I remember that my first encounter with peer-2-peer money was a bit like that of Andreas Antonopoulos, not paying it the attention I should.
I was studying Computer Science and Engineering at London South Bank University (I graduated in the summer of 2012) and I was studying hard but sometimes I would do very weird things like spending a whole day watching youtube videos of all of the hundreds of writers listed in a freebie magazine, called "Shortlist", that was given to me in the morning when I was going to uni.
This time, I was surfing the web in some blogs related to "intentional communities" and alternative styles of life. I remember I found this bizarre apparently very young man that I would certainly recognize if I saw one of his videos again, that was channeling messages from aliens, some very bizarre videos actually. And along with that, I found a blog, that I really don't know how to find out what it was, and in one of the posts I found out there was this experimental software for peer-2-peer money.
And I said to myself, "Wow, peer-2-peer money. How cool!".
And without spending too much time and realizing how important it would become, I just moved on, but still, I remember it well, I sent an email from my university email (since it was not my Gmail, I checked it, and I wouldn't certainly create an email for that specific purpose) to my dear uncle, to whom from time to time I would send emails of stuff I found particularly interesting that he could not know about, which is actually extremely hard, believe me).
The email was sent from my email, namely:
alexandd@lsbu.ac.uk and his email address ended in: @cix.pt (which used to be a very popular ISP and online email provider in Portugal). My best guess is that it was by the end of 2009, probably November or December, but could have been in 2010, I am actually not sure, and it is hard for me to figure it out). That was actually the last email I sent to that email address because what happened is that the email bounced back straight away saying that That email box was no longer in use.
The email was just saying something short like: "This is amazing, peer-2-peer money." with a link to that short blog post where it was mentioned.
When I graduated I didn't backup emails. There was not a simple way to export and backup and I didn't realize I would need anything from those emails, so I just looked a bit into it to see if there was really anything that I wanted to save, but quickly moved on and thought, well I will not actually need any of these. So I will move on.
Later I realized I actually would like to have this particular sent email. But it was too late. I contacted the uni but they always say the same, after a few months those emails are discarded and there is really no way to recover them.
My question is, most internet activities in the UK are all particularly scrutinized and logged by GCHQ, which is like the NSA of the UK, so it is extremely unlikely that an email sent from a university in London at that time could be lost. But still, I really don't know. Emails are very specific internet communication, using specific protocols like IMAP and POP3. So, what do you think, is that email really lost?
Any feedback would be very welcome. And of course, I know the email address I sent it to.
And actually most emails I would send him were from my Gmail. But for a bit bizarre reason this last one was sent from:
alexandd@lsbu.ukThen, I was many many years without contacting him. And even by that time, I would only send him emails, because talking with him on the phone was even less often. I talked with him on the phone in December 2006 and more recently, a few years ago and last year. But as you see, not every day.
Mainly because he is very much of a hermit and mysterious man. But his heart is definitely in the right place. And he is a very moral man. Probably the most intelligent, cultured and knowledgeable I ever met. And I have met many, believe me. He is probably the closest thing to the Richard Feynman of our time. And yes, he could be Satoshi Nakamoto. And has an extremely very high profile for that actually. He even studied Maths at Ph.D. level at Harvard at about the same time of Neal Koblitz (creator of the Elliptic Curves math) and by the time that William Feller, last referenced in the bitcoin whitepaper, (that looks a bit like how one would imagine a very wise
Japanese Satoshi), from Princeton University, received his National Medal of Science medal, around the Summer of Love.
Another thing, it is very unlikely Satoshi never searched or read on the web about the "Byzantine Generals Problem" before we had VPNs and Tor Browser. Now we have SyncThing which is even more powerful if you are careful and protect your files, air-gapped from the internet, with a password using 7z (from 7-zip.org), making them for that matter encrypted. So why no one would try to find who did actually look for it on the web before 2008?! Wouldn't that be the first thing to try?
But I only became really interested in Bitcoin, reading the whitepaper and everything I could on the web, by the end of August in 2011 (26/Aug/2011), when Ray Kurzweil posted about it on his email mailing-list that I used to receive. I think there was something else that triggered a bit of my attention before that, but don't know exactly what.
- remotemass
[EDIT: Actually, I just found out it was sent, for sure, after: 08/Oct/2009]
