Bitcoin white paper turns 15 as Satoshi Nakamoto’s legacy lives on
Today marks 15 years since the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, shared the Bitcoin (BTC) white paper to a mailing list of cryptographers on Oct. 31, 2008 — a date also annually celebrated as Halloween.
“I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party,” Satoshi famously said in the opening sentence before linking the document titled: “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”
The whitepaper proposed a decentralized system that could facilitate peer-to-peer transactions which could solve the “double spending” problem often associated with digital currency.
It proposed to achieve this via a network of nodes to validate and record transactions through a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, launching just two months later on Jan. 3, 2009.
Satoshi’s computer science breakthrough came on the back of other impressive developments in the cryptography and e-money space.
The first reference cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper is Wei Dai’s invention of b-money, an electronic peer-to-peer cash system which never launched but nonetheless played a key role in Satoshi’s plans for Bitcoin.
Like Bitcoin, b-money proposed that participants of the system maintain a database of account balances, which keep track of the ownership of money. Transactions would be initiated and completed by a broadcast message to all participants, which would update the account balances of those involved in a specific transaction.
In many ways, it could be seen as a precursor to the nodes of Bitcoin’s protocol which keep a record of the constantly growing blockchain.
This process is one which requires proof-of-work — a form of cryptographic proof in which one party proves to others that a
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