Satoshi Nakamoto's Email Provider Sheds Little Light On The Hacking And Deletion Of Bitcoin Creator's Account

Satoshin@gmx.com no longer exists

Last week, the Internet was abuzz with news of the threatened unmasking of Bitcoins anonymous creator who is known only by the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. A hacker or hackers got into Nakamotos email account satoshin@gmx.com and announced plans to dox Bitcoins creator unless a ransom was paid. In an interview with Vice, a person with access to the address was vague regarding the details of how he got access to Nakamotos email account and what it was that he was able to pull from it, but he insisted throughout our conversation that he is 100 percent sure he has discovered Nakamotos identity. But since then. crickets.

Nakamotos identity has not been revealed, and the satoshin@gmx.com email account has shut down. Messages sent to it are now returned as undeliverable; Mailbox unavailable says the error message.

I havent heard anything [from the hacker], says Michael Marquardt, a.k.a. theymos, who was one of the first people to report that the address had been compromised. Maybe he was careless and didnt save the emails before GMX locked the account.

Thomas Plnnecke, spokesperson for 1&1, the Germany-based company that owns GMX, Nakamotos Pennsylvania-based email provider, says the company cant talk about what exactly happened with the account due to its privacy policy of not releasing information about an account holder to third parties. But he was able to generally address one of the theories floating around about how Nakamoto might have lost access to his account: That the account expired because it was inactive for 6 months, and that someone else took control of it.

Yes, according to our TOS weve got the right to terminate an account if it is inactive for six months, said Plnnecke by email. Six months ago, after being dormant for years, Satoshi Nakamoto returned to the Internet to post a message on a forum he used to frequent saying he was not Dorian Nakamoto, the man fingered by Newsweek as Bitcoins creator. The email affiliated with the forum the P2P Foundation is the GMX one as evidenced by the fact that the hacker was able to access the forum account once he or she had control of the email address through a password reset. So did Nakamoto access the email account six months ago to make his Dorian Nakamoto posting and then abandon it, leaving it to be terminated and reset by a hacker?

Plnnecke couldnt address that. But he did say that when an inactive GMX account is terminated, all its contents will be deleted along with the account. The person who got access to the satoshin@gmx.com account got access to its archive, and was able to forward old messages from the account to journalists and previous correspondents. So either the hacker did not get the address because it was made available due to GMX terminating an inactive account or a technical mistake was made by GMX when the address was released.

Plnneckesays that GMX does its best not to yank an account away from an unsuspecting user. While termination after six months of inactivity is the standard procedure for inactive accounts GMX allows additional time for the user to return and use the account, saysPlnnecke. During this time, we will also try to contact inactive customers, reminding them to use their GMX account again.

Satoshi Nakamotos email address is now deleted, but the mystery around its takeover remains intact.

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Satoshi Nakamoto's Email Provider Sheds Little Light On The Hacking And Deletion Of Bitcoin Creator's Account