Satoshi's Last Message: April 2011 and 'I've Moved On to Other Things'

Satoshi Nakamoto's last known messages are private emails from April 2011. On 23 April he told Mike Hearn, "I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone." Three days later, on 26 April, he emailed Gavin Andresen the network alert key and wrote that he had "moved on to other things and will probably be unavailable." No later message from him sits in the published archives.

That is different from his last public post. The last Bitcointalk message under his name landed months earlier, on 12 December 2010. The April emails are the farewell most people mean when they say Satoshi disappeared in 2011.

Satoshi's exit at a glance

Last public forum post	12 Dec 2010 — Bitcointalk, Bitcoin 0.3.19 DoS limits
Last known source commit	15 Dec 2010 (SVN r202)
Last email to Mike Hearn	23 Apr 2011, ~15:40 — "I've moved on to other things"
Last known email overall	26 Apr 2011 to Gavin Andresen — subject "alert key"
Famous line	"I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone."
Primary published thread	Mike Hearn's archive at plan99.net

Two "last messages," not one

People often collapse Satoshi's exit into a single goodbye. The record is clearer if you separate channels.

Public. On 12 December 2010 Satoshi posted on Bitcointalk under the title Added some DoS limits, removed safe mode (0.3.19). It is a release note, not a farewell speech. The day before he had warned that WikiLeaks had "kicked the hornet's nest." His last mailing-list release note for 0.3.19 followed on 13 December. His last known repository commit is dated 15 December 2010.

Private. He kept answering a few developers into 2011. The published endpoint of that correspondence is the April pair: Hearn on the 23rd, Andresen on the 26th. Archives that collect Satoshi mail treat 26 April 2011 as the last confirmed date before silence.

So: last public words in December 2010; last known words in April 2011.

What he wrote to Mike Hearn (23 April 2011)

Mike Hearn, then at Google and building what became BitcoinJ, had been emailing Satoshi about locking coins as collateral and about nLockTime-style contracts. In the same thread he asked directly whether Satoshi planned to rejoin for code reviews or to step back from the limelight.

Satoshi's reply on Saturday 23 April 2011 answered that question and little else about his own plans:

I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone.

I do hope your BitcoinJ continues to be developed into an alternative client. It gives Java devs something to work on, and it's easier with a simpler foundation that doesn't have to do everything. It'll get critical mass when impatient new users can get started using it while the other one is still downloading the block chain.

The tone matches the rest of his mail: short, technical, no autobiography. He names Gavin Andresen as the person holding the project, then pivots to encouraging an alternative client. Hearn later published the full thread on his site.

What he wrote to Gavin Andresen (26 April 2011)

Three days later Satoshi emailed Andresen with the subject alert key. Andresen has published the text; it is widely treated as Satoshi's final known email.

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.

Three moves in one short note: push the story away from the founder myth, announce unavailability, and hand over the alert-signing key so someone else could still broadcast network warnings. By then the alert system could no longer force nodes into safe mode — Satoshi had stripped that power in the December 2010 0.3.19 work — but the key still mattered for signed status-bar alerts.

Andresen replied the same day. Satoshi never answered that reply in the published record.

Why April 2011 sticks

The famous sentence is not a manifesto. It is a hand-off: the protocol is open source, other people already ship the client, and the founder is stepping out of the loop. That is why the line travels. It is also why Whitepaper Day and the section-by-section whitepaper explainer matter more than any later identity rumour — the paper and the code outlived the mailbox.

Later claims of Satoshi posts (for example disputed 2014–2015 messages) are outside this article. We stick to the April 2011 emails Hearn and Andresen published, and to the December 2010 public post you can still open on Bitcointalk.

Where this sits on the early timeline

Satoshi's exit closes the opening chapter we already cover on the blog:

• 31 Oct 2008 — whitepaper emailed to the cryptography list
• 3 Jan 2009 — genesis block and the Times headline on our Genesis T-shirt
• 12 Jan 2009 — first person-to-person payment to Hal Finney in block 170
• 2008–2010 — sourced early timeline
• 12 Dec 2010 — last public Bitcointalk post
• 23–26 Apr 2011 — last known private emails

April is not a celebration date like Pizza Day or Whitepaper Day, but it belongs next to the other dated moments on our anniversaries calendar as the month the founder went quiet.