This year, Oct. 31 marked the 14th anniversary of the issuance of one of this century’s most consequential white papers — Satoshi Nakamoto’s “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” Its 2008 publication set off a “revolution in finance” and “heralded a new era for money, one that did not derive its value from governmental edict but rather from technological proficiency and ingenuity,” as NYDIG celebrated in its Nov. 4 newsletter.
Many aren’t aware, though, that Satoshi’s nine-page white paper was met with some skepticism initially, even among the cypherpunk community where it first surfaced. This reluctance may be understandable since earlier attempts to create a cryptocurrency failed — David Chaum’s Digicash effort in the 1990s, for example — nor at first glance did it appear that Satoshi was bringing anything new to the table in terms of technology.