CHANGING OF THE GUARD

By late 2010, Bitcoin was a two-year-old project that had evolved from a small cypherpunk experiment into a global network with a thriving community. There had been a few ropey moments along the way, but Bitcoin had made it past the most precarious phase of every project’s lifecycle and now had a genuine chance of standing on its own two feet. It would have to, because Satoshi was no longer there to support it.

For the past two years, Satoshi had done the brunt of the work, patching code, designing wallets, and guiding the community while trying to gently steer it away from major controversy. The early coders who assisted with Bitcoin’s development – people like Hal Finney, Martti Malmi, and Gavin Andresen – may not have known it, but Satoshi wasn’t just dividing up duties by enlisting their help – he was training them for a time when he wouldn’t be around.

By late 2010, Satoshi was confident that the Bitcoin network was stable enough to keep on producing blocks and that its community was strong enough to keep the flag flying. There was always more that could be done, and the departing Satoshi may have rued the ideas he’d liked to have implemented if only there had been more time.

But now he was leaving and the disciple he chose to receive the keys to the kingdom and the instruction to shepherd his flock was Gavin Andresen. The calm but competent Gavin may have lacked Satoshi’s brilliant vision, but in many other respects the two men were quite alike. If Satoshi was seeking an unflappable figure to coolly lead Bitcoin’s development – without letting the power get to their head – Gavin was his man.

Meet the New Boss

Gavin Andresen was likely the only person who knew that Satoshi Nakamoto was preparing to exit stage left. In September 2010, Satoshi privately told Gavin that he was getting busy with other projects and planned to hand over control of the code repository and the Bitcoin alert key (which allowed urgent network messages to be broadcast).

Possession of the alert key and repository access were essentially the “leadership badges” of the project, with the conversation marking Gavin as the heir-apparent. Indeed, by late 2010, Gavin was effectively acting as head developer, coordinating a small team of about five volunteer coders alongside Satoshi. In the six months or so he’d been working as a Bitcoin dev, Gavin’s contributions and technical competence had earned Satoshi’s trust.

On December 19th, 2010, Gavin posted on the Bitcointalk forum: “With Satoshi’s blessing, and with great reluctance, I’m going to start doing more active project management for Bitcoin.” It was a spotlight he hadn’t sought but one he knew he had to step into – at least for a little while.

From late December 2010, following Satoshi’s final post concerning the 0.3.19 build that had just shipped, Gavin Andresen was effectively in control. He knew what he had to do – steady the ship and break nothing – and together with his loyal developer crew, he set about doing just that.

But away from the terminal window, Gavin also did something else: he gently moved Bitcoin toward an open-source governance model. No more leaders: just community consensus. The benevolent dictatorship model that Satoshi oversaw had proven effective at bootstrapping the network. Now it was time for a more decentralised approach. With no clear leader – just a lead developer – Bitcoin would become even harder to kill.