A new trove of emails between Satoshi Nakamoto and Nicholas Bohm disclosed in the COPA/Wright lawsuit in early 2024 revealed Bohm having difficulty with the network, and with that a new IP to investigate.
“Bitcoin has failed to establish any connections for the last day or so, despite restarts,” Bohm wrote to Satoshi on July 19, 2009. “I’m not aware of having made any changes to my system, so this is puzzling. Can you suggest what I might check?”
Satoshi wrote in reply: “Did your IP address change? And if so, what’s the new address? I run a node but I can’t accept incoming connections and if your IP address changed then I would have lost contact with you. There may just not be anybody else running it right now. How many connections did you usually have before? If you keep your server running, if new users come along at least they’ll have someone to connect to, rather than get no connections and give up.”
That Satoshi suggests it’s possible that “there may just not be anybody else running it right now,” is evidence of just how small bitcoin remained six months after the genesis block. Bohm, however, said that up until July 15th, he was usually connected to 3-5 other nodes.
Satoshi replied, “I guess something must be preventing you from receiving incoming connections. Mine has been trying to connect to your IP without success. I’m currently connected to 70.113.114.209 since yesterday. If you’re not at least connected to that one, then you can’t connect out either.”
Sixteen years later, one wondered who was behind that node at that IP address. Was it perhaps a remote PC that Satoshi was using to mine from afar? The answer, however, is likely to be a well known early Bitcoin pioneer and miner named Dustin Trammell. Trammell believes he was the 2nd ever node on the network and his communications with Satoshi have long since been publicized.
Though it’s hard to say exactly where the IP was precisely linked to 15 years ago, the IP currently resolves to the Round Rock, TX area.
The IP address was also used to edit a Wikipedia entry in 2007 with a scoring update for the Texas A&M Aggies. That’s two years before that email. Trammell was working in Austin, TX in both 2007 and 2009, which is within ~20 miles of where the IP currently resolves. Unless it was a tor node or VPN back then, this IP was likely Trammell’s node.