Who is the inventor of Bitcoin, Nakamoto Satoshi, has been a topic of debate and speculation, with no one knowing for sure. However, there is a university student named Martti Malmi who had extensive communication with Nakamoto and had his life changed as a result. This article is sourced from OneKey and organized, translated, and written by Wu Blockchain.
(Summary:
Judge rules that Australian Craig Wright is “not Satoshi Nakamoto” and not the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper, crucial evidence revealed.)
(Background:
Bitcoin surpasses $68,000, Nakamoto Satoshi rises to 20th on Forbes’ billionaire list, surpassing Huang Renxun.)
Content:
Early operation of Bitcoin was similar to that of a startup company
Ultimately, Martti took on everything
Belief in Bitcoin for Martti
The final email
In 2009, Martti Malmi, who was still a second-year university student at Helsinki University of Technology, came across bitcoin.org and emailed Nakamoto Satoshi, saying, “I would like to help with Bitcoin, if there’s something I can do.”
To be honest, it was quite a hasty job application email. But from then on, the gears of destiny began to turn.
Martti Malmi became Nakamoto’s first collaborator and the person Nakamoto trusted the most, and his life was changed by Bitcoin. There have always been legends of university students getting rich “All in” in the cryptocurrency industry, and Martti is undoubtedly the ancestor of this legend.
Last month, he publicly released the email history with Nakamoto Satoshi, allowing us to review the magnificent history of Bitcoin from different perspectives. Here are some interesting findings from OneKey.
Just like most startups at the time, they registered the domain name “bitcoin.org” and had extensive discussions about product features, user interface (UI), and the website.
Unlike the entrepreneurial atmosphere at the time, work was done through email communication, without anyone meeting the boss, Nakamoto Satoshi. Nowadays, remote work has become popular in the cryptocurrency industry, with major cryptocurrency companies like Binance, Paradigm, and our company OneKey adopting various degrees of global collaboration.
This was the first remote task assigned by Nakamoto Satoshi to university student Martti Malmi – the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). Nakamoto Satoshi said that what the website currently needed the most was some written content, and he “was not good at writing, but good at coding.” The original translation: “You can consider setting up a website on SourceForge, as there is currently no content there. If you can prepare an FAQ, I can provide you with the content I have previously answered in emails and forums, which can help you obtain the necessary information and inspiration.”
Nakamoto Satoshi was clearly a good boss, seriously considering the suggestions of a young university student Martti. Here, Nakamoto Satoshi, like a product manager, discussed the features of the Bitcoin core client, such as “minimize to tray” and “startup on boot.” Like many computer programs at the time, everyone was competing for user adoption and reducing “user churn rate.” Of course, Bitcoin adopted this “trick” to encourage more people to run full nodes and make the early network more secure. The original translation: “Next, I plan to add a feature that allows the Bitcoin program to start automatically on Windows and can be minimized to the system tray, which will significantly increase the number of online nodes. In retrospect, you did point out a critical missing feature, which has the potential to greatly increase the number of nodes. Without automatic startup, it is difficult for us to retain users after their initial trial. As the early file-sharing networks have shown, it is crucial to have the program run automatically and default to hiding in the system tray. Although it seemed inappropriate to introduce this feature in our first version (v0.1.0) due to the lack of stability, now that the program has become stable enough, this feature has become a must-have for our next version to ensure that users who are willing to try the new version have a better experience and are willing to continue using it.”
As an “entrepreneur,” Nakamoto Satoshi also couldn’t help but complain about internet startup projects that generate a lot of hype without even having any code. In the email below, Nakamoto Satoshi believed that SourceForge’s functionality was no longer sufficient for the Bitcoin forum and that they needed to switch to a different forum service provider. At the same time, he complained, “I have seen some projects attract a lot of attention based solely on discussions and planning on the forum, even though they haven’t started writing any code yet. The discussions on the forum provide a platform for exposure to the project, attracting new users, helping solve support issues, and identifying the most needed features (so the forum is important).”
In terms of marketing in a startup company, Nakamoto Satoshi was not entirely an extreme “geek.” In this email, he mentioned that the promotional point “anonymity” on the official website seemed suspicious and thought that it could be something that everyone knew privately. The original translation: “The word ‘anonymous’ sounds a bit suspicious. I think those who want to be anonymous can figure it out themselves without us publicizing it. I made some changes to the bitcoin.org homepage, but the update and translation are not really urgent. I tend to continue editing and revising it in the near future, so if they want to update, it’s better to wait.”
In the email communication, Nakamoto Satoshi repeatedly expressed his reluctance to become a public figure (although in the end, most people remember Nakamoto Satoshi). He encouraged Martti to use his real name and address. He asked Martti to use his own credit card/ID to set up servers and bank accounts.
If you were Martti, would you be scared and “run away”?
The original translation: “I received a $2,000 donation request, but I need your mailing address to have it sent. Yes, the donor wants to remain anonymous, so please protect the privacy of the envelope source.”
In some Bitcoin promotional points, Nakamoto Satoshi let Martti speak on his behalf and also reminded of some marketing risks. The original translation: “On the SourceForge website, you can express many views that I cannot say on my own website. However, it feels inappropriate to explicitly state ‘regard Bitcoin as an investment.’ This statement is quite risky, so it’s best to remove this point. If users have such thoughts themselves, it’s fine, but we cannot promote it as a selling point.”
Assigning interview tasks to newcomer Martti doesn’t seem inappropriate. The original translation: “There is a blog author who wants to write an article about Bitcoin, but I currently don’t have time to answer his questions. If I introduce him to you, would you be willing to answer his questions? This way, we may gain a good link resource.”
Boss Nakamoto Satoshi suddenly disappeared for a month, and Martti took on the operation of the forum. The original translation: “I have been busy with other matters for the past month and a half. I just started downloading my emails from early April. I have taken care of most things, and I should return to work on Bitcoin soon. I’m glad to see that you have taken care of some things while I was away. Congratulations on completing your first Bitcoin transaction!”
Nakamoto Satoshi also foresaw that if Bitcoin were to become mainstream, it would require a significant amount of energy. This may have been an explosive viewpoint at the time: the banking system wastes more resources than PoW. The original translation: “If we ultimately have to choose between economic freedom and resource conservation, it would be ironic. Unfortunately, ‘proof of work’ is the only solution I have found that allows a peer-to-peer electronic cash system to work without a trusted third party. Even if I didn’t initially envision it as a way of distributing the currency, proof of work is still crucial for coordinating the network and preventing double-spending. If it really starts consuming a lot of energy, I think such energy consumption would still be less than the labor and resource consumption of the traditional banking activities it aims to replace. Its cost would be much lower than the billions of dollars spent by banks on all the brick buildings, skyscrapers, and useless credit card promotional mailings.”
We all know that on December 12, 2010, Nakamoto Satoshi made his final post on the Bitcoin forum discussing DoS (Denial of Service) and then stopped forum activity, but this was not Nakamoto Satoshi’s last email.
A month later, in this email from Nakamoto Satoshi to Gavin Andresen (also sent to Martti), Nakamoto Satoshi once again confirmed that he did not want to participate in any media PR content and interviews. And here, we can see that Nakamoto Satoshi was very concerned about Bitcoin growing too fast, leading to various demands for features, attack defenses, etc., not being met.
At the same time, they were concerned about the frenzy of public opinion. At the time, some unofficial Bitcoin spokespersons were overly hyping, even claiming that it would replace PayPal or even the euro. They wanted to emphasize more in the media that Bitcoin was a front-end test and had not reached the level of large-scale application.
Another month later, this is the last email from Nakamoto Satoshi to Martti, arranging some administrator password matters, and then he disappeared again. This farewell was in 2013, and it is unlikely that we will see him again.
Nakamoto Satoshi’s disappearance is full of legends, but in these emails, we see a closer side of Nakamoto Satoshi. It seems that the “god” is not so distant and that he is among us, as if everyone is Nakamoto Satoshi.
Martti’s story is not just an illusion, how many more “university student” legends will we witness in the next bull market wave?
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