The Finnish Kid Nobody RemembersThe Finnish Kid Nobody Remembers

Yesterday I saw Stacker News suggestion to write about a little-known aspect of Bitcoin, and I stared at the screen for a long time, unsure where to begin.
I'm not much of a writer. A stray thought here and there, the occasional catharsis, but I never imagined myself writing something like this. However, while searching for something to write about, I stumbled upon a story I couldn't put down.

The story of Martti Malmi.

Or as he was known in the old corners of the internet: Sirius.

When someone mentions Bitcoin, the conversation almost always ends up in the same place: Satoshi Nakamoto. And it makes sense. He was the one who wrote the white paper, the one who started it all. But the more I delved into the story, the clearer something became that isn't usually mentioned: Bitcoin didn't survive thanks to just one person behind a screen.
It needed someone on the other side.

And that someone, during the early years, was Martti.

In 2009, he was a computer science student in Helsinki. No company, no fame, no special capital. Just a young man who stumbled across Satoshi's project online and decided to write to him to offer his help. He found him in January 2009 while searching for decentralized currency projects on Google, convinced that if politics wouldn't change, perhaps fixing the money system would.

That decision, so simple in appearance, would end up changing quite a lot.

While Satoshi remained in the shadows, Martti became, almost unintentionally, one of the first visible faces of the project. Programmer, writer, administrator, technical support, evangelist. All at once, all in his spare time while attending university.

He was largely responsible for the new features of Bitcoin v0.2, including Linux support, which allowed many more developers to join the project. That's why Satoshi explicitly mentioned him in the release notes for that version:

Major thanks to Martti Malmi (sirius-m) for all his coding work and for hosting the new site and this forum, and New Liberty Standard for his help with testing the Linux version

He also helped build Bitcoin.org, wrote the project's first FAQs, and was the first person to whom Satoshi handed over control of the site, which at the time also hosted the community forum, before it moved to what we now know as Bitcointalk.org.

But there's one thing in particular that always ends up surprising anyone who hears it.

On October 12, 2009, Martti sold 5,050 bitcoins for $5.02 via PayPal.

Today that seems like a joke. But at that moment, something happened that had never happened before: Bitcoin had a price. For the first time, someone had exchanged bitcoins for real money. Without fully realizing it, Martti helped establish the first economic benchmark for what would later become a financial revolution.

Bitcoin 2014 conferenceBitcoin 2014 conference

Over the years, he accumulated around 55,000 bitcoins mining with his laptop. And when the price started to rise, he sold them little by little.

He sold about 10,000 BTC when Bitcoin was around $15 or $30 to buy an apartment in Helsinki.

He sold the rest later, when he had to.

The story is often told as that of the man who let a fortune slip away. And mathematically, yes. If he had saved all that, he would be a multimillionaire today. He himself acknowledges this with some regret.

But he also said something that seemed more honest to me than any regret: that with the first bitcoiners, they set in motion something bigger than the personal gain of any of them.

I don't know if that's any consolation. But it does say a lot about who he is.

I thought that was the end of the story. That Martti was simply one of those figures from the past that the industry had forgotten over time.

But in 2024, he reappeared in the most unexpected way.

When the trial between COPA and Craig Wright (the Australian who for years insisted he was Satoshi Nakamoto)took place, Martti Malmi was called to testify as a witness, in his capacity as a Finnish computer programmer who had corresponded directly with Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.

He wasn't a commentator. He wasn't someone who had read about that era. He was one of the very few human beings who had actually been there.

He disputed the dates and claims that Wright had presented about his alleged interactions with Nakamoto and published the emails he had kept for over a decade. Emails he kept all those years, not because he knew they would be needed someday, but probably because it didn't occur to him to delete them.
Imagine that for a moment.

A Finnish student who, in 2009, helped a stranger online keep an experiment alive. Fifteen years later, that same student appears in a London courtroom, helping to defend the story of how it all began.

Satoshi created Bitcoin.

But Martti was one of the first to believe in him, to help him, to build the small things that make an experiment a reality.

He didn't invent anything that bears his name. He didn't write the white paper. Many people who have been in the ecosystem for years probably don't even know who he is.

But he was there when Bitcoin was worthless.

And when history needed a witness, he reappeared.

Dec. 12, 2010, was the last time that Satoshi left a message on the bitcointalk.org forum. No one has heard from him since. Sirius also left Bitcoin the following year since he believed that the decentralized cryptocurrecy no longer needed him:

Thank you, Satoshi and others who have made Bitcoin what it is today. May it bring peace and prosperity to the world. Long live Bitcoin.