Thirteen years ago, Satoshi Nakamoto published a document that created a trillion-dollar market and offered greater financial inclusion and multiple use cases globally. So how has Bitcoin progressed during this time?
white paper
Satoshi’s white paper was titled “Bitcoin: The Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” and was shared on a cryptographer email list on October 31, 2008. Nakamoto’s article was accompanied by a message that read, “I am working on a new fully peer-to-peer electronic cash system without a trusted third party.”
The 9-page document explains in-depth the solution to avoid double-spending through “honest nodes”, which will mean “to accept valid blocks by trying to extend them and reject invalid blocks by refusing to work on them”. It also states that proof of work (PoW) ensures transparency by allowing the public to see the amount transferred, while ensuring that the identity of transacting parties is protected.
Besides, the term mining was never used in the document, instead Nakamoto referred to the process as “production”.
On November 2, 2008, James A. Donald was the first to respond to the document. “We need a system like this very, very badly, but your proposal doesn’t scale to the required size as I understand it,” he said.
Since its launch, Bitcoin’s whitepaper has been translated into more than 30 languages and has been cited an impressive 17,201 times in academic articles. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey referred to the white paper as “poetry” and said it was “one of the most seminal works of computer science in the last 20 or 30 years”.
How has Bitcoin performed since then?
Just two months after its release, the Bitcoin network was created after Satoshi mined the genesis block on January 3, 2009. BTC has since increased 70,000,000% to reach $66,930, bringing its market cap to just over $1 trillion.
The journey to these impressive numbers was not a smooth one. It suffered drastic price drops, government bans, and was rejected by various institutions. Still, it has remained resilient, overcoming its challenges of becoming a national currency in El Salvador, and appearing on the balance sheets of billions of companies like Tesla and MicroStrategy.
The ripple effect of the foundation laid by Satoshi Nakamoto led to the development of Litecoin, Ethereum and a number of other cryptocurrencies.