The recent scandal on the bitcoin community is filling up the discussion section, I saw it thoughtful to flash our memory back to the root of bitcoin, the bitcoin white paper. He
@RIzzo shared this thread on his page on the 14th anniversary of bitcoin whitepaper, 31 October 2022.
Below are the 14 facts of bitcoin White paper1.
Coming in at 2,736 words, the Bitcoin white paper is shorter than the Magna Carta (3,550 words), the U.S. Constitution (4,543 words) and the most recent U.S. Infrastructure Bill (2,700 pages)
The average book is 70,000 to 120,000 words.
2.
The Bitcoin white paper generated a LOT of discussion when published.Moderators of the cypherpunk mailing list would even later intervene, telling Satoshi to take his ideas and incessant talk elsewhere.
3.
Bitcoin’s first public supporter was Hal Finney, but he wouldn’t respond to the email until over a week after the announcement on November 7.
Satoshi dealt with a lot of critics in between!
4.
The word Bitcoin only appears twice in the whole paper and only in the title.It’s widely believed Satoshi named Bitcoin fairly late in the process, and there is evidence he may have even wanted to call it “Electronic Cash” or “Netcoin.”
5.
Satoshi wrote the code for Bitcoin before he wrote the white paper. In later posts, he’d mentioned he had been working on Bitcoin for two years by the time the white paper was finally released to the world.
6.
The paper doesn’t include the word "blockchain"Rather, Satoshi calls the Bitcoin "blockchain" a “timestamp server,” noting its function (keeping time for the network) and what it sought to replace in prior digital cash systems (their central servers).
7.
Satoshi saw Bitcoin as an alternative to the "mint based model" used by older digital cash systems. This is a reference to prior work like David Chaum’s DigiCash, which was not peer-to-peer. Rather the network was divided into two tiers, banks and users.
8.
The most common word in the Bitcoin white paper is “block,” which is used a total of 48 times. Blocks are batches of transactions that have been timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain.
9.
The Bitcoin white paper includes 8 citations to past works, including attempted digital cash projects like B-money by Wei Dei and Hashcash by Adam Back.
Back is the only cryptographer mentioned who still contributes to Bitcoin actively today.
10.
The white paper says that "CPU power" is used to generate Bitcoin blocks. Today, that wouldn’t be correct to say (but it's not wrong).
Most generation is performed by specialized computers called ASICs. Both provide the "computational power" the network needs for operation
11.
Parts of the Bitcoin white paper are no longer being worked on by developersIn the paper, Satoshi makes the first “scaling proposal” for Bitcoin. Called Simple Payment Verification, it has since been abandoned as a viable solution.
12. Following legal attacks, the Bitcoin white paper is now hosted on websites around the world, including by the U.S. Government and the City of Miami.
The document is in the public domain and can be freely hosted.
13.
The Bitcoin developers keep an active list of the inconsistencies, changes, and inaccuracies in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper. Since its publication, we've learned more about how Bitcoin works in a live environment.
https://gist.github.com/harding/dabea3d83c695e6b937bf090eddf2bb314.
The first website to host the Bitcoin white paper, http://Bitcoin.org, still hosts the document. It is now available in over 40 languages, and you can read it at the link below
https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-paperAmongst these facts I'll say that number 4 and 6 got my interest; the word blockchain was not mentioned in the whitepaper rather it was called
Timechain and the fact that bitcoin was only mentioned twice. What do you think about the
simplified payment verification that got abandoned by developers? Also share the section that got your interest. Cheers.
