11 Years Ago, Satoshi Dropped a Final Message: “There’s More Work to Do”
It is no secret that Satoshi Nakamoto, the father of Bitcoin, is still one of the biggest unsolved mysteries within the crypto space, as no one knows if the pseudonymous tag belongs to a single person or a group.
A Final Message From Satoshi
Interestingly, December 12, 2010, eleven years ago, was the last time anyone heard from Satoshi publicly after they left a final message telling early members of the Bitcointalk forum that there’s still a lot of work to be done to improve the network.
After publishing the Bitcoin whitepaper in October 2008, Satoshi communicated regularly with the growing community for the next two years, explaining the different concepts of the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Satoshi: There’s More Work To Do
In December 2010, WikiLeaks, an international non-profit whistle-blowing organization founded by Julian Assange, revealed plans to leverage bitcoin to raise funds using its decentralized payment system. It chose BTC mainly because most major payment processors were blocking donations to the organization.
However, Satoshi did not welcome the idea, noting that the adoption would attract an unwanted amount of government attention to Bitcoin, describing it as “kicking a hornet’s nest.”
“No, don’t ‘bring’ it on. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks to not try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”
The day after his warning, precisely on December 12, 2010, Satoshi dropped a final message on the forum, informing developers that there is still so much work to do to make the Bitcoin software resistant to denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
“There’s more work to do on DoS, but I’m doing a quick build of what I have so far in case it’s needed, before venturing into more complex ideas. The build for this is version 0.3.19… Added some DoS controls.
As Gavin and I have said clearly before, the software is not at all resistant to DoS attacks. This is one improvement, but there are still more ways to attack than I can count. I’m leaving the -limitfreerelay part as a switch for now and it’s there if you need it.”
Immediately after sending this last message to the forum, Satoshi disappeared and has remained the biggest mystery in the cryptocurrency industry to this day. While the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin remains unknown, here are some interesting facts we know about him.
11 Years Later
It’s been over a decade since Satoshi Nakamoto ended all communications with the Bitcoin community. Still, the project they started with $0 of public funding has turned into a trillion-dollar asset and created a multi-trillion dollar industry, which gave birth to several unicorn companies and thousands of crypto projects.
Bitcoin remains the king of all cryptocurrencies to this day, and protocol developers continue to work round the clock to improve the network and make it more robust and secure, with the latest upgrade being the long-awaited Taproot.
The cryptocurrency has also been adopted by countries like El Salvador as a legal tender, while big corporations like MicroStrategy, Tesla, and AMC now use Bitcoin either as a reserve asset or payment method.
But despite all of these feats that Bitcoin has achieved over its 12 years of existence, there’s still more work to do, as Satoshi rightly said.
