The research paper detailing the engineering and design requirements to enable the first distributed, uncensorable, electronic digital cash system to come to life was released 13 years ago. The Bitcoin white paper[1] publicized the long-sought resolution to the double-spending problem of all previous attempts to build digital cash.
However, contrary to popular belief, the invention of Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto wasn’t precisely an unprecedented construction. The quest for digital cash[2] had started many years before the Bitcoin white paper was published, and Bitcoin is more accurately seen as the culmination of decades of research and development. Satoshi brilliantly applied some tweaks and puzzled it all together to devise the Bitcoin network and its consensus protocol.
Bitcoin marvelously joins together[3] digital signatures, proof of work, public-key cryptography, hash functions, timestamps, block rewards, transaction fees, mining difficulty adjustment, Merkle Trees, and the concept of a peer-to-peer network run by independent nodes. This unique construction allowed the double-spending problem to be solved and the soundest form of money ever created to emerge.
Each of these pieces was built upon previous knowledge. The white paper cited eight of such prior developments, hinting at how the pseudonymous inventor arrived at the requirements for creating Bitcoin.
The first reference is “b-money[4],” where Wei Dai explores how cooperation could be possible without governments and trusted entities.
“A community is defined by the cooperation of its participants, and efficient cooperation requires a medium of exchange (money) and a way to enforce contracts,” Dai wrote. “Traditionally these services have been provided by the government or government sponsored institutions and only to legal entities. In this article I describe a protocol by which these services can be provided to and by untraceable entities.”
The paper’s three subsequent references
