A 5 email historical exchange between Back and Nakamoto was entered into the court records of the COPA vs CSW case today. Pete Rizzo's twitter thread has all 5 emails pictured and some commentary from him.
The first email was sent by Nakamoto to Back on August 20, 2008, checking he had the citation to Back's hashcash paper right and giving a brief précis of his own forthcoming paper and a link to a pre-release draft.
August 21 : Adam replies, and suggests Nakamoto look at Wei Dei's paper on B-money.
Nakamoto writes back, saying he wasn't aware of Wei Dei's paper. After having now looked at it he says : "Thanks, I wasn't aware of the b-money page, but my ideas start from exactly that point." (Satoshi will go on to add this paper to his citations in Bitcoin's white paper.)
Adam writes back a second time, saying that he still hasn't looked at Satoshi's draft but suggests another paper he might like to look at, "by Rivest et al called micromint".
October 1st, 2008 : Nakamoto writes to Back for the final time, thanking him again and announcing the release of the first public implementation of Bitcoin (v0.1). He quotes an overview of the project by Hal Finney from a discussion on the Cryptography mailing list.
The exchange stops there, as Back doesn't reply further and quoting Rizzo "According to Adam's public statements, he wouldn't look at Bitcoin again until late 2012."
Images of the 5 emails, for ppl who don't want to visit twitter :
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Error in my submission text that's important to correct :
Nakamoto's final email to Back (the 5th one above) is in October 2009, not 2008
(I should have picked up this error when composing; apologies)
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If nothing else comes of this trial, learning about some new, true early Bitcoin history has been fascinating.
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"So, Mr. Wright, since you are in fact Satoshi Nakamoto, when developing Bitcoin, you had certainly researched and were familiar with Wei Dei's paper on B-money, correct?"
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Not to mention, Satoshi's tone - in all of his writings - never has the narcissistic ego-driven tone that CSW can't help but do.
I mean, does anyone even believe that Creg Right would even write to the people who inspired him, asking for input?
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Good point. He would have patented everything before telling anyone.
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This is super interesting because Satoshi refers to Hal. I've tried to find the text version on the internet but couldn't locate it. Do you know where it can be found, or were they private emails?
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Rizzo would have got the emails from the court records. I'm not sure if the court records are on the internet yet (i.e. whether these emails can be linked directly).
The early overview that Hal gives of Bitcoin and that Satoshi quotes in the 5th email comes from a discussion on the Crtyptography mailing list, so that has been public all this time.
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It's interesting to contrast "technical" Adam Back with "NGU" Adam Back... of course not mutually exclusive, but he's one of the more vocal NGU technical people I've seen.
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He's a rare breed indeed.
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“They concede that something is flammable, but argue that it will never burn because there will never be a spark.” What a quote from Satoshi.
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“They concede that something is flammable, but argue that it will never burn because there will never be a spark.” What a quote from Satoshi.
Sorry, that's from one of his emails with Martii Malmi not Adam Back: https://twitter.com/marttimalmi/status/1760898475980403183
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You know what I'm wondering about the most? If these dudes knew who exactly they were writing with back then... I'd imagine they'd change their tune and questions asked if they'd be able to do it all over again.
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.