When asked who wrote the code, Dr. Wright said “most of it came from me,” though b-money creator Wei Dai had provided some of the cryptographic code after Wright had contacted him online.

Others made contributions in various ways, most notably Hal Finney who Wright credits with keeping the network going in January 2009 after it “fell over” several times in those early days due to bugs and update.

Others had reviewed and critiqued the code as well, including Mike Hearn and Gavin Andresen, as well as (Zcash founder) “Zooko” Wilcox and (Bitcoin Core developer) “Blue Matt” Corallo.

“Everyone has help. Was someone else Satoshi? No.” Dr. Wright has said.

Speaking of that 69 computer network, something (Dr. Wright has referred to as a Microsoft update) caused the machines to restart at some point between the Genesis Block and Block 1, putting nodes in the network out of sync. Wright frantically ran (and drove) between the distant locations over the next few days, buying expensive Microsoft licenses, installing a domain and workgroup and creating a forest and WUS server—a process that “took most of that whole week”. Dr. Wright gives this as the reason for the six-day break between Block 0 and the first mined block.

Hal Finney helped with the code to get it all running again, along with advice from Dave Kleiman. Of Kleiman, Wright said “I wouldn’t be sane or whatever else without him.”

The first Bitcoin transaction, between Satoshi and Hal Finney, happened on the 12th of January and Bitcoin v.0.2 was released on the 16th.

Who can remember what they were doing on January 9, 2009? Most of us working in Bitcoin today were blissfully unaware of that messy birth 11 years ago. And yet that combination of personalities and incidents produced something upon which many of our livelihoods, careers and indeed sanity rest.

You can probably remember being 11 though, and understand that you still had a long way to go from there. So does Bitcoin, which is about to undergo its second Genesis and set upon the path to adolescence and maturity. In the meantime, chalk down another year and enjoy the cake before getting back to work.