Halloween and October 31 are quite synonymous. As people around the world are busy ‘witching’ around and celebrating the said occasion, the Bitcoin white paper has simultaneously turned fourteen years old.
Happy birthday, Bitcoin white paper!
On October 31, 2008, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin—Satoshi Nakamoto—released the Bitcoin white paper to a cryptography mailing list. The list was hosted by Metzdow and run by a group of cypherpunks.
Per records, the Bitcoin white paper was sent via a message titled “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper,” in which Nakamoto elucidated that the novel digital currency was fully peer-to-peer and required no trusted third party for a transaction to be executed.
The paper also chalked out the main properties by shedding light on the prevention of double spending, anonymity, the proof of work consensus mechanism, etc.
Years of research and development had gone into the creation of the white paper. Concepts like digital signatures, public-key cryptography, hash functions, Merkle Trees, timestamps, block rewards, mining difficulty adjustments, transaction fees, etc. were deeply delved into before forming the first ever digital currency. The white paper, notably, cited a host of such developments, outlining how the creator came to the requirements for creating Bitcoin.
The 9-paged “revolution”
It is interesting to note that Nakamoto had penned down the entire code before revealing the white paper. Also, he never used the term mining, per se. He had labelled the process as “generating.”
Alongside, the world blockchain was also not used in the Bitcoin white paper. Only phrases like “blocks are chained” and “chain of blocks” were opted for. As a matter of fact, the entire white paper has only 9 pages with 3192 words in total.
Opining on the white paper, founder of Indian crypto exchange WazirX tweeted that the same was not “not just an idea,” but a “revolution.” The executive further went on to thank Nakamoto and said, “Let’s continue to grow the crypto ecosystem.”