Early Bitcoin enthusiast and contributor Martti Malmi recently gained loads of attention for sharing his early email correspondence with the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.
However, Malmi's contribution to the Bitcoin Project goes far beyond just email correspondence alone, as he was one of the lead developers ever working on Bitcoin's repository code. Allegedly, he worked aside Satoshi himself, based on information gathered by independent researchers like Peter Rizzo, but exactly who is Martti Malmi? He is a Finnish computer scientist and software developer who contributed to the Bitcoin source code alongside Satoshi Nakamoto during its first two years. He is known for making the first Bitcoin-to-fiat transaction, selling 5,050 BTC for $5.05.
Martti Malmi's Early Days Involved in the Bitcoin Project
Who is Martti Malmi anyway, right? In short, Martti Malmi contributed to the Bitcoin project from 2009 to 2011, working alongside true crypto legends, such as Gavin Andresen and Hal Finney. Back in those days, he was still a college student and was one of the first people to openly defend Bitcoin's ideological arguments in favor of a separation between state and money on the website anti-state.org. Additionally, he argued against claims that digital currencies like Bitcoin had no true intrinsic value.
In addition, our Plasbit experts found out he was the first official copywriter of Bitcoin.org, the first website dedicated to the world's most recognized virtual currency, and the main developer to work on Bitcoin Core's 0.2 version, together with Satoshi Nakamoto. In 2008, he was the first person ever to realize a crypto-to-fiat transaction when he decided to sell 5,000 bitcoins for just $5.
Apart from launching the official Bitcoin website, he also created the first Bitcoin exchange with Nakamoto's support. So, if one asks who is Martti Malmi, some may refer to him as the first cryptocurrency exchange owner. Initially, he used 30,000 of his own bitcoins to function as the main Market Maker of the exchange, which led him to onboard thousands of users to Bitcoin. In 2011, Malmi allegedly spent 10,000 bitcoins on an apartment when Bitcoin was trading at about $30 apiece. This purchase functioned as one of the first major real-world Bitcoin use cases.
Additionally, extensive blockchain research shows that Malmi parted with over 55,000 bitcoins over the last couple of years, mainly to expand the Bitcoin ecosystem. Nowadays, these bitcoins would have been worth over 3 billion dollars, -- that's billion with a b. Malmi publicly stated that he puts most of his life savings into Bitcoin, even though he didn't think much of it in the beginning. At the moment, he serves the role of CEO at Sirius Business, a Decentralized Finance (DeFi) company focusing on decentralizing social media.
Malmi, until this day, goes under the name ''Sirius-m'' online and studied computer science at the University of Helsinki in Finland. After his graduation, he became a trainee at Siemens. At Siemens, he was mostly responsible for creating large parts and sections of the website using a content management system (CMS), which, according to researchers, involved a lot of copy-pasting.
Whenever Malmi wasn't extensively copy-pasting, he conducted extensive due diligence on peer-to-peer currencies. One day, while searching Google results for the ''p2p currency,'' he stumbled on Satoshi's official Bitcoin whitepaper, which he labeled ''the only true and completely decentralized solution out there.''
Marti Malmi’s First Email to Satoshi Nakamoto
Malmi was also greatly influenced by the Swedish Pirate Party, a political party that was ideologically focused on technical progress and the freedom of information. Allegedly, he emailed Satoshi Nakamoto stating something along the lines of ''I would like to help with Bitcoin if there is anything I can do,'' an offer which Satoshi gladly accepted back then. For this reason, it is speculated among industry experts that Malmi was the first person ever to join the Bitcoin network, although others suggest Hal Finney arguably joined it first.
Some of Malmi's first assignments included writing documentation and FAQ pages for the Bitcoin.org website to help people understand Bitcoin as a concept. Additionally, he set up the first Bitcoin community forum, which later became Bitcointalk.org, one of the biggest Bitcoin forums to this day.
At Bitcointalk, forum members discussed Bitcoin's future, including its vision, goals, and developments. Additionally, Satoshi asked Malmi to assist him in growing the digital currency's user base and community and raising its awareness among the general public.
During the same time, Malmi started working on a project called ''White Vector'', where he worked alongside a team that managed and developed a social media analyzing and monitoring product.
One of the most significant early-stage challenges both Malmi and Satoshi faced was correctly assigning an appropriate value to Bitcoin. Back in the day, there were no cryptocurrency exchanges, so deals had to be brokered online or in person.
Eventually, Martti Malmi assigned the first real-world value to a Bitcoin when he sold 5,050 Bitcoins for a mere $5,02. This equated to $0,0009 per BTC, which could hunt Malmi to this day, given that a single Bitcoin has shot up in value to around $70,000 nowadays, totaling Malmi's transaction to $350 million in today's money.
After Malmi completed Satoshi's initial assignments, his responsibility in the Bitcoin project increased significantly when Satoshi asked him to write C++ code for Bitcoin itself. In December 2009, Bitcoin v0.2 was released, which included support for Linux, completely compiled by Malmi. As we know now by leaked confidential emails, Malmi received a special thanks from Satoshi for this:
''Many thanks to Martti (Sirius-m) for all his development work.''
The Linux deployment was particularly important for Bitcoin's future at the time as it allowed the onboarding of a significant number of developers who otherwise wouldn't be able to join the project.
Malmi Early Bitcoin Mining and Buying a Studio with its Proceeds
Bitcoin mining wasn't as competitive back in the day as it is today, meaning that anyone with a simple laptop could mine BTC. By 2012, Malmi had mined more than 55,000 bitcoins with his laptop. He sold most of these bitcoins during the summer of 2012 when each bitcoin was valued between $15 and $30. With the proceeds, he bought a studio apartment in Helsinki.
Malmi himself recalled buying his Helsinki apartment at the age of 22 as ''quite a big deal for a young adult who never had much money. Probably the most expensive studio in the world by now, but at least I got more than two pizzas.'' The two pizzas obviously refer to Lazlo Hanyenz, who bought two pizzas for a whopping 10,000 bitcoins. What was the price of Bitcoin in 2009?
Malmi later admitted regretting selling his Bitcoin bag that early; however, he acknowledged that early Bitcoins set something in motion much larger than personal gain. In an interview conducted later in his life, he affirmed when he said ''you don't live forever. Pursuing something greater than yourself brings meaning to life.''
Luckily, Malmi saved at least some of his bitcoins, as he wasn't planning to do so. Only after Satoshi asked him personally to run a node to secure the Bitcoin project, he decided to keep some.
Looking back on the entire ordeal, Malmi said, ''Perhaps owing to Finnish culture, idealistic mentality, and lack of life experience, I never thought much about making money. It happened accidentally because Satoshi asked me to keep my node running so others could connect. Thank you, Satoshi.”
Satoshi left his final message on the Bitcointalk forum in December 2010 and sent his last email in April of the following year. Additionally, he left Gavin Andresen in charge of development at the Bitcoin project and told the community that they were in ''good hands.'' At this point in time, the global Bitcoin community had grown significantly, which, in turn, encouraged an experienced software developer like Malmi to take on even more responsibility. Some say Malmi was almost forced to work full-time on the Bitcoin project back then, and, as a result, he abandoned the project within a year after Satoshi.
However, he frequently visits the Bitcointalk forums and discusses new topics and developments with close friends and strangers alike, but he no longer plays a central role in the active development of Bitcoin. Instead, he is very thankful for having had the opportunity to work on such an important project for global finance and mankind.
Martti’s Connection With Adam Back - The Wei Dai Lies
On Wednesday, February 21, 2024, our Plasbit crypto experts noted that Adam Back functioned as a witness for the Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) and was cross-examined live in a court case against Craig Wright. As you might already be familiar with, this lawsuit basically covered three COPA pleadings: that Craig Wright is not Satoshi Nakamoto, that Craig Wright does not own any Bitcoin-related copyright, and that he committed fraud (upon the court).
Adam Back is the founder of Blockstream and the creator of Hashcash. He is also one of the first people Satoshi Nakamoto communicated with via email. Together with Martti, he testified in Craig Wright’s court case with previously unreleased emails with Nakamoto.
HashCash was initially introduced back in 1997 when it was first intended to be a way to prevent email spam by charging a small price to a user for each email sent. Millions of spam emails could become more expensive to send with this method and probably not be sent at all.
According to Plasbit experts, Adam Back suggested that HashCash would work to counter denial-of-service attacks, which Wright’s lawyer noted as integrating HashCash ideology with Wei Dai’s B-Money. As a countermeasure, Wright’s team presented the court with Adam Back’s original HashCash document, which circulated within the Cypherpunks mailing group for a while.
Adam Back then mentioned HashCash’s potential for digital currency when one of Wright’s lawyers asked whether the company’s initial goal of limiting spam emails would be framed as such.
Although many arguments went back and forth, from all claiming to be Bitcoin pioneers having communicated with Satoshi directly or actually being him, the UK High Court of Justice didn’t vote in favor of Wright’s claim to the Bitcoin whitepaper.
Craig Wright is not Satoshi - Crypto Open Patent Alliance (COPA) v. Craig Wright UK High Court of Justice
In February earlier this year, Craig Wright had to face both Adam Back and Martti Malmi in the COPA v. Wright court case held in the UK High Court of Justice. Although Craig Wright certainly had interesting things to say, to say the least, most of our attention went to the legacy emails written between Satoshi Nakamoto, Adam Back, and Martii Malmi.
As they wanted to assert Wright from authorship and copyright over Bitcoin’s original whitepaper, published in 2008, they also prevented the Australian entrepreneur from continuing his multi-year litigation campaign against Bitcoin educators and core developers.
Although it was more than a decade ago that Satoshi Nakamoto compiled the released emails by Martti Malmi, it was evidence enough, and he eventually made a good choice deciding to make his hundreds of personal emails with Satoshi public.
The emails proved that Malmi was able to communicate directly with Satoshi through email and IRC chat channels in 2009. For this reason, Malmi has more than enough reason to dispute Wright’s claim of being Satoshi. As a matter of fact, Malmi himself has more reasons to actually be Satoshi Nakamoto, according to our research.
Could Martti Malmi be Satoshi Nakamoto?
There are a few clues hinting that Martti Malmi could be Satoshi Nakamoto, including the fact that he has the technical ability and that the timeline fits perfectly. Malmi’s degree in computer science, combined with his work as a software developer and his two years of work on the Bitcoin project, prove that he has the programming ability to have created or co-created Bitcoin.
Added to this, Martti was working as a trainee at Siemens at the time Satoshi was developing Bitcoin. This indicates he probably had enough spare time to have been able to build Bitcoin in his spare time.
However, there is also some evidence pointing in the direction that Martti Malmi most likely isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto at all. First of all, each time someone asks Malmi whether or not he’s Nakamoto, he has politely denied it.
Secondly, it is believed Martti Malmi worked closely with Satoshi but wasn’t actually him. Unless he was playing 4D chess and replying to his own emails for two entire years, Martti just worked closely with Nakamoto in the early days of Bitcoin, with his main task being to grow the community and overall user base. For his contributions in this aspect, Satoshi acknowledged his work, giving thanks ‘’for all his development work.’’
AXE Project and Identifi
According to Martti, there are early adopters and early early adopters. Together with a group of highly skilled developers, he set to launch a new cryptocurrency called AXE. The project behind the digital token combines his Identifi online reputation management system with a decentralized database system called GUN. It has for long been his desire to decentralize the entire web, and this time, he might as well succeed.
The Identifi project aimed to decentralize the way we provide proof of identity online through the extensive use of blockchain technology and cryptography. However, to this day, it hasn’t launched anything substantial in this field yet.
Martti discussed with ERA CEO Mark Nadal (also the CEO of GUN) that governments can still blacklist Bitcoin miner’s IP addresses, and telecom companies, Google, Amazon, etc., can do the same or reroute our traffic. Because of this huge vulnerability, they decided to launch AXE.
On the other hand, Identifi will help decentralize the ecosystem further by offering a fully censorship-resistant identity layer. The goal is to create a fully decentralized web, including social media channels, where people can communicate with each other without any interference from third parties.
GUN, in turn, is an open-source blockchain database co-founded with Nadal. The most unique thing about it is that once a developer goes offline, all information is cached and then instantly restored during the next online session. However, the database is not yet ready for mass adoption, although it certainly has the capacity to do so in years to come.
As one of few Bitcoin’s core developers, Malmi had stopped working on Bitcoin a couple of years ago, stating that there were many skilled developers who could take his place and keep Bitcoin afloat by then. However, the AXE project, Identifi, and GUN gave him the energy needed to get back into the game.
Martti’s Stance on Practical Decentralization
Although Malmi is a vivid Bitcoinist, he is still skeptical of the promise of blockchain technology as it has been advertised recently. According to Malmi, blockchain technology, and decentralized finance in particular, is overhyped at this point, and when people don’t need a distributed ledger with no trusted parties, they don’t need a blockchain at all, meaning that blockchain technology should not be used as a buzz or hype word and only when seriously needed.
For this reason, he thinks ERA is going to be a game-changer as it plans to incorporate cryptocurrency into the decentralized web in the ‘’right’’ way. According to him, the project is also easily scalable, so apps built using GUN today are not nearly as large as the companies they hope to replace.
The Life of Martti Malmi in Short
In short, to answer the question: who is Martti Malmi?, he was a Swedish university student who reached out to Satoshi Nakamoto, stating that he would like to help with the Bitcoin project. After having been assigned a few tasks, his responsibilities grew, and he began to receive more elaborate tasks directly from Satoshi himself.
After having cashed out a significant amount of bitcoins, he went into early retirement for a bit before coming back with his AXE and Identifi projects. With these projects he aims to decentralize the entire web, including social media channels, using the digital token called GUN.
This will work using decentralized social media channels and tokens, including Proof-of-Identity login mechanisms that prevent companies like Google and Amazon from using client’s personal information and cooperating with the government without their consent.
