The thread. It’s the most cinematic coincidence in the case — and a clean lesson in following primary sources instead of vibes.
The hook: on 12 January 2009 Satoshi wrote about vanity addresses, “just by chance I have my initials,” and the very next day an address beginning 1CFB (1CFBdvaiZgZPTZERqnezAtDQJuGHKoHSzg) mined 50 BTC at 00:19:40 UTC on 13 January 2009 (verified on the public ledger). If “his initials” meant C-F-B — Come-from-Beyond — that looks like a signature.
The email settles it
Then you read the actual message — Satoshi to Hal Finney, Mon, 12 Jan 2009, 8:41 AM:
“You can send to my Bitcoin address if you want to… 1NSwywA5Dvuyw89sfs3oLPvLiDNGf48cPD” … “I just thought of something. Eventually there’ll be some interest in brute force scanning bitcoin addresses… Just by chance I have my initials.“
Satoshi names his own address in the same email — and it begins 1NS (“NS”), not 1CFB. The “my initials” line refers to the address he just pasted. By his own hand, Satoshi’s initials-address is 1NSwyw, full stop.
Points against the 1CFB link (decisive)
- Satoshi told us which address it was, and it wasn’t 1CFB. This is primary, first-person, same-email evidence.
- The letters are NS, not CFB — Satoshi Nakamoto’s own initials. The CFB reading was always a reinterpretation; the email removes the ambiguity.
- The 1CFB block is just someone’s vanity address. Vanity prefixes are trivially brute-forced; a different address that happens to start “1CFB” mining a block the next day is coincidence, not signature.
The only escape (and why it’s weak)
A die-hard could argue 1NSwyw was a decoy and 1CFB was Satoshi’s “real” secret address. But that requires Satoshi to lie to Finney about his own address in a private 2009 email no one expected to surface — to plant a fake while hiding the true one for a pseudonym (CFB) that wasn’t publicly tied to Bitcoin for years. That’s not evidence; it’s an unfalsifiable save.
Weight
Against. This was the site’s most fun coincidence, and the source document dissolves it: Satoshi’s initials-address is 1NSwyw, in his own words. We keep the thread precisely because it’s a clean example of testing a juicy claim and letting it fail. The CFB case does not need — and shouldn’t lean on — the 1CFB address.