Bitcoin white paper turns 15 years old as Satoshi Nakamoto's legacy lives on

“I am working on a new electronic cash system that is completely peer-to-peer, with no trusted third parties,” Satoshi said in an email dated October 31, 2008.

Today marks 15 years since Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, shared the Bitcoin (BTC) white paper to a cryptographer mailing list on October 31, 2008 — a date also celebrated annually as Halloween.

“I am working on a new electronic cash system that is completely peer-to-peer, without trusted third parties,” Satoshi famously said in the opening sentence before linking the document entitled: “Bitcoin: Electronic Peer-to - Peer Cash System.”

The whitepaper proposes a decentralized system that could facilitate peer-to-peer transactions that could solve the “double spending” problem often associated with digital currencies.

They proposed to achieve this through a network of nodes to validate and record transactions via a proof-of-work consensus mechanism, which was launched just two months later on January 3, 2009.

Satoshi's computer science breakthrough occurred alongside other impressive developments in the fields of cryptography and electronic money.

The first reference cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper is Wei Dai's invention of b-money, a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that never took off but nonetheless played an important role in Satoshi's plans for Bitcoin.

Like Bitcoin, b-money proposes that system participants maintain a database of account balances, which tracks money holdings. Transactions will be initiated and completed via broadcast messages to all participants, which will update the account balances of those involved in a particular transaction.

In many ways, it can be seen as a precursor to Bitcoin's node protocol which keeps track of the ever-evolving blockchain, a process that requires proof-of-work.

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