We Never See Nothing

What are the facts about the origins of bitcoin? Honestly, I don’t want to know who Nakamoto is nor do I think they should reveal themselves. What I really want is more information about the origins and very early development of the Bitcoin protocol. What do key, early contributing devs know? What do we know about the development process in the years leading up to bitcoin? The fact that Nakamoto remains anonymous also means we don’t get a lot of information about the earliest development of Bitcoin. We don’t have much of a record beyond the whitepaper, some emails/comments, and some short publications to understand how Nakamoto understood their own creation and the possible trajectories it might have. I know we have open source code and lots of great resources but what I really want are the thoughts and impressions from BEFORE bitcoin was at all popular or even heard of by more than just the most crypto-nerd of the cypherpunks and crypto-anarchists (basically up to the end of the first year of the main chain’s existence).

Lastly I want to congratulate Nakamoto on being cool as a cucumber and keeping the first bitcoins rooted to their spot. In trying to learn more about the origins of bitcoin we naturally look to the early blocks in the bitcoin ledger. A lot of sophisticated work has been done in this vein and we can speculate with meaningful accuracy what addresses definitively correlate to Nakamoto. These coins never move, but does anyone think they ever will? Is there any evidence of some kind of plan for Nakamoto to cash in parts of the earliest mined coins that stay completely still?

To give my own completely nonsense, lacking-in-evidence theory: my impression has always been that the central, early bitcoin core developers are jointly Nakamoto and that they purposefully maintain the image of a unified, anonymous figurehead since it puts less pressure on them and fuels the “P2P, bigger than any central authority” narrative that is bitcoin’s lifeblood. I then like to imagine that they have some sort of secret threshold crypto based scheme for transacting the bitcoin from the Nakamoto wallet(s) (the addresses associated with the earliest mining) as some red button they can collectively chose to press to cash in their billions to fiat (or whatever else we’ll be transacting when that day comes).

Thanks for any and all information!