It’s 14 years since bitcoin was created

Today marks the 14th anniversary of the creation of the flagship cryptocurrency — on October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published a white paper entitled «Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Money System».

In the white paper, the Bitcoin developer described how the peer-to-peer payment system works. It is worth noting that Satoshi Nakamoto did not invent blockchain technology, but he did develop the first decentralized currency based on it.

«A fully peer-to-peer version of electronic money would allow online payments to be sent directly from one user to another, bypassing financial institutions. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are offset if a trusted third party is still needed to prevent double spending. We propose a solution to this problem based on a peer-to-peer network. It provides transactions with timestamps, connecting them into a continuous chain of proof of work based on hashing,» the white paper says in its preface.

It is not known for certain who is behind Satoshi’s name (or pseudonym). Nakamoto disappeared from the public space back in April 2011 and has not been seen since, so there is speculation that he is dead. There is also a theory that an entire development team is behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. Before his disappearance, Nakamoto claimed to be Japanese, born on April 5, 1975. However, he was very fluent in English, so many believed him to be a resident of an English-speaking country.

Interestingly, Satoshi Nakamoto has not spent a single bitcoin since 2009. There is no exact data on how much BTC is in the developer’s accounts, but according to rough estimates, it is about 1 million bitcoins (approximately $ 20 billion at the time of writing).

Recently, developer Jim Blasco found the official oldest known downloaded version of Satoshi Nakamoto’s code. The code that Blasco managed to obtain dates back to before Satoshi published his concept of virtual currency and made Bitcoin public. The previously lost version was found on the open-source software development platform SourceForge, where the Bitcoin project was registered in November 2008.