The Crypto Community Celebrates the 14th Anniversary of Satoshi’s Bitcoin White Paper

by James · October 31, 2022

On Monday (October 31, 2022), the crypto community around the world celebrates the 14th anniversary of the release of the Bitcoin White Paper.

It was on October 31, 2008 that Satoshi released Bitcoin’s white paper, which was titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. The original goal of Bitcoin was to be “a pure peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” that “would allow electronic payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.”

This is how Satoshi announced the release of this white paper on the Cryptography Mailing List:

1/10 years ago today (Fri 18:10 2008-10-31 UTC) Satoshi Nakamoto announced the creation of #Bitcoin to the cryptography mailing list. Satoshi’s creation is the most important innovation to money (itself the most important good in any society) in a thousand years.

A thread 👇 pic.twitter.com/22R1ZNMYE1

— Vijay Boyapati (@real_vijay) 31 October 2018

Hal Finney, the person receiving BTC from satoshi, wrote eight days later that if Bitcoin one day became the “dominant payment system in use worldwide”, each Bitcoin could be worth $10 million.

On January 3, 2019, the Bitcoin network went live with the Satoshi mining of the origin block bitcoin (block number 0), which had a reward of 50 BTC.

Dr. James Angel, associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told Cointelegraph:

“It has sparked a revolution in finance with the rise of DeFi apps, smart contracts and coin offerings, as well as a payments revolution leading to central bank digital currencies.“

Here are some reactions from the crypto community:

Today is the 14th anniversary of #Bitcoin white paper written by ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’.

Also in Japanese, ‘Nakamoto’ means ‘central origin’ and ‘Satoshi’ means ‘intelligence’.

Happy #BitcoinWhitePaperDay !

— Core Community (@SatoshiPlus_) 31 October 2022

Interestingly, several Bitcoin-related records appear in the 2023 edition of the famous annual reference book Guinness World Records (which was “known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as The Guinness Book of Records”).

Here are some of the new Guinness World Records entries:

First commercial Bitcoin transaction

Oldest cryptocurrency

First blockchain

Some of the other crypto-related new entries are

Biggest bitcoin scam
First Bitcoin transaction
First country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender
Most valuable cryptocurrency
First decentralized cryptocurrency

A Guinness World Records spokesperson told Cointelegraph:

“We will be following this area with interest over the next few years as the technologies underpinning crypto evolve and find a wider range of applications… Researching this title involved not only figuring out how to describe what a blockchain is. […] but also put into context decades of research into cryptocurrency and what made it different from previous projects.“