Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s old email address appears to have been hacked

Don’t take this as cause to run and dump your wallet and dismantle your mining rig, but there’s something fishy going on in the Bitcoin community today. An old email address from Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious figure behind the creation of the cryptocurrency, seems to have been compromised.

Bitcointalk.org head Theymos revealed on the forum earlier on Monday that he had received a suspicious email from an address previously attributed to Nakamoto on the gmx.com domain. “Michael, send me some coins before I hitman you,” the letter reportedly read.

Around the same time, the Bitcoin repository on Sourceforge was defaced to point to the troll website Buttcoin.org (har har). Finally, a suspicious post showed up on the P2P Foundation site where Nakamoto had previously participated. Posting under Nakamoto’s own account, the note read:

Dear Satoshi. Your dox, passwords and IP addresses are being sold on the darknet. Apparently you didn’t configure Tor properly and your IP leaked when you used your email account sometime in 2010. You are not safe. You need to get out of where you are as soon as possible before these people harm you. Thank you for inventing Bitcoin.

While there’s no clear answer to what exactly has taken place, Theymos’s theory is that a single troll got into the old email address and “made a couple of lame jokes.” At least for now, this isn’t likely to affect the security of the currency.

Adding to the mystery is the fact that little is known about Nakamoto, including whether it refers to a person or a group of people. Earlier this year, Newsweek started a media frenzy when it claimed to have identified Nakamoto, but the individual in question fiercely denied it in a statement.

(h/t InfoSec Taylor Swift)

Image credit: Antana / Flickr