"The first email Wright sent me was from 27 November 2007, when he was working for the Sydney accountancy firm BDO Kendalls and the two men were working on a paper on ‘Cookies in Internet Banking’. ‘Next year Dave, we come out with something big. I will tell you, but not now,’ he wrote to Kleiman on 22 December 2007. Kleiman’s reply told him what he was reading – ‘Sagan, Feynman, Einstein’ – and added: ‘I hope we make an event together this year so we can “break some bread” and have a casual conversation, instead of the brain dump middle of the night email exchanges we normally have.’ On 1 January 2008, Wright closed an email: ‘Nothing now, but I want your help on something big soon.’"

The subject of bitcoin came up – quite starkly – in an email from Wright dated 12 March 2008. ‘I need your help editing a paper I am going to release later this year. I have been working on a new form of electronic money. Bit cash, bitcoin … you are always there for me Dave. I want you to be part of it all. I cannot release it as me. GMX, vistomail and Tor. I need your help and I need a version of me to make this work that is better than me.’ Wright told me that he did the coding and that Kleiman helped him to write the white paper and make the language ‘serene’. With a protocol as clever as the one underlying bitcoin, you would imagine the work was complex and endlessly discussed. But Wright says they mainly talked about it by direct message and by phone. Wright had been fired from his job at BDO (the crash was taking effect) and had retired with his then wife, Lynn, and many computers to a farm in Port Macquarie. It was there, Wright says, that he did the majority of the work on bitcoin and where he spoke to Kleiman most regularly. The Satoshi white paper, ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, was published on a cryptography mailing list on 31 October 2008".

The Satoshi Affair.
Andrew O’Hagan in the #LRB:
30 June 2016
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n13/andrew-ohagan/the-satoshi-affair