• Peer-to-peer payment system
• Counter-concept to traditional banking
• Nakamoto’s identity remains unclear
Bitcoin white paper published in November 2008
On November 1, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto wrote an email to the Cryptography Mailing List, a mailing list that discussed cryptographic technologies and their political implications. “I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that works entirely on a peer-to-peer basis, with no trusted third parties,” the unknown developer began his writing, before referring to his white paper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” which was released under the MIT license on the same day. On January 3, 2009, the Bitcoin network went live with the creation of the first 50 bitcoins and the generation of the “genesis block”, i.e. the very first block in the chain.
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Criticism of central banks and money houses
With his white paper, Nakamoto presented the concept for a digital currency at a time when the economy was still marked by the global financial crisis. Bitcoin was thus created as a counter-concept to traditional financial institutions, as the white paper shows and as the author of the scientific report subsequently emphasized several times. “The main problem with conventional currencies is the trust it takes to make them work. You have to trust the central bank not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. You have to trust the banks trust them to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles without being able to put a fraction of it back,” Nakamoto wrote in a 2009 P2P Foundation forum.
“Double spending problem” solved
Unlike common cashless transactions managed by banks, Nakamoto was able to solve the problem of double bookings with Bitcoin. “We propose a solution to the problem of double-spending in a peer-to-peer network,” the publication said. “The network timestamps transactions by enclosing them in a continuous chain of hash-based proof-of-work, creating a record that cannot be altered without recreating the proof-of-work.” Transactions can therefore be clearly assigned, multiple payments with one and the same token should not be possible.
Satoshi Nakamoto’s identity remains unknown
In April 2011, the Bitcoin developer said goodbye to the public with a short email to the early developers Martti Malmi and Mike Hearn, as reported by Sylvain Saurel of the In Bitcoin We Trust newsletter. “I turned to other things. [Der Bitcoin] is in good hands with Gavin and everyone else,” Nakamoto is said to have written. Gavin here means the software developer Gavin Andresen, who made positive comments about the cryptocurrency in 2010 and then joined the project. Nakamoto’s identity is still known There are repeated rumors on the Internet about who is behind the assumed pseudonym, but who the Bitcoin inventor actually is is still unknown fourteen years after the white paper was published.
Although nothing official is known about Nakamoto’s whereabouts, the developer laid the foundation for the largest cryptocurrency weighted by market capitalization fourteen years ago. Currently, all tokens of the cybercurrency have a total value of $347.5 billion, while one bitcoin currently costs $16,518 (as of November 14, 2022).
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