Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper turns 14 today

Satoshi’s invention, shared on the metzdowd.com crypto mailing list, not only solved a problem that had plagued computer scientists for years, but it also redefined the way people think about money. Moreover, as a side effect, Satoshi’s creation gave birth to a new digital economy with more than 13,000 crypto-currencies, now worth just over $1 trillion.

Celebrating the 14th anniversary of Satoshi’s bitcoin white paper

Currently, crypto-currency and bitcoin supporters are celebrating the 14th anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin white paper. The mysterious creator of bitcoin first introduced the white paper on the metzdowd.com crypto mailing list on October 31, 2008, at approximately 2:10 p.m. ET. This date marks the first time Satoshi shared the inventor’s vision and the first sentence the Bitcoin inventor uttered:

I have been working on a new electronic money system that is completely peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.

In the post, the creator of Bitcoin stated that the invention offers a number of different properties. The benefits of bitcoin include the prevention of double spending and there is “no currency or other trusted parties“, said Satoshi. The inventor also pointed out how bitcoins are minted via a “Hashcash-style proof of work“. Satoshi added:

The proof of work for generating new parts also feeds into the network to avoid double spending.

After presenting the main properties, Satoshi shared the summary of Bitcoin’s founding white paper with a link to bitcoin.org, where the document was hosted at the time. Satoshi did not communicate with the public again until four days later when the inventor released two more emails on November 3, 2008. Both emails were introductions to the bitcoin white paper, with a summary and a URL link to where the document could be read. Satoshi wrote a total of 16 emails (some responses to James A. Donald) in 2008 before the actual launch of the network on January 3, 2009.

Solution to the problem of Byzantine generals

On December 10, 2008, Satoshi’s last email before the network’s launch was a welcome message on the Bitcoin mailing list. After the network launched on January 3, 2009, Satoshi did not communicate via the mailing list until January 8, 2009, in a message titled “Bitcoin v0.1 released“. In this thread, the inventor of Bitcoin shared the very first version of Bitcoin’s code base when the creator stated:

Announcing the first version of Bitcoin, a new electronic money system that uses a peer-to-peer network to avoid double spending. It is completely decentralized, with no server or central authority.

It is believed that Satoshi may have shared the code base with others before the message was published.”Bitcoin v0.1 released“. It is also commonly believed that Nakamoto helped launch the network in those early days. It is assumed that the Bitcoin inventor mined between 750,000 and 1.1 million BTC before leaving the community in 2010. It is also speculated that Satoshi could have mined the cache of coins with a single PC.

In addition to the release of the white paper on Halloween 2008, this was the first time that academia and computer scientists received a document that solved the “Byzantine Generals Problem” or the “Byzantine rift“. He also presented the first academic paper showing how triple-entry accounting works, and Nakamoto knew it was a revolutionary invention when the inventor said on November 13, 2008:

The proof-of-work chain is a solution to the Byzantine generals’ problem.

Shortly after the launch of the Bitcoin network, the idea of creating an alternative crypto asset network was born. Fourteen years later, since the publication of the white paper, there are now more than 13,000 crypto-assets in the wild, worth US$1 trillion. There are now other types of blockchain and crypto-currency concepts, such as smart contracts, decentralized finance (defi) and non-fungible tokens. Of the $1 trillion in value within the cryptoeconomy, Satoshi’s invention accounts for nearly 38% of the current aggregate.