In August 2008, Adam Back received an email. An identity by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto asked him to look at a short paper describing a new electronic form of money: “Bitcoin”.

Back, one of the early “cypherpunks” into cryptography and online privacy, hadn’t heard of Satoshi. He responded by redirecting him to previous experiments in the electronic cash sphere (including his own, Hashcash).

Six weeks later, Satoshi submitted his white paper (a 9-page pdf) to a specialized cryptography mailing list. “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system,” he announced, “that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”

A week after Satoshi posted his Bitcoin paper, there were still only two responses. Both were negative. One computer security expert said it would be overwhelmed by hackers. Another said that the Bitcoin blockchain would quickly become too large to download.

In the weeks following, a developer named Hal Finney was the only defender of Satoshi’s plan, describing it as “very promising and original.” But he wanted to see the actual code, not just a white paper.

Satoshi sent Finney a beta version, and they ironed out some of the issues together. Then, in January 2009, Satoshi released the actual Bitcoin code to the mailing list.

In the first few weeks of the Bitcoin network’s life, the user base consisted of two people: Satoshi and Hal Finney.

Satoshi was “doing everything possible to sell the technology, responding quickly to anyone who showed the slightest interest,” writes Nathanial Popper in Digital Gold. But the network was going unnoticed.

Even Hal Finney despaired sometime at the future of Bitcoin; it was using up a lot of his computer resources to keep it going, and it seemed like CO2 was being released for no good reason.

Then Finney, Bitcoin’s only early promoter aside from its inventor, began showing signs of a debilitating degenerative condition, Lou Gehrig’s disease. Suddenly, other things were more important. Things went quiet for Bitcoin for a very long time.