On 31 October 2008, an anonymous figure posted a nine-page paper titled 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' to a cryptography mailing list. On 3 January 2009 they mined the first block, embedding a Times headline — 'Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks' — into the genesis.
For the next two years Satoshi corresponded with early developers, refined the software, and then, in April 2011, sent a final email: 'I've moved on to other things.' They have not spoken since. The roughly one million BTC mined in those early months has never moved.
Whether Satoshi was one person or many, alive or dead, remains one of the great open questions of the internet age. The protocol runs without them.
Bitcoin Whitepaper
Nine pages that changed money forever. The original 2008 paper describing a peer-to-peer electronic cash system — still the clearest, most radical thing written about what Bitcoin actually does.