On October 31, 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Satoshi Nakamoto laid the foundation for an economic and social revolution.
On Halloween 16 years ago, during the Great Recession of 2008, a user with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published nine pages on the cryptography mailing list that would change the history of money. The Bitcoin white paper, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System“, was released on October 31, 2008, laying the foundation for what would become a decentralized digital currency system that would enable peer-to-peer transactions without the need for a trusted third party, such as a bank.
The technical document details a decentralized digital currency system, immune to central bank monetary policies and capable of operating without intermediaries. The timing of the publication couldn’t have been more symbolic: just two weeks earlier, the U.S. government had announced a $2 trillion bank bailout plan, yet another demonstration of the flaws in the traditional financial system.
The white paper precisely outlines Bitcoin’s network architecture, introducing concepts that would become pillars of the ecosystem. From the peer-to-peer network to elliptic curve cryptography (ECDSA), from the Proof-of-Work based mining mechanism to the public ledger called “timestamp server” (the white paper doesn’t contain the word blockchain) to solve the “double spending” problem.
That document of 2,736 words not only laid the technical foundation of Bitcoin but also defined its philosophy and objectives.
Nakamoto concluded the email stating:
“We have proposed a system for electronic transactions that does not rely on trust”.
However, the initial responses following the white paper’s publication were less than enthusiastic: there were several criticisms about the system’s non-scalability, the enormous amount of electricity that would need to be used, and the choice of inflation rate, considered too high by some users.
The first to respond was user James A. Donald who immediately highlighted the system’s poor scalability:
“We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.
For transferable proof of work tokens to have value, they must have monetary value. To have monetary value, they must be transferred within a very large network, for example a file trading network like BitTorrent.
To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, if implemented naively, requires each peer to have most past transactions or most recent past transactions. If hundreds of millions of people are making transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth – every peer must know all, or most, transactions”.
The Bitcoin white paper includes eight citations of previous works, including digital currency projects like B-money by Wei Dai and Hashcash by Adam Back. The most cited are Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, recognized for several works introducing the timechain concept. Adam Back is the only person mentioned who still works on Bitcoin today.
The document was written after two years of work on Bitcoin’s code by Satoshi Nakamoto.
