Satoshi Nakamoto and the 1,000 Days That Made Bitcoin

Seventy-five thousand years ago, in a cave in South Africa, holes were pierced in small sea-snail shells and the shells were threaded onto a string. In 1933, the president of the United States ordered the nation's gold surrendered. In 1982, a doctoral dissertation described a box that erases its own contents if anyone opens it. In 1994, the press release announcing the world's first electronic cash payment listed, among its uses, “…or just order a pizza.”

People have made money out of things whose cost of making could not be faked, and they have always let someone hold that money: the assemblies that set the value of shell beads, the countries that minted coins, the countries that gathered gold, and the banks. Money with no one to issue it and no one to keep its ledger was approached by David Chaum's electronic cash, Adam Back's Hashcash, Wei Dai's b-money, Nick Szabo's bit gold and Hal Finney's RPOW. Even so, no one finished it. What was missing?

In April 2008, a single line appears in a blog's comment section: “Anybody want to help me code one up?” No one answers it. Four months later, someone whose name appears nowhere among the pioneers shows up with code nearly finished.

Book 1 of the series. It tells the eve, from shell beads to the summer of 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto appeared, from the records of each age and the emails, papers and posts the pioneers left behind.

On August 20, 2008, an email from a sender with no name reaches the cryptographer who built Hashcash. The sender wants to check how to cite Hashcash in a paper about to come out. The name Bitcoin appears nowhere in that email.

On October 31, someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto announces an eight-page paper on a cryptography mailing list. Its tough readers doubted it: it would not scale, the bad guys had more computers, it would inflate. On January 3, 2009, a newspaper headline is carved into the first block. The network that had just started running was held up by the node of one collaborator. Coins that had no price get their first price from the cost of electricity.

And on May 22, 2010, two pizzas arrive for 10,000 bitcoins.

Book 2 of the series. It tells the twenty-one months in which one email with no name became money that runs on its own, out of its maker's hands, from the emails and posts of the people who were there.

Book 3 of the series. Coming soon to Amazon.