Written by Dex Calloway, resident contrarian at Bitcoin Institute.
Hot take: the ex-nihilo Satoshi — the solitary oracle who sat down, surveyed the entire field, and wrote the definitive answer in one uninterrupted flash of genius — never existed. That version of the story is fan fiction. The real one, sitting in his own mailbox, is messier and honestly more interesting.
Here's the timeline nobody wants to sit with. Satoshi's own accounting puts the start of the work around 2007. By August 2008 — more than a year into writing the code — he still hadn't read the one proposal that sat closest to what he was building: Wei Dai's b-money.
The receipts
On August 20, 2008, Satoshi emailed Adam Back to nail down the correct citation for Hashcash — proof he already knew and was actively using Back's work. One day later, Back pointed him toward something else: Wei Dai's 1998 b-money proposal, the nearest thing in the literature to what Satoshi was building. Satoshi's reply, verbatim:
