At 8:41 AM PT on Jan 12, 2009, Hal Finney received an email from Satoshi Nakamoto with a rather striking idea, vanity bitcoin addresses.
You can send to my Bitcoin address if you want to, but you won’t get to see the full transfer sequence:
1NSwywA5Dvuyw89sfs3oLPvLiDNGf48cPD
I just thought of something. Eventually there’ll be some interest in brute force scanning bitcoin addresses to find one with the first few characters customized to your name, kind of like getting a phone number that spells out something. Just by chance I have my initials.
When this email and others were released by Hal to the Wall Street Journal in the months before he died in 2014, bitcoin fans quickly drew up two possible theories as to what Satoshi meant by “NS”.
1. That the initials stood for Nakamoto Satoshi in true Japanese name sequence styling.
2. That it was a wink and a nod from the sender to Hal Finney that NS secretly meant Nick Szabo, another individual long accused of possibly being Satoshi.
And so for the last 10 years the debate has mostly been stuck on expanding on those two theories. And that’s mainly because the email has been interpreted literally, that Satoshi had been voicing nothing more than a stream of consciousness about something that happened “just by chance.”
However, if we don’t interpret it literally, and bear in mind that both sender and recipient were cryptographers, then it becomes far more likely that Satoshi was dropping a hint to Hal as to how to look for a hidden message, right there in a bitcoin address.
In fact, only thirteen hours earlier, Satoshi executed the first ever bitcoin transaction when he sent 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney. Check out this timeline:
Jan 11, 7:30 PM PT – Satoshi sends 10 bitcoins to Hal Finney
Jan 11 or 12 – Hal in a non-timestamped email tells Satoshi “I see you sent me a payment, thanks!”
Jan 12, 8:41 AM PT – Now that Hal has received the bitcoins, Satoshi gives Hal a separate address than the one he used to send them from along with the clue to look for customized characters.
You can send to my Bitcoin address if you want to, but you won’t get to see the full transfer sequence:
1NSwywA5Dvuyw89sfs3oLPvLiDNGf48cPD
I just thought of something. Eventually there’ll be some interest in brute force scanning bitcoin addresses to find one with the first few characters customized to your name, kind of like getting a phone number that spells out something. Just by chance I have my initials.
And indeed, it turns out the sender of those bitcoins to Hal came from 12cbQLTFMXRnSzktFkuoG3eHoMeFtpTu3S which by chance has two words in it! HomeFTP. While anyone is free to conclude that this is just a random assortment of letters (and I have been attacked on this very possibility), I believe it is a reference to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon novel.
“Another thing he did this morning was to download the Cryptonomicon from the FTP server where it lives in San Francisco.” — quote from the novel.
I did not select Cryptonomicon completely at random. It is already an established fact that the Bitcoin White Paper was released on Neal Stephenson’s birthday (October 31) and that Neal Stephenson’s initials are NS, the initials Satoshi said were his. There are other Cryptonomicon references in Bitcoin’s founding which is why I believe HomeFTP is an obvious reference to that book but for brevity’s sake, I’ll not go deeper into them here.
One particular critique I have received on the bitcoin address having the words HomeFTP in them is that the early 2009 era employed the use of public keys (p2pk) rather than hashed public keys (p2pkh) and thus Satoshi would not have even known what his own p2pk would have looked like when hashed and converted to a later modern p2pkh format. This, however, is obviously false because Satoshi himself provides Hal with a bitcoin address in p2pkh format in the very email where he expresses the idea of brute forcing a p2pkh address. Satoshi knew exactly what he was doing, what his addresses looked like, and what the resulting hash of any p2pk would look like. So even if p2pk was employed, Satoshi would obviously be able to generate and look at the final p2pkh version. Others have expressed doubt that the publicly released bitcoin software was capable of brute forcing anything. However, it defies logic that Satoshi, the creator of this tech, would’ve been limited by his own publicly released software.
So, getting back to the reference. The secret message to Hal from Satoshi is that the HomeFTP lives in San Francisco, and therein the actual wink and nod is that Satoshi himself lives in San Francisco.
If a hidden message like this seems a bridge too far, consider that the genesis block itself is already known to contain this easter egg “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
Satoshi doesn’t stop with his transaction to Hal. In fact, he executed four subsequent transactions from his “HomeFTP” bitcoin address before emailing Hal about looking for initials in bitcoin addresses, and he sent bitcoins to:
Jan 11, 10:02 PT – 1DUDsfc23Dv9sPMEk5RsrtfzCw5ofi5sVW
Jan 11, 10:12 PT – 1LzBzVqEeuQyjD2mRWHes3dgWrT9titxvq
Jan 11, 10:34 PT – 13HtsYzne8xVPdGDnmJX8gHgBZerAfJGEf
Jan 12, 12:04 PT – 1ByLSV2gLRcuqUmfdYcpPQH8Npm8cccsFg
After this the HomeFTP address stops spending coins. Assuming the recipients were alternate addresses for Satoshi, then the purpose of the exercise was for Satoshi to log a hidden message to coincide with the date of the first ever bitcoin transfer with Hal Finney.
Using Satoshi’s guide of how to read the hidden message: “Eventually there’ll be some interest in brute force scanning bitcoin addresses to find one with the first few characters customized to your name, kind of like getting a phone number that spells out something. Just by chance I have my initials.”
The initial readout looks something like:
1DUDsfc23Dv9sPMEk5RsrtfzCw5ofi5sVW
1LzBzVqEeuQyjD2mRWHes3dgWrT9titxvq
13HtsYzne8xVPdGDnmJX8gHgBZerAfJGEf
1ByLSV2gLRcuqUmfdYcpPQH8Npm8cccsFg
DUDsf
—
3H
ByLSV
Since we know HomeFTP is a reference to San Francisco, we’ll interpret the first 1 as:
Dude, San Francisco
The second one is not immediately clear. The words “Hes” and “tit” are discoverable throughout but this departs from the opening characters.
The third one starts with 3H
The fourth one reads pretty clearly as ByLSV.
It is at this point that you are allowed to deem me irresponsible, do your own interpretations, or x out of the page, but we’re literally following what Satoshi told Hal was possible within 12 hours of Satoshi transacting with these addresses from an address that he himself in all likelihood brute forced.
Dude, San Francisco
—
3H
By LSV
I must admit that this combination opens up an endless sea of possibilities if one truly had no inkling of whom Satoshi might be or what he would be writing here. However, I have a suspect in mind, one I have discussed at length for almost a year, Jack Dorsey. Thus, anyone is free to conclude that my following analysis is the result of confirmation bias and understand that I’m willing to accept that criticism? Ok, keep reading:
Tweets from Jack Dorsey that very week:
Jan 16, 2009 – Jack reminds people that he’s living at Mint Plaza, which is across the street from the San Francisco Chronicle
Jan 16, 2009 – Jack asks how to tell someone their neighborhood?
Jan 16, 2009 – Jack says he shares his location by intersection or landmark.
Ok, thanks Jack, we’ll use that as a guide. Where did he live at the time? Very publicly he lived at 2 Mint Plaza in San Francisco, which if you were going up 5th Street in San Francisco, you’d turn left when you see the newly opened Latte Express, Soup & Sandwich, and Vietnamese Sandwiches and Iced Coffee place, shortened down to: By Latte, Sandwiches, and Vietnamese, aka ByLSV.
Super speculative? Maybe, but 2 Mint Plaza is the 3rd house/building down from there. 3H
So now:
Dude, San Francisco
—?
3rd House Down
By Latte, Soup, and Vietnamese
What’s missing of course for this conspiracy theory to make any sense is the actual location, which suddenly makes itself known in the 2nd address. It’s in the middle. jD2m. Jack Dorsey, 2 Mint Plaza.
Dude, San Francisco
Jack Dorsey, 2 Mint Plaza
3rd House Down
By Latte, Soup, and Vietnamese
How do you tell someone your location? Exact address? Intersection? Neighborhood?
— jack (@jack) January 16, 2009
I share my location by intersection or landmark. Most often by the former.
— jack (@jack) January 16, 2009
We hear you Satoshi, we hear you, oh I mean Jack.
Finally, even if you were able to make all these leaps with me, another critique I’ve received is to why Satoshi Nakamoto would do something like this, and that it goes against everything Satoshi stands for or would rationally do. To this I respond by saying nobody knows anything about Satoshi’s frame of mind or motivations, only ones they created in their own minds. For my own sake, I know that if it were me who built something revolutionary but I was entirely unsure as to where it would go, I’d leave a precise easter egg just like this one as a just-in-case. As for what the purpose would be of executing these transactions in January 2009 when there was no robust block explorer for Hal Finney to see them, there need not have been any urgency for Hal or anyone else to have seen them. The easter egg was there to either be discovered by Hal at some point in the future or never at all. However, if Jack Dorsey were put in a position where he had to prove he was Satoshi, and he had lost his private keys or his private keys had become compromised, he could use these transactions as a backdoor way in tandem with his tweets to prove his final point. It’s literally my name and directions to my apartment, what more do you want your honor?
You can hate my theory if you want. I think Satoshi Nakamoto is Jack Dorsey.
Additionally, the reader should keep in mind that the date of the first-ever bitcoin transaction on January 11 was Jack Dorsey’s mother’s birthday. I have previously pointed out that Satoshi is known to have stopped mining bitcoins on May 3, 2010 (per the Patoshi pattern), which is his father’s birthday. However, it would seem to me that Satoshi would probably want to make sure his father was honored a lot sooner than that, probably closer to the very beginning of bitcoin. His father’s favorite number is 53 or 5353 for being born on 5/3/53. So let’s do something and check block 5353 shall we? Turns out it’s a Patoshi block, meaning Satoshi mined it.
What do we get?
14dbyDbrb7mbAADSBrDYPrjZT1YfCqZBRR
4dby
4 dad’s birthday