On December 12, 2010, the member of the Bitcointalk forum under nickname Satoshi Nakamoto left his last message on the forum, after which he stopped communicating with the community.

In the early years of bitcoin's existence, its inventor, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, actively led the development community along the path of improving the project. Nakamoto's last post is dated December 12, 2010. Then he added the following message to the thread dedicated to updates on the bitcoin network:

“There’s more work to do on DoS, but I’m doing a quick build of what I have so far in case it’s needed, before venturing into more complex ideas,” Nakamoto said at the time. “The build for this is version 0.3.19. Added some DoS controls. As Gavin and I have said clearly before, the software is not at all resistant to DoS attacks. This is one improvement, but there are still more ways to attack than I can count. I’m leaving the -limitfreerelay part as a switch for now and it’s there if you need it. Removed “safe mode” alerts, ‘safe mode’ alerts was a temporary measure after the 0.3.9 overflow bug,” bitcoin’s creator added.

Satoshi Nakamoto faded into the darkness when bitcoin was valued at $0.20 per coin. Most of his forum posts related to technical issues, current challenges developers faced while working on bitcoin blockchain updates.

No one knows why the inventor so abruptly stopped communicating with the community, but in the weeks before his disappearance, he expressed his displeasure at the mention of virtual currency in the context of the Wikileaks scandal. Bitcoin was mentioned in a PC World article under the headline “Could the Wikileaks Scandal Lead to New Virtual Currency?”. At that time, Wikileaks faced a financial blockade by the US authorities, and since Paypal, Mastercard and Visa stopped serving the non-profit organization, Wikileaks switched to bitcoin donations.

According to Nakamoto's answers, he was allegedly annoyed by the attention that attracted him at that time only a nascent project.

“The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to Wikileaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.”

But Nakamoto's appeal was not heard on Wikileaks, and soon the non-profit organization began accepting donations in bitcoins, which did not go unnoticed by the media.

The identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is still a mystery.