The Timestamping Papers Bitcoin Cited, and What They Were Solving
The chain of hashes at the centre of the design was published as a way to notarise documents, not to move money.
Primary source
41pieces published
Fifteen years, piece by piece.
Grouped by era rather than by date, because a list ordered by when the writer got to a subject tells you nothing about the subject.
Timeline
what happened, in order, with dates that can be checked
Postmortem
something failed, and what the record shows about why
Explainer
a mechanism, explained so it is still true in three years
Primary source
one document, read closely and located
Profile
a person or an organisation, and what they actually did
01roughly 2008 to 2011
Origins
A paper, a mailing list and a client nobody was using yet. Almost everything from this period survives as a document, which is why it is the best documented era and the one most often misquoted.
How Do You Responsibly Disclose a Bug When There Is No Vendor
Standard disclosure practice assumes somebody can ship a fix to everyone, which is exactly what does not exist here.
Explainer
The First Businesses That Accepted It, and Why Most Stopped
Merchant acceptance is the most announced and least examined metric in this history.
Timeline
Difficulty Adjustment: The Feedback Loop That Keeps the Clock Steady
The network has no clock, so it built one out of a moving target.
Explainer
bit gold: Unforgeable Costliness as a Design Goal
bit gold asked what would have to be true for a string of bits to be expensive in the way a metal is.
Primary source
Hardcoded Checkpoints Were an Admission, and a Reasonable One
A checkpoint is the developers telling your node not to bother reconsidering the distant past.
Primary source
The Bug That Created Coins Out of Nothing, and the Fix That Rewrote History
The supply rule was broken by an integer overflow, and the repair required the network to abandon blocks it had already accepted.
Postmortem
The Supply Schedule Is a Rule in Code, Not a Promise in a Document
The cap is enforced by every node choosing to run software that enforces it, which is a different kind of guarantee than most people hear.
Primary source
b-money: A Short Proposal That Named Most of the Problem
b-money is short enough to read in one sitting and honest enough to say where it does not work.
Primary source
There Was a Key That Could Broadcast a Message to Every Node
For years the network shipped with a mechanism for a few people to display a message on everyone's screen.
Primary source
The Pizza Story Is True, and Almost Everything Said About It Is Not
The transaction happened, it is on the chain, and the version everyone repeats is mostly commentary added later.
Explainer
The First Transaction Between Two People, and Why It Is Verifiable
Most of this history rests on archives and memory, and a small part of it rests on a chain that anyone can read.
Timeline
Hashcash: What the Proposal Actually Said It Was For
The mechanism at the centre of Bitcoin mining was proposed to make email spam expensive.
Primary source
A Hard Fork Loosens the Rules, and Everyone Has to Move at Once
The mechanism is simple, the coordination is not, and the coordination is where all the history happens.
Explainer
How Something With No Price Acquires One
Before there is a market there are two people arguing about what a fair swap looks like, and everything else grows from that.
Explainer
The First Client Shipped Features the Whitepaper Never Mentioned
The paper and the code that shipped alongside it are two different documents with two different scopes.
Primary source
The Crypto Wars: How Strong Encryption Stopped Being a Munition
Before anyone could build public cryptographic money, publishing the code had to stop being a controlled export.
Timeline
A Soft Fork Tightens the Rules, and Old Nodes Never Notice
The defining property is that software nobody updated still considers the new blocks valid.
Explainer
Giving It Away Was a Deliberate Answer to a Real Problem
A payment network with no holders is a chicken and egg problem, and the first fix was to give the chicken away.
Explainer
The Release Announcement Read as a Product Launch
Read as a launch post rather than as history, the first announcement is strikingly ordinary.
Primary source
The Cypherpunks Mailing List as an Institution
The list had no institutional form at all, which is exactly why its output is hard to attribute and easy to misquote.
Profile
Rough Consensus Was Borrowed From a Culture With Nothing at Stake
The norm works well when the losing side keeps nothing, and badly when the losing side holds the asset.
Explainer
When Mining Was Something You Left Running Overnight
Mining began as a toggle in a desktop program and ended as a category of industrial real estate.
Timeline
The Genesis Block Carries a Headline, and That Is Almost All We Know
The first block contains a newspaper headline, which proves a date floor and very little else.
Primary source
e-gold and the Compliance Wall Every Centralised Issuer Eventually Hits
e-gold demonstrated that a centralised digital currency has a throat to choke, and that somebody eventually chokes it.
Postmortem
The Improvement Proposal Process, and What It Is Actually For
A proposal number is a filing reference, not a decision, and treating it as a decision has caused a lot of shouting.
Primary source
Hal Finney Ran the Second Node and Wrote Down What He Thought
Finney is unusual in this history because he wrote his reasoning down at the time rather than reconstructing it later.
Profile
How a Network With No Clock Agrees What Time It Is
The time in a block is a claim made by the miner, and nothing outside the network can check it.
Explainer
DigiCash: Correct Cryptography, No Distribution
DigiCash shipped a working product that almost nobody could spend anywhere, which turns out to be the harder half of the problem.
Postmortem
What a Maintainer Can and Cannot Do to a Public Protocol
The people with commit access have less power than their critics claim and more responsibility than they wanted.
Profile
What Running a Node Actually Meant Before Anyone Called It That
The first software did four jobs at once, which is why early instructions sound like they were written for a different system.
Profile
Reading the Bitcoin Whitepaper Section by Section
The whitepaper is short, and almost everyone who cites it is citing something they read about it.
Primary source
David Chaum and the Idea That Payment Privacy Could Be Mathematical
Chaum described the surveillance problem in electronic payments roughly a decade before most people had an electronic payment to make.
Profile
The Founder Left, and the Project Had to Invent a Way to Continue
The most consequential governance event in this history is somebody quietly not posting any more.
Timeline
For Two Years, a Web Forum Was the Entire Institutional Memory
One privately operated forum holds most of what we can say about the first two years, which should worry anyone who has watched a forum disappear.
Profile
What Was Actually Happening in Finance the Autumn the Whitepaper Appeared
The whitepaper appeared in a season when the phrase bank failure was on the front page most weeks.
Timeline
The Double Spend Problem, and Why Every Earlier Attempt Needed a Referee
A file can be copied perfectly and for free, which is exactly the property you do not want in money.
Explainer
Half of the Whitepaper's Bibliography Is About Timestamping Documents
The reference list is the least read page of the most read document in the subject, and it points somewhere other than money.
Primary source
The Bitcoin whitepaper does not contain the words everyone quotes from it
Open the file, search it, and most of the vocabulary that the last fifteen years attached to it is simply absent.
Primary source
02roughly 2011 to 2014
Early exchange
The first places to buy the thing, and the first places to lose it. Custody arrived years before anybody had worked out what custody meant.
Mt. Gox: the coins were already gone before the story was told
The exchange said a bug in Bitcoin took 850,000 coins in February. The chain says at most a few hundred could have gone that way.
Postmortem
03roughly 2019 to 2021
On-chain finance
Market structure rebuilt as public code: pools instead of books, incentives instead of intermediaries, and a new class of failure that nobody had a name for yet.
The constant product formula is not an equation, and k does not stay constant
The invariant everybody quotes is an equality. The one the code enforces is not, and the difference is where the money comes from.
Explainer