshi afaire.
Andrew O’Hagan
30 June 2016

"...The Genesis block is the one that didn’t crash.’ There from the beginning was Hal Finney, who would receive the first bitcoin transaction, on block 9. This was a key moment for the new cryptocurrency: block 9 for ever shows that Satoshi sent Finney ten bitcoin on 12 January 2009 – it is the first outgoing transaction we know to have come from Satoshi. Satoshi also sent four other transactions on the same day. I asked Wright who the recipients were – who the four addresses belonged to. ‘Hal, Dave, myself,’ he replied. ‘And another I cannot name as I have no right to do so.’ Wright told me that around this time he was in correspondence with Wei Dai, with Gavin Andresen, who would go on to lead the development of bitcoin, and Mike Hearn, a Google engineer who had ideas about the direction bitcoin should take...."


The Satoshi Affair.
Andrew O’Hagan in the #LRB:
30 June 2016
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair

"Even Hal Finney started to get it. In December 2010, Hal said:

Ultimately, it’s good for the network for mining to be expensive. It makes it that much harder for a well-financed attacker to dominate the network.

So, unlike the earlier idea of needing to put a cap on and slowly build to
allow many nodes, he started to get it. Unfortunately, by that time I was already disillusioned.

He still saw Bitcoin as the store-of-value and digital-gold ideal, though.

I see Bitcoin as ultimately becoming a reserve currency for banks, playing much the same role as gold did in the early days of banking. Banks could issue digital cash with greater anonymity and lighter weight, more efficient transactions.

He never got around to understanding how efficient Bitcoin can be. I guess
we all have baggage that weighs us down from the ideas we had before."

Pag. 21
Satoshi's Vision:
The Art of Bitcoin.
By Craig Wright
August 2019
https://t.me/theArtofBitcoin/20

https://www.amazon.com/Satoshis-Vision-Bitcoin-Craig-Wright/dp/168873592590

“Both Satoshi and I objected that [Bitcoin] wouldn't scale at 1MB. Hal was concerned about a potential DoS attack though, and after discussion, Satoshi agreed... But all 3 of us agreed that 1MB had to be temporary because it would never scale.”

-Ray Dillinger

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=946236.msg10388435#msg10388435

 The Many Facts Pointing to Hal Being Satoshi
The identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous founder is the subject of endless and dedicated speculation among the hardcore crypto crowd, and for good reason: the mystery truly is enticing. While the…
Read More

Reusable Proofs of Work
by Hal Finney
(hal at finney dot org)
https://web.archive.org/web/20041202180250/http://rpow.net:80/

Legendary Bitcoin contributor Hal Finney's Twitter profile is safe — for now
Bitcoin fans can rest easy as Twitter has backpedalled on its plans to purge inactive accounts until it can figure out how to memorialize them. - thenextweb.com

Re: [bitcoin-list]
Bitcoin v0.1 released
From: <hal@fi...>
- 2009-01-11

Satoshi Nakamoto writes:
> Announcing the first release of Bitcoin, a new electronic cash
> system that uses a peer-to-peer network to prevent double-spending.
> It's completely decentralized with no server or central authority.
>
> See bitcoin.org for screenshots.
>
> Download link:
> http://downloads.sourceforge.net/bitcoin/bitcoin-0.1.0.rar

Congratulations to Satoshi on this first alpha release. I am looking forward to trying it out.

> Total circulation will be 21,000,000 coins. It'll be distributed
> to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half
> every 4 years.
>
> first 4 years: 10,500,000 coins
> next 4 years: 5,250,000 coins
> next 4 years: 2,625,000 coins
> next 4 years: 1,312,500 coins
> etc...

It's interesting that the system can be configured to only allow a certain maximum number of coins ever to be generated. I guess the idea is that the amount of work needed to generate a new coin will
become more difficult as time goes on.

One immediate problem with any new currency is how to value it. Even ignoring the practical problem that virtually no one will accept it at first, there is still a difficulty in coming up with a reasonable
argument in favor of a particular non-zero value for the coins.

As an amusing thought experiment, imagine that Bitcoin is successful and
becomes the dominant payment system in use throughout the world. Then the
total value of the currency should be equal to the total value of all the wealth in the world. Current estimates of total worldwide household
wealth that I have found range from $100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million.

So the possibility of generating coins today with a few cents of compute time may be quite a good bet, with a payoff of something like 100 million
to 1! Even if the odds of Bitcoin succeeding to this degree are slim, are they really 100 million to one against? Something to think about...

Hal

https://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/bitcoin-list/?viewmonth=200901

From hal at finney.org Thu Mar 1 2001
From: hal at finney.org (hal at finney.org)
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2001 11:24:24 -0800
Subject: the three-services model
Message-ID: <200103011924.LAA20764@finney.org>


Wei Dai's original article on the Three Services Model has appeared on
the openp2p.com news ticker (look at the lower right part of that page,
or the news page at http://www.openp2p.com/p2p/news.csp). The link
ponints directly into the Bluesky archives. The OpenP2P site does not
provide a discussion forum on its news page, but this could lead to
wider distribution of information about this list.

Hal