Almost 14 years ago on Halloween, Bitcoin was introduced to the world by Satoshi Nakamoto when he shared a white paper.
Shared on the Cryptography Mailing List of metzdowd.com, the invention helped solve a problem that had been troubling scientists for years.
In addition, Satoshi’s invention also redefined the way people saw money and it spawned a digital economy that comprises of more than 13,000 assets and is worth more than $1 trillion today.
14th anniversary
Bitcoin and crypto supporters are celebrating the 14th anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper published by Satoshi Nakamoto.
The mysterious creator of Bitcoin first introduced it on October 31st, 2008 and was the first time that he had shared his vision.
He announced that he was developing a new peer-to-peer electronic cash system that did not use any third parties.
Bitcoin’s creator touted a number of properties of his invention, including the elimination of double spending.
He also highlighted the proof-of-work method of minting bitcoins. After he had introduced the properties, he shared the abstract summary with a link to bitcoin.org.
He did not interact with the public again, until he published two emails four days later on November 3rd, 2008.
The emails
The two emails served as introductions to the white paper and a URL was provided for people to read it. In 2008, a total of 16 emails were written by Satoshi, some of which were responses to James A. Donald.
This was before the launch of the Bitcoin network on January 3rd, 2009. The last email before the launch was on December 10th, 2008 and it welcomed people to the Bitcoin mailing list.
Once the network was launched, Satoshi communicated through the email list on January 8th in which he shared the first codebase release of Bitcoin.
He highlighted that there was no central authority involved because the peer-to-peer system was decentralized and free from double spending.
The inventor
According to rumors, the Bitcoin creator might have shared the codebase with others before publishing his post.
It is also understood that in the early days, Satoshi helped kick-start the Bitcoin network and mined somewhere between 750,000 to 1.1 million bitcoins before he left the community in 2010.
It is also assumed that Nakamoto may have used a single PC to mine the BTC tokens. The release of the white paper solved the ‘Byzantine Generals Problem’ for computer scientists and academia.
It was also the first academic paper highlighting how triple-entry bookkeeping would function and Nakamoto was fully aware that the invention was a major breakthrough.
This was evident from his post on November 13th, 2008 when he specifically mentioned that it could solve the Byzantine generals’ problem.
Not long after the launch of the Bitcoin network, the idea of creating an alternative crypto network popped up.
Today, 14 years later, the crypto market has become a force to be reckoned with and there are 13,000 crypto assets circulating the market with a value of more than $1 trillion.
