On 31 October 2008, on an obscure cryptography mailing list, one Satoshi Nakamoto drops a 9-page PDF that is about to change the world: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. No fundraising, no buzzwords, no pitch deck. Just maths, cryptography, and an elegant solution to the double-spending problem that had been nagging the cypherpunks for decades. The source code appears on SourceForge on 9 January 2009.

The cypherpunks had tried before. David Chaum’s DigiCash: too centralised. Adam Back’s Hashcash: just an anti-spam system. Wei Dai’s B-money: never got past the concept stage. Bitcoin succeeds where they all failed: creating digital scarcity without a central authority.

On 3 January 2009, Satoshi mines the genesis block. In the block’s data, he engraves a message:

“The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”.

A cryptographic middle finger to central banks, a timestamp, and perhaps a clue to his motives. The 50 BTC reward? Unspendable. Bug or feature, we will never know. Bitcoin was born in the middle of a financial crisis, and that is no coincidence.

So who is this Satoshi Nakamoto? Fifteen years on, we still have no idea. A man? A woman? A group? An intelligence agency? Theories abound. Dorian Nakamoto, the poor Californian engineer hounded by journalists? Nick Szabo and his stylistic similarities? Hal Finney, the first person ever to receive bitcoins and a legendary developer? Adam Back, creator of Hashcash?

What we do know: Satoshi wrote in British English but coded on American hours. He handled cryptography like a pro and was fond of quoting Hayek and the Austrian economists. According to the Patoshi analysis, he mined around 1.1M bitcoins ($110bn), which have never moved. And above all, he vanished. On 23 April 2011, his last known email: “I’ve moved on to other things.” Then silence. Total. Final.

That disappearance is no small matter. By stepping aside, Satoshi gave Bitcoin its finest gift: absolute decentralisation. No founder to arrest, no CEO to bribe, no central figure to attack. Just code that runs. Gavin Andresen takes up the torch, other developers follow. The project becomes truly community-run.

But the 2009-2011 era is also the digital Wild West. Bitcoin is worth nothing, literally. The first trades happen on forums, by hand. The miners of the day are geeks, libertarians, the curious. They mine on their CPU, sometimes their GPU. One block every 10 minutes, a 50 BTC reward. Some pile up tens of thousands of bitcoins and forget them on an old hard drive. Others give them away, lose them, delete them.

Bitcoin Market opens in March 2010, the first real exchange. Then Mt.Gox turns up in July. Originally a site for trading Magic cards (“Magic The Gathering Online eXchange”), it quickly becomes the Bitcoin platform, handling up to 70% of global volume. The first black markets emerge. Silk Road causes a scandal, with nearly 9M BTC of cumulative volume before the FBI shuts it down. Bitcoin starts getting bad press. Criminals’ money, they say. As if the dollar had never bankrolled a cartel.

The Bitcoin wallets of the day were pure cottage industry. No Ledger, no Trezor, not even seed phrases. Just a wallet.dat file on your hard drive, with your private keys inside. Unencrypted until September 2011 and version 0.4, which finally introduced encryption. With no automatic backup.

Bitcoin Core (then simply called “Bitcoin”) generates 100 keys in advance, stores them, and prays your drive doesn’t crash. Some people print their keys on paper: the first paper wallets. Others jot them in a notebook, engrave them on metal, hide them in improbable places.

The random number generators of the time? A walking disaster. Insufficient entropy, predictable seeds, reused values. A script of a few lines could crack some wallets. Some of the Satoshi-era coins have already been drained through these flaws.

Most of the addresses used by early adopters start with “1” - the P2PKH format, for Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash. Simple, effective, but with limits we would only discover later. Each address is like a digital safe. The public key is the safe’s address. The private key is the combination. Lose the combination, lose your bitcoins. For ever.

It is in this context that our mysterious wallets were created, in April and May 2011, at the end of the Satoshi era and the start of something bigger. Bitcoin is worth about 1 dollar. Nobody imagines they are looking at future fortunes. These are just experiments, tests, proofs of concept of a newborn technology.

Until 4 July 2025, when 80,000 of these primitive bitcoins wake up. After 14 years asleep, the ghosts of the Satoshi era are back to haunt the blockchain. And they have things to tell us.