Mike Hearn

From Satoshipedia, the Satoshi Mail encyclopedia

Mike Hearn is a software developer who wrote to Satoshi in April 2009, while working at Google (“We use them here at Google for everything”), and kept corresponding with him until April 2011 (their emails).

Correspondence

His first email opened: “I read your paper on BitCoin with great interest. I found it a bit confusing though”. He asked how one chain could scale, and where the figure of 24 million coins came from (“Questions about BitCoin”). Satoshi's answer compared Bitcoin to the Visa network, which then processed about 15 million Internet purchases a day.

Their last exchange, in April 2011, contains Satoshi's line about leaving: “I've moved on to other things. It's in good hands with Gavin and everyone.” In the same email Satoshi hoped Hearn's Java client, bitcoinj, would keep developing (the email).

BitCoinJ

In March 2011 Hearn told Satoshi he had got “all the lawyers happy enough to release BitCoinJ under the Google name using the Apache 2 license” (the email).

Hearn published his emails with Satoshi on his website, and nakamoto-archive keeps copies.^[1]

In the archive

18 messages in 6 conversations with Satoshi.

• Questions about BitCoin 7 messages
• More BitCoin questions 4 messages
• Open sourced my Java SPV impl 3 messages
• Holding coins in an unspendable state for a rolling time window 2 messages
• [bitcoin-list] Does Bitcoin Crash in Windows? 1 message
• Lack of chargeback support 1 message

See also

• Departure of Satoshi Nakamoto
• Gavin Andresen

References

1. nakamoto-archive, “Complete archive of Satoshi Nakamoto's writings and productions”, GitHub. The README lists each source file with its origin, date and SHA-256 hash.

Primary sources

The messages and commits this article draws on, in Satoshi Mail and where they were first published.

1. Questions about BitCoin, Private email with Mike Hearn, 12 April 2009. Original source
2. Holding coins in an unspendable state for a rolling time window, Private email with Mike Hearn, 20 April 2011. Original source
3. Open sourced my Java SPV impl, Private email with Mike Hearn, 9 March 2011. Original source

Published by Tyler Howell for Satoshi Mail. Written with AI assistance from the sources listed above and checked against them. Last updated 22 October 2026. Spotted an error? Email itstylerhowell@gmail.com (how articles are made).

Categories: People · Developers · Correspondents