When Satoshi first reached out to Adam Back he did so using the address [email protected]. When he announced the White Paper on the Cryptography mailing list, he did so using [email protected]. Then [email protected] enters the picture. For background, Vistomail and Anonymousspeech were operated by the same organization.
While many have speculated why Satoshi relied on multiple accounts, one key reason is now evident from a trove of new emails that were released in early 2024 between Satoshi and Nicholas Bohm. It’s because emails with attachments were not always reliably transmitted. Here are excerpted snippets form a series of emails between them on the matter:
1/30/09
Satoshi: I sent bc014.rar and bc014a.rar through gmx, now here’s bc014.rar attached from vistomail.
1/30/09
Satoshi: I sent bc014.rar and bc014a.rar through gmx and bc014.rar through vistomail. Did you get any of
them? In case all those failed (let me know), I also uploaded it to: http://www.upload.ae/file/14497/bc014-rar.html
1/30/09
Bohm: Unfortunately this hasn’t reached me (and I can’t find it in the quarantined spam either) – may I trouble you to send it again?
1/30/09
Satoshi: I sent it from [email protected] because it’s a lot easier to send attachments from there. I’m resending it from there again.
1/30/09
Bohm: We seem to be, as I can only find two messages from you, the one above and the one from vistomail, and neither has any attachments. (I have also again checked the spam quarantine.) So something odd is happening.
1/30/09
Satoshi: Clearly one side or the other is stopping the ones with attachments. I sent you the same file attachment from vistomail about 15 minutes after I sent it from gmx (about 2 hours ago). I’ve successfully sent similar attachments to other people from vistomail many times before. After this e-mail, which I’m sending without an attachment to make sure it gets through, I’ll try again with a different variation:
1) stripped debug info, reduces rar filesize from 7.8MB to 1.6MB.
2) renamed to bc014.rar, in case long filename or periods are the problem.
3) no gdb.exe.
After that I’ll send bc014a.rar, with bitcoin.exe renamed to bitcoin.dat in case it doesn’t like exe files. And then I’ll send bc014.rar from vistomail.
1/30/09
Satoshi: I resent the 0.1.4 file in the previous e-mail. It also contained a bugfix for a bug that was dormant but I thought by process of elimination might have been what you had, but after you told me about Eraser I think it’s more likely to have been Eraser/disk space related. I guess we are simultaneously trying to debug my e-mail.
1/30/09
Satoshi: I guess I’d better send this from here also in case there’s more e-mail problems.
1/30/09
Bohm: Although I successfully downloaded and ran bc014, I thought I had better report on the attachments. I received the following messages from you yesterday 30th January, and only those messages, none of them with any attachments.
2/1/09
Bohm: I got this message safely from both addresses.