On Monday (31 October 2022), the crypto community around the world is celebrating the 14th anniversary of the release of Bitcoin’s white paper.
It was on 31 October 2008 that Satoshi released Bitcoin’s white paper, which was titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. The original goal for Bitcoin was to be “a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash” that “would allow online 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:
Hal Finney, the person person to receive BTC from satoshi, wrote eight days later that if Bitcoin one day became the “dominant payment system in use throughout the world”, each Bitcoin could be worth $10 million.
On 3 January 2019, the Bitcoin network went live with Satoshi mining the genesis block of 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 set in motion a revolution in finance with the rise of DeFi apps, smart contracts, and coin offerings, in addition to a payment revolution that is leading to central bank digital currencies.“
Here are a few reactions from the crypto community:
Interestingly,multiple 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 a few of the new entries in Guinness World Records:
First commercial Bitcoin transaction
Oldest cryptocurrency
First blockchain
Some of the other crypto-related new entries are
- Largest bitcoin fraud
- 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 watching this space with interest over the next few years, as the technologies that underpin crypto develop and find a wider range of applications… Researching this title involved not only figuring out how to describe what a blockchain is […] but also putting into context decades of cryptocurrency research and what made it different to any earlier projects.“
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