Celebrating the Seminal Bitcoin White Paper Satoshi Nakamoto Published 13 Years Ago Today – Featured Bitcoin News
Around the world, cryptocurrency supporters and blockchain technology advocates are celebrating the 13th anniversary of the bitcoin white paper. The inventor’s creation summary was posted to the metzdowd.com crypto mailing list on Halloween 2008 as it spawned an asset with a market valuation of over $1 trillion and sparked the creation of over 10,000 cryptocurrencies that followed the innovative design of satoshi nakamoto.
introducing the proof-of-work chain: a solution to the Byzantine generals problem
13 years ago at approximately 2:10 p.m. m. (edt), satoshi nakamoto published the bitcoin white paper, an overview of the innovative network and native cryptocurrency that changed the world. the 12-part white paper begins with an indented paragraph called a summary explaining that bitcoin is a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic money [that] would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through through a financial institution.”
Reading: Bitcoin white paper anniversary celebrated
When the article was first published, little was known to academics and computer scientists around the world that the inventor of bitcoin solved a problem that had plagued computer scientists for years: the “Byzantine Generals Problem” or the “Byzantine fault”. Two weeks after Nakamoto published the white paper on Halloween 2008, he told pseudonymous Metzdowd.com crypto mailing list member James A. Donald the inventor solved the problem. nakamoto said on November 13, 2008:
the proof-of-work chain is a solution to the byzantine generals problem.
The benefits of Nakamoto’s paper were clear, and the advantages of triple-entry bookkeeping became apparent to people who studied the inventor’s paper and witnessed the launch of the network on January 3, 2009. Satoshi also told donald a few days earlier that the “proof-of-work chain is the solution to the synchronization problem and knowing what the globally shared view is without having to trust anyone.”
triple entry accounting: nakamoto’s bitcoin invention has changed the world forever
since then, nakamoto’s article gave rise to the bitcoin network and the myriad of blockchains that followed. Furthermore, the white paper is used quite a bit in academia these days, as it is referenced in many crypto network white papers and cited 17,201 times on Google Scholar. It is safe to say that there has been no other white paper as prolific and innovative as Nakamoto’s since its publication on October 31, 2008. It literally invoked the next level of general ledger accounting systems such as triple entry accounting, in contrast to simple accounting and double ledger systems: it offers a concept that is almost trustless, if we remove the trust in the autonomous system.
Bitcoin transactions are pseudonymous and users can add as much privacy as they want as the system offers both public transparency and privacy at its core. “The traditional banking model achieves a level of privacy by limiting access to information to the parties involved and the trusted third party,” the Bitcoin white paper details. “The necessity to announce all transactions publicly precludes this method, but privacy can still be maintained by breaking the flow of information in another place: by keeping public keys anonymous.”
just as the printing press changed society for the better and allowed people to learn without an apprenticeship and just as the combustion engine made travel much faster, satoshi nakamoto’s bitcoin invention is one that has changed the world forever.
In the beginning skeptics, bankers, and governments mocked and laughed at the nascent technology and in time they even tried to attack crypto’s exponential growth. These days, the biggest financial institutions in the world are trying to adapt to Nakamoto’s concepts and governments are trying to produce their own versions of blockchain technology.
See also: CFO Insights: Making change: Should bitcoin be on your balance sheet?
The white paper is now a very important document that is hosted on the websites of large corporations, city web portals and is cited as one of the “seminal works” of computer science. On Lex Fridman’s podcast in late April 2020, Twitter CEO and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey told Fridman that the white paper is like “poetry.”
“I think the bitcoin white paper is one of the most important pieces of work in computer science in the last 20 or 30 years,” Dorsey said.
Bitcoin.com news readers who are interested in reading the groundbreaking bitcoin white paper can read Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous article in its entirety here.
what do you think about the 13th anniversary of the bitcoin white paper? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
image credits: shutterstock, pixabay, wiki commons, bitcoin white paper,
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