Contemporary · North America · Technology

2008

Bitcoin whitepaper appears

October 31, 2008

An anonymous coder calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto posted a nine-page paper to a cryptography mailing list, describing a peer-to-peer electronic cash system without a central bank or any trusted intermediary. The first block was mined in January. Most readers ignored it. A new asset class, and a new ideology of decentralized finance, were quietly born.