Key Takeaways:
- Bitcoin turned 15 today!
- The whitepaper still has several facts to baffle crypto enthusiasts.
- Satoshi easter eggs and other other surprises
YEREVAN (CoinChapter.com) – Bitcoin whitepaper is 15 years old today, minus the quinceanera dress! Investors are not too keen to trade on Halloween. So, while the markets are flat, let’s review the top 5 interesting facts about the Bitcoin whitepaper named “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.”
#1 Bitcoin is data, not money
According to the Bitcoin whitepaper, “We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures.” While it might sound self-evident, a digital coin is no money at all, but rather stored data, or information that can be transferred without the common trust-based model.
#2 Adam Back’s Hashcash influenced Bitcoin consensus
The whitepaper references several works throughout the document as important influences on Satoshi’s own vision. One of those influences was Adam Back’s Hashcash, a proof-of-work cryptographic system that was used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks.
First proposed in 1997, it was described more formally in Back’s 2002 paper “Hashcash – A Denial of Service Counter-Measure.”
#3 “Bitcoin” was not the intended name
Bitcoin should be the most common word on the whitepaper, right? Wrong! It is only used twice throughout the nine-page document. Notably, the whitepaper also lacks definitions such as “cryptocurrency” and “blockchain.”
It’s widely believed Satoshi named Bitcoin fairly late in the process, and there is evidence he may have even wanted to call it simply “Electronic Cash” or “Netcoin.”
#4 Whitepaper on macOS
It turned out that there is a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s original Bitcoin whitepaper, hidden within the internal files of macOS. It seems to have been there since macOS released its Mojave in 2018, without anyone realizing it.
The whitepaper supposedly stayed the files until Apple removed it in the developer release of macOS Ventura 13.4 beta 3. So, why was it there in the first place? A likely explanation is that an Apple engineer just wanted to have some fun and hide an easter egg where it didn’t belong. No one went looking for it, as the whitepaper was mostly unknown and didn’t include any sensitive information.
#5 Satoshi still anonymous
The real identity of Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto has troubled crypto enthusiasts for over a decade. In fact, there were many attempts to reveal it, ranging from reasonable to insane.
American journalist and author of “The Mastermind” Evan Ratliff stated in a 2021 interview that the person he believes to be the creator of the Bitcoin blockchain is the notorious international criminal Paul Le Roux. He is also the person who sold missile navigation software to the Iranian military.
Others skipped the research and claimed that Elon Musk, the chief of Tesla, SpaceX, and X.com, is Satoshi.
However, one of the loudest and most controversial theories pins the elusive Satoshi’s identity to Craig Wright, an Australian computer scientist and businessman, who publically claimed the role in 2015. Additionally, the Wright controversy spread beyond speculations and involved several defamation trials
The post Happy Quinceañera, Bitcoin! 5 interesting facts about the whitepaper appeared first on CoinChapter.
