Satoshi’s final words

Twelve years ago the last public messages from “Satoshi Nakamoto” were posted on bitcointalk.org.

The original Bitcoin discussion forum was debating using Bitcoin to shore up support for Wikileaks. Founder and Sr. Member “satoshi” was not on board with this, however, pointing out that Bitcoin, at less than 2 years old, was still “in its infancy” and there was much work to be done to harden the code against an onslaught of new users.

The second-to-last message from satoshi gave this foreboding prediction: “WikiLeaks has kicked the hornet’s nest, and the swarm is headed towards us.”

The next day, on Dec 12, satoshi’s final post began with, “There’s more work to do on DoS…” and then detailed a few code updates that were done to make the code more resistant to denial of service (DoS) attacks, “before venturing into more complex ideas.”

A number of DoS and distributed DoS attacks have happened against hosted crypto platforms, exchanges, and even bitcoin.org itself was hit with a DDoS ransomware attack last summer. But as the distributed network of Bitcoin nodes grows, the likelihood of an effective attack against Bitcoin itself becomes less probable, not least of all because of the high fees needed to move traffic through the network.

Today bitcoin is nearly a household name, several major corporations and even some governments have embraced it while others are still treading cautiously.