21 BTCBitcoin whitepaper
“Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” is the nine-page paper in which Satoshi Nakamoto described Bitcoin. It was sent to a cryptography mailing list on 31 October 2008.
What it says
The paper solves double-spending without a trusted third party: transactions are timestamped into a chain of Proof of work, and the longest chain is both the record and the proof of which history most of the computing power agreed on. It also covers incentives (new coins and fees for miners), simplified payment verification and privacy.
It cites eight works, including Wei Dai's Wei Dai announces b-money and Adam Back's Hashcash. 31 October is celebrated as Whitepaper Day.
From the Bitcoin Museum
The whitepaper (31 Oct 2008): Satoshi Nakamoto posts “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper” to the Cryptography Mailing List: “I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.”
See also
- Satoshi NakamotoSatoshi Nakamoto: Creator of Bitcoin (pseudonym), active 2008–2011. Wrote the Bitcoin whitepaper (31 Oct 2008), mined the genesis block and released Bitcoin v0.1 (8 Jan 2009). Handed the project to other developers in December 2010 and stopped writing in April 2011.
- Genesis blockThe genesis block is block 0, the first block of Bitcoin, mined by Satoshi Nakamoto on 3 January 2009. It carries a newspaper headline about bank bailouts.
- Proof of workProof of work is how Bitcoin decides who adds the next block: miners spend electricity on guessing, and a correct guess is easy for everyone to check but expensive to produce.
- Hashcash is announced28 Mar 1997: Adam Back announces “hash cash postage” on the cypherpunks list: a sender proves work by finding a partial SHA-1 collision, which is costly to make and instant to check.
- Wei Dai announces b-money27 Nov 1998: On the cypherpunks list Wei Dai points to his description of b-money: money created by solving computational problems, with accounts kept by pseudonymous participants.
References
- Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (2008) bitcoin.org
- Satoshi Nakamoto Institute: whitepaper and emails nakamotoinstitute.org
- satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org