Bitcoin whitepaper

Start here if you know nothing about Bitcoin beyond the price. A five-part guide to what a bitcoin is, who keeps the record, how new coins appear, and why no one can cheat it.

What Satoshi's design assumed about a fee-only future, and the documented debate over whether transaction fees alone can sustain proof-of-work security after the block subsidy ends around 2140.

Bitcoin Institute reanalysis of van Dorst's stylometric corpus for the five most-cited candidates. Finding: Szabo top at 4.67th percentile of 12,739 authors; 594 unnamed rank closer; corpus is noisy.

Hashcash's inventor and the first person Satoshi contacted. In April 2026 the NYT named him the closest stylometric match among 620 cryptography-mailing-list writers. The evidence, weighed.

On April 13, 2024, Bas van Dorst published Where is Satoshi?, a large-scale stylometric corpus comparing Satoshi against 75,000+ cryptography mailing-list authors and 70,000+ Reddit commenters.

Adam Back reflects on his August 2008 email exchange with Satoshi, his regret at not reading the whitepaper carefully, and his COPA v Wright testimony where the complete chain became public.

After the London High Court ordered bitcoin.org to remove the Bitcoin whitepaper, Cobra responded on Twitter with a critique declaring cryptographic rules superior to court-enforced ones.

Craig Wright sued bitcoin.org operator Cobra over Bitcoin whitepaper copyright. Cobra refused to reveal his identity, resulting in a default judgment ordering bitcoin.org to remove the whitepaper.

Cobra (also Cøbra): Pseudonymous operator and guardian of bitcoin.org, the website originally registered by Satoshi in 2008. Chose to lose a copyright suit by default rather than reveal his identity.

Cobra's response on X, posted hours after the London High Court ordered bitcoin.org to remove the Bitcoin whitepaper following Craig Wright's default judgment.

On February 22, 2021, Evan Hatch published Len Sassaman and Satoshi: a Cypherpunk history on Medium — the article that became the foundational case for the Sassaman = Satoshi Nakamoto hypothesis.

Timothy May, an Intel physicist who retired at 35, wrote The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto in 1988, co-founded the Cypherpunks in 1992, and stayed a skeptic of crypto hype until his death in 2018.

Tim Swanson's comprehensive interview with Ray Dillinger for the Bitcoin whitepaper's 10th anniversary. Dillinger reveals technical details of his code review, including the floating-point discovery.

Craig Steven Wright (born 1970): Australian computer scientist who publicly claimed to be Satoshi in May 2016. UK High Court (COPA v Wright, March 2024) found he fabricated evidence on a grand scale.

On May 15, 2015, the New York Times published Nathaniel Popper's Decoding the Enigma of Satoshi Nakamoto — a Digital Gold excerpt naming Bit Gold designer Nick Szabo as Satoshi. Szabo denied it.

Aston University Centre for Forensic Linguistics released Project Bitcoin (April 2014): a stylometric study under Jack Grieve naming Szabo as the most likely whitepaper author among 11 candidates.

Wei Dai's March 2014 LessWrong Q&A: why he never built b-money, his disillusionment with crypto-anarchy, and his reading of Satoshi's motives and background.

He conceived Bit Gold, and three of the four most-cited stylometric studies place him first. The evidence for Nick Szabo as Satoshi, weighed.

On December 1, 2013, blogger Skye Grey published Satoshi Nakamoto is (probably) Nick Szabo — the first public stylometric study naming Szabo as Satoshi, reported by TechCrunch on December 5.

Wei Dai LessWrong comments: Bitcoin's monetary policy has failed due to volatility, and he never sent Satoshi comments on the 2008 draft — regretting he could have dissuaded the fixed-supply choice.

Chinese entrepreneur (1986–). Translated Bitcoin whitepaper into Chinese (2011), co-founded Bitmain (2013), backed Bitcoin Cash with hashpower (2017), later founded Matrixport and Bitdeer.

Software engineer at Google (Maps, Earth, Gmail anti-spam) who contacted Satoshi in April 2009, became an early contributor, and built BitcoinJ. His Satoshi correspondence was made public in 2017.

Dustin Trammell's first email to Satoshi after running the Bitcoin alpha. Reports usage, mentions a public timestamp service, and asks about coin maturity (generated coins showing 0.00 credit).

The first known tweet about Bitcoin. Hal Finney posted 'Running bitcoin' two days after Bitcoin v0.1 was released, on January 10/11, 2009. He was the first known person other than Satoshi to run it.

Bitcoin's first block contains a Times bank-bailout headline — Satoshi's only personal voice inside the design, etched in the system's most permanent place. A reading of why he chose it.

Satoshi Nakamoto registered the 'bitcoin' project on SourceForge.net, establishing the first public repository and project page for Bitcoin's source code and releases.

Cryptographer and libertarian commentator who was the first to publicly respond to Satoshi on the cryptography list (November 2, 2008). His scalability skepticism prompted key design clarifications.

Bitcoin v0.1 reuses one cypherpunk primitive (PoW from Hashcash), borrows general CS components (Merkle trees, linked timestamping, ECDSA), and synthesizes the rest (UTXO, mining, 21M cap, P2P).

Editorial reading of Satoshi's relationship to cypherpunk, from three primary observations: he didn't know b-money, Wei Dai testified Satoshi was "not previously active," alignment with Hughes 1993.

Bitcoin chose a hard 21M cap; b-money (1998) proposed elastic supply; fiat runs central-bank discretion. The cypherpunk debate, Wei Dai's 2013 regret, and 15 years of cryptocurrency variants.

Reads the asymmetry between public attempts to identify Satoshi, the surviving material trail, and the persistent identification gap.

Unidentified individual or group who authored the Bitcoin white paper (October 31, 2008), wrote the software, mined the genesis block, and guided early development before disappearing in April 2011.

b-money is whitepaper reference [1], his Crypto++ shipped inside Bitcoin v0.1, and he was the second person Satoshi contacted. The evidence for Wei Dai as Satoshi, weighed.

Computer scientist and cryptographer who created b-money (1998), one of the earliest digital currency proposals, and the Crypto++ library. Satoshi emailed him before publishing the Bitcoin paper.

Before reading the draft, Adam Back points Satoshi to Rivest's MicroMint paper; a 2025 profile quotes him calling his failure to read the whitepaper carefully 'probably my biggest mistake.'

Satoshi thanks Adam Back for the b-money reference and reveals he was not previously aware of Wei Dai's proposal. Historically significant line: 'my ideas start from exactly that point.'

On his Unenumerated blog, Nick Szabo asks for help implementing bit gold, his 1998 design. No one responds. Six and a half months later, Satoshi publishes a whitepaper that never mentions bit gold.

Adam Back announces Hashcash to the Cypherpunks list — a proof-of-work postage scheme against spam, framed within the digital-cash discourse as a stop-gap or fallback for digicash.

Eric Hughes, a mathematician, co-founded the Cypherpunks in 1992, ran their mailing list, built early anonymous remailers, and wrote A Cypherpunk's Manifesto on March 9, 1993.

How a 1992 Oakland meeting became the Cypherpunks mailing list: the name, the remailers, the Clipper fight, the 1997 split, and the Hashcash and b-money posts the Bitcoin whitepaper later cited.