As you may have seen my recent X post related to Jack Dorsey being Satoshi Nakamoto, I’m going to elaborate on each component of it in a series of blog posts. Here’s the first two bullet points of that post:
Jack was 1 of ~1,300 confirmed cypherpunks in 1996 (his UMR email)
UMR is University of Missouri-Rolla. The web domain at the time was umr.edu. Jack went there from 1995 to 1997 before transferring out.
Jack was [email protected] which we can prove from his archived posts on Usenet groups at the time. Example 1, Example 2, Example 3, Example 4.
- The hex surrounding his signature: 0x63, 0x72, 0x79, 0x70, 0x74, 0x6F spells: crypto.
- Jack uses PGP.
- On Jack’s signature here, he copies a line out of cypherpunk founder Tim May’s signature. higher power: 2^1257787-1.
- [email protected] was logged as a subscriber to the cypherpunk mailing list in 1996.
- There were ~1,300 subscribers at the time.
- Jack is also logged as being on the mailing list on March 18, 2000 under his most common pseudonym Jak Daemon with his work email [email protected].
- Jack’s business card with his Dnet.com email address in 1999 can be found here.
- Jack Co-founding Dnet with Greg Kidd is part of his well-known backstory so feel free to look that up.
Jack is a cypherpunk, albeit mostly a passive reader, unless he was posting under other pseudonyms. Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, and Adam Back were also cypherpunks. Adam Back invented Hashcash, which Satoshi relied on to formulate Bitcoin. Adam Back was also famous for writing 3 lines of perl code that some countries considered to be a “munition.” That led to a niche cultural movement of printing the code on a t-shirt, thereby making the shirt dangerous and allegedly illegal to export. There were variations of this “perl RSA munitions” t-shirt made. You can see some examples of one here: 1, 2.
Adam Back also made a guide for people to print their own versions of the t-shirt.
On a January 22, 2025 podcast, Jack Dorsey brought up Usenet, the mailing list, and this shirt.
“Really when I was a kid, I loved alt.cypherpunks. I loved Usenet, I loved what those guys were doing. I followed the mailing list. Wired back in the day, was like wild, like it was underground back then, and it was following all that activity, starting with PGP and Philip Zimmerman, and exporting the code by Adam Back on a t-shirt in Perl, like all that was just like, that was my joy. I wasn’t working in that space, but it was my joy.” – Jack Dorsey
Jack Wore an Adam Back t-shirt in the UMR yearbook
In the 1996 University of Missouri-Rolla yearbook (PDF page 140), Jack Dorsey is actually wearing a perl RSA munitions t-shirt in the top left.
