Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Has Lost Control Of His Email Address

Update (9/9): Motherboards Patrick McGuire reports that he has corresponded with the person or persons in control of the account. Meanwhile, when I attempted to email the address again on Tuesday morning, I got a bounceback: Mailbox unavailable.

Little is known about the mysterious creator of Bitcoin beyond his pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto, and the fact that he uses the email address satoshin@gmx.com. However, the latter may no longer be true. Reports are flooding in that the email account has been taken over by someone new, who is using his or her access to the account to email past correspondents of Nakamoto and to daisy chain into other online accounts associated with Bitcoins creator.

An administrator on the Bitcoin forum Bitcointalk.org claimed Monday to have received a strange email from the address. According to Bitcointalk user Theymos, the email said:

Michael, send me some coins before I hitman you.

This is not Nakamotos usual style. Additionally, graffiti was posted on the SourceForge page where Bitcoins code was posted by Nakamoto. According to a poster atHackerNews, it briefly read, Buttcoin is a peer-to-peer butt. Peer-to-peer means that no central authority issues new butts or tracks butts.That graffiti appears to have been scrubbed since. Meanwhile, a P2P forum account associated with Nakamoto, which has been inactive since it went dark in 2009 with one exception in March, posted a new message from Nakamotos account:

Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently you didnt configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin.

The assumption is that Nakamotos email has been hacked due to the compromise of its password, but based on the timing, there may be a different explanation. The Pennsylvania-based email provider, GMX, may have made the account available to a new user due to lack of use. With access to the email address, the new owner could have used it to reset Nakamotos passwords on the SourceForge site and on the P2P forum to post the claim that Nakamoto had been doxed, an Internet term meaning his identity has been outed.

This is occurring almost exactly six months after the person we assume is the real Nakamoto returned to the Internet to announce, I am not Dorian Nakamoto, the man Newsweekincorrectly fingered as the creator of Bitcoin. To make that posting, the person behind Bitcoin may have had to sign into the gmx.com email account. He may have left it dormant after that, as dormant as its been since 2011 when Nakamoto stopped corresponding with people after handing the Bitcoin reins over to developer Gavin Andresen. According to GMXs Terms of Service, any account dormant for more than six months can be erased. From the GMX TOS:

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Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto Has Lost Control Of His Email Address