All around the world cryptocurrency supporters and proponents of blockchain technology are celebrating the 13th anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper. The summary of the inventor’s creation was published on metzdowd.com’s Cryptography Mailing List on Halloween 2008, as it gave birth to an asset with a market valuation of over $1 trillion and sparked the creation of over 10,000+ cryptocurrencies that followed Satoshi Nakamoto’s innovative design.

Introducing the Proof-of-Work Chain: A Solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem

13 years ago at approximately 2: 10 p.m. (EDT), Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin white paper, a summary of the innovative network and native cryptocurrency that changed the world. The 12-part white paper starts off with an indented paragraph called an abstract which explains that Bitcoin is a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash [that] would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

When the paper was first published, academia and computer scientists worldwide were not aware that Bitcoin’s inventor 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 the pseudonymous member of metzdowd.com’s Cryptography Mailing List, 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 had also stated to Donald, a few days before, that the “proof of work chain” is the solution to the syncronisation problem and to know the global consensus view without having to trust anyone .

Triple-Entry Bookkeeping: Nakamoto’s Bitcoin Invention Has Forever Changed the World

Since then, Nakamoto’s paper has been the foundation of the Bitcoin network and all the other blockchains that have followed. Moreover, the white paper is leveraged in academia quite a bit 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 there hasn’t been another white paper as prolific and innovative as Nakamoto’s since its release on October 31, 2008. The paper literally evoked the next level in ledger accounting systems. Triple-entry bookkeeping, which is different from single- and double-ledger systems, offers a concept almost trustless if you remove the trusting of the autonomous system.

Bitcoin transactions can be pseudonymous. Users have the option to add privacy or not. The system is both transparent and private 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. This method is not possible due to the necessity of revealing all transactions publicly. Privacy can be maintained however by keeping the flow information anonymous

Just as the printing press transformed society and made it possible to learn quickly, the invention of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin has changed the world.

In the beginning, skeptics and bankers laughed at crypto’s infancy. They even attempted to stop its exponential growth. Today, the largest financial institutions around the globe are adapting to Nakamoto’s ideas and governments are working to create their own version of blockchain technology.

The white paper is now an important paper. It is available on the websites large corporations and city portals. It is cited as “the seminal work” in computer science. On Lex Fridman’s podcast at the end of April 2020, Twitter CEO and Square co-founder, Jack Dorsey, told Fridman the white paper is like “poetry.”

“I think the Bitcoin whitepaper is one of the most seminal works of computer science in the last 20 or 30 years,” Dorsey said.

Bitcoin.com News readers that are interested in reading the innovative Bitcoin white paper can read Satoshi Nakamoto’s famous paper in its entirety here.

What do you think about the 13th anniversary of the Bitcoin white paper? Please comment below to let us know your thoughts on this topic.

Image Credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Bitcoin White Paper,

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