"And then on April 23rd of 2011, sent his final known email to a developer named Mike Hearn. And the email said, and I'm quoting directly, I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone. And then he disappeared. He hasn't spoken since. Not once."

… He corresponded with the early developers who joined the project. He patiently answered questions, fixed bugs, refined the code, defended the design choices. By all accounts of people who interacted with him, he was absolutely brilliant, polite, and almost obsessively focused on getting the protocol right. And then on April 23rd of 2011, sent his final known email to a developer named Mike Hearn. And the email said, and I'm quoting directly, I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone. And then he disappeared. He hasn't spoken since. Not once. Not under his own pseudonym. not under any pseudonym anyone has ever verified, not anywhere. He just walked away. And here's the most extraordinary detail. In the early days of Bitcoin, when almost nobody was mining, Satoshi mined a lot of Bitcoin himself just by being there, just by being the only one running the software for stretches of time. A …