Email to Gavin Andresen, "alert key" ("I wish you wouldn't keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure … I've moved on to other things"). Satoshi's text only
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Research, not advice. Part of the Bitcoin research archive (October 2026). Claims labelled unverified, contested or fringe are reported, not endorsed; statuses of bills and rules are as of the date checked. Government, court and patent records are public domain; the research notes are CC BY 4.0.
Satoshi Nakamoto — email to Gavin Andresen, 26 April 2011, "alert key" (Satoshi's message only) ============================================================================================== Extracted 2026-10-09 for ~/Projects/bitcoin (research, not advice). Source: Gavin Andresen, "Eleven years ago today…", his Svbtle blog, 26 April 2022, which opens: "Eleven years ago today I had my last email exchange with Satoshi; here it is". Read from the Internet Archive snapshot https://web.archive.org/web/20220426154120/https://gavinandresen.ninja/eleven-years-ago-today (retrieved 2026-10-09). The live address https://gavinandresen.ninja/eleven-years-ago-today now redirects to a copy on riski.wiki (https://riski.wiki/wiki/User:Gavinandresen/Blog/2022-04-26_Eleven_years_ago_today%E2%80%A6), retrieved the same day, with the same email text. Only Satoshi's message is kept, verbatim as Andresen printed it. Andresen's reply is left out (summary: he blamed the tone of a recent Forbes article, agreed to credit other contributors, said he would have to find people he could trust to keep the key and code safe, and said he had agreed to speak about Bitcoin at a conference held by In-Q-Tel, the US government-funded investment firm, and planned to say so openly on the forum). Time: the header Andresen pasted reads "26 Apr 2011, 10:29"; the quote line of his reply reads "On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 4:29 AM, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote". The two are consistent with 08:29 UTC if the reply time is US Eastern daylight time; neither line states a time zone. The email says Satoshi attached "the CAlert key and broadcast code". The published text does not contain the key, and no key is stored in this repo. ----- Subject: alert key Satoshi Nakamoto [email protected] 26 Apr 2011, 10:29 I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about me as a mysterious shadowy figure, the press just turns that into a pirate currency angle. Maybe instead make it about the open source project and give more credit to your dev contributors; it helps motivate them. I’ve moved on to other things and will probably be unavailable. Here’s the CAlert key and broadcast code in case you need it. You should probably give it to at least one or two other people. There are a few long time users who are always around all the time.