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Bitcoin white paper turns 13 years old: The journey so far

The Bitcoin white paper only has nine pages, yet it contained enough to change the world. Here’s how it came to be 13 years ago.
The 13th birthday of the Bitcoin (BTC) white paper has crept up just as the world continues to deal with..

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2 years ago

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The Bitcoin white paper only has nine pages, yet it contained enough to change the world. Here's how it came to be 13 years ago.

The 13th birthday of the Bitcoin (BTC) white paper has crept up just as the world continues to deal with a global pandemic, inflation fears, an astounding memecoin mania trend and growing institutional adoption of the cryptocurrency space.

On October 31, 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin white paper to a cryptography mailing list hosted by Metzdow. The Metzdow mailing list was run by a group of cypherpunks and was filled with ideas meant to create a form of digital currency: some of these have even been cited in the Bitcoin white paper.

Satoshi’s white paper came in a message titled "Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper," in which Nakamoto explained that his digital currency is fully peer-to-peer (P2P) and requires no trusted third party for a transaction to occur. Through a peer-to-peer network, Bitcoin solved the double-spending problem. Bitcoin also allowed network participants to remain anonymous and was secured through a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm.

At the time, the white paper wasn't received the way people would expect it to be, knowing what they know today. Only a handful of people saw Nakamoto’s email and replied with their thoughts and concerns surrounding Bitcoin.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Leo Matchett, co-founder and CEO of Decentralized Pictures, a non-profit organization supporting independent filmmakers, said that the Bitcoin white paper “is the genesis of a new era in monetary sovereignty,” adding, “Satoshi stood on the shoulders of giants and solved problems that those who came before could not.”

Matchett opined further that the white paper “was truly the beginning of a new era for monetary systems of the world” because it “brought forth the idea that decentralization has more value than centralization.” Indeed, the idea of Bitcoin attempted to solve numerous problems including counterfeiting, steep on-ramps and counterparty risk.

Running Bitcoin

After the white paper was shared on the cryptography mailing list, slowly but surely, discussion surrounding the document started growing, with the Bitcoin network being launched in early 2009. At that time, Hal Finney, a cypherpunk that worked with the PGP Corporation developing leading encryption products, was already involved.

Hal Finney is well-known in the cryptocurrency space for being involved in the first Bitcoin transaction and being the first person after Nakamoto to run a copy of the network through a node. After setting it up, Finney tweeted he was “running bitcoin.”

The cypherpunk, who tragically passed away in 2014 as a result of ALS complications and had his body cryopreserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, described his work with Satoshi in a forum post where he revealed he started mining BTC on “block 70-something,” and that after some correspondence, Satoshi sent him 10 BTC to test whether the network worked.

At the time, there was no demand for space on the blockchain, so the transaction was successfully processed with a 0 BTC fee attached to it. The 10 BTC were worthless at the time, but the transaction helped fix some bugs in BTC’s early days.

That first Bitcoin transaction made it clear that the network worked, and while there was still a lot of work to be done to get where it is today, it was a first step in the right direction. A year later, in 2010, the first commercial Bitcoin transaction would occur.

$600 million+ for two pizzas

On May 18, 2010 developer Laszlo Hanyecz created a post on the Bitcointalk forum offering 10,000 Bitcoin “for a couple of pizzas.” Hanyecz offered to pay another forum member the coins if they got him two large pizzas, which could even be homemade.

The post was met with skepticism, as 10,000 BTC at the time weren’t worth the cost of two pizzas, or were anywhere near it. Only on May 22, after a follow-up, did Hanyecz report that he “successfully traded 10,000 bitcoins for pizza.”

At the time and despite Bitcoin’s low value and the community’s small size, one user noted that a “great milestone was reached.” That day is now known in the cryptocurrency community as the “Bitcoin Pizza Day.”

The first commercial Bitcoin transaction led to the creation of an ecosystem now worth over $2 trillion and proved that Bitcoin has a number of use cases that need to be considered. For the first time ever, Bitcoin was used as a true medium of exchange.

A multi-trillion dollar industry

The cryptocurrency’s price would rise over time, partly because of adoption and partly because of speculators looking to profit off of its incredible volatility. In the midst of all that, new businesses were created in what ended up becoming a large asset class.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Miha Grčar, head of global business development at cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, said: “no one could have predicted the tidal wave of change unleashed by the publication of a 9-page PDF.”

The Bitcoin white paper, Grčar said, laid out a vision for a digital currency that can be used as a store of value and medium of exchange independent of centralized control. Per his words, the potential it has hasn’t been fully unleashed:

“It turned out to be a breakthrough of such historical importance and magnitude that even thirteen years on, we’re barely scratching the surface.”

Bitcoin, he said, instigated a “paradigm shift that now underpins a multi-trillion dollar industry” and showed the world there was a better way where “sovereignty, finance and individual freedoms all co-exist outside the clutches of corrupt outdated socio-economic systems ridden with insiders, cronies and backroom deals.”

As understood from the first commercial Bitcoin transaction, BTC’s value hasn’t always been clear. The cryptocurrency has gone through substantial crashes in its history and has been declared “dead” over 400 times by popular media outlets and analysts.

Bitcoin’s market cap is now above $1.16 trillion, according to Cointelegraph Markets Pro. While most wish they could have heard about the cryptocurrency in 2010 or 2011 to invest in it and build up wealth through that investment, most would have likely failed to see how big BTC would get.

Early Bitcoin investor Greg Schoen published, in May 2011, a now-famous tweet where he showed regret for selling 1,700 BTC for $0.30, after getting them when the cryptocurrency was trading at $0.06, as he could have sold his coins at $8 apiece. As one BTC is now trading above $61,000, his 1,700 BTC would now be worth over $104 million. A pity indeed. 

Bitcoin’s rise has been supported by a thriving industry filled with innovation that has already seen cryptocurrency exchanges start trading on the Nasdaq exchange and by institutional investors who recognize that BTC can be used to diversify their portfolios and hedge against inflation.

Earlier this year, El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender with the country’s Bitcoin Law officially coming into effect on Sept. 7. El Salvadorans can use the cryptocurrency through a wallet called Chivo launched by the government that uses the Lightning Network, a layer-two scaling solution.

Speaking to Cointelegraph, Javier Moro, chief product officer at Latin American cryptocurrency exchange Bitso, noted that El Salvador’s move was “rooted in hope for a better future for El Salvadorans,” and its success will depend on the spread of cryptocurrency-related knowledge in the country.

More is yet to come

Earlier in October, the first Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) was launched in the United States. The ProShares Bitcoin Strategy ETF began trading under the ticker BITO on the New York Stock Exchange. It became the second-most heavily traded fund on record in its debut.

In a statement sent to Cointelegraph, Ron Levy, CEO and co-founder of blockchain consulting firm The Crypto Company, stated that the Bitcoin white paper “laid the groundwork for what would become a decentralized industry beyond what anyone thought was possible.”

The next leap in this space, he said, are “clear laws and regulations around what can and can’t be done with crypto currency.” But, it’s obviously not clear how that may turn out, as all new technological breakthroughs face resistance from established mechanisms.

Brittany Laughlin, executive director at the Stacks Foundation, which bridges decentralized finance (DeFi) and the Bitcoin network, told Cointelegraph that Bitcoin has come a long way from just being a store of value, as it’s “now possible to build smart contracts on Bitcoin, welcoming the millions of BTC holders to the world of DeFi, NFTs and true ownership.”

Notably, Satoshi Nakamoto seemingly predicted that additional blockchains could use tokens, which they called “domain objects” at the time, to represent ownership of assets. Satoshi’s example was for a token representing the right to own a domain for a year.

As Grčar said, humankind has only begun scratching the surface of what Bitcoin and blockchain technology are capable of. So much so, that the developments we have today were seemingly thought of by Bitcoin’s creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.

The Bitcoin white paper has made the idea of a decentralized network viable and proved that even a short nine-page document was able to change the world in ways so radical they may be hard to comprehend even at this point in time.

While it isn’t clear whether more countries will adopt BTC as legal tender in the future, or whether interest for Bitcoin ETFs will wane, it appears clear that Bitcoin is here to stay and serve as both a store of value and medium of exchange, and that’s only 13 years after the idea was first introduced. Imagine what will happen in the next 13 years.

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate…

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4 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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Low Iron Levels In Blood Could Trigger Long COVID: Study

Authored by Amie Dahnke via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

People with inadequate iron levels in their blood due to a COVID-19 infection could be at greater risk of long COVID.

(Shutterstock)

A new study indicates that problems with iron levels in the bloodstream likely trigger chronic inflammation and other conditions associated with the post-COVID phenomenon. The findings, published on March 1 in Nature Immunology, could offer new ways to treat or prevent the condition.

Long COVID Patients Have Low Iron Levels

Researchers at the University of Cambridge pinpointed low iron as a potential link to long-COVID symptoms thanks to a study they initiated shortly after the start of the pandemic. They recruited people who tested positive for the virus to provide blood samples for analysis over a year, which allowed the researchers to look for post-infection changes in the blood. The researchers looked at 214 samples and found that 45 percent of patients reported symptoms of long COVID that lasted between three and 10 months.

In analyzing the blood samples, the research team noticed that people experiencing long COVID had low iron levels, contributing to anemia and low red blood cell production, just two weeks after they were diagnosed with COVID-19. This was true for patients regardless of age, sex, or the initial severity of their infection.

According to one of the study co-authors, the removal of iron from the bloodstream is a natural process and defense mechanism of the body.

But it can jeopardize a person’s recovery.

“When the body has an infection, it responds by removing iron from the bloodstream. This protects us from potentially lethal bacteria that capture the iron in the bloodstream and grow rapidly. It’s an evolutionary response that redistributes iron in the body, and the blood plasma becomes an iron desert,” University of Oxford professor Hal Drakesmith said in a press release. “However, if this goes on for a long time, there is less iron for red blood cells, so oxygen is transported less efficiently affecting metabolism and energy production, and for white blood cells, which need iron to work properly. The protective mechanism ends up becoming a problem.”

The research team believes that consistently low iron levels could explain why individuals with long COVID continue to experience fatigue and difficulty exercising. As such, the researchers suggested iron supplementation to help regulate and prevent the often debilitating symptoms associated with long COVID.

“It isn’t necessarily the case that individuals don’t have enough iron in their body, it’s just that it’s trapped in the wrong place,” Aimee Hanson, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who worked on the study, said in the press release. “What we need is a way to remobilize the iron and pull it back into the bloodstream, where it becomes more useful to the red blood cells.”

The research team pointed out that iron supplementation isn’t always straightforward. Achieving the right level of iron varies from person to person. Too much iron can cause stomach issues, ranging from constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain to gastritis and gastric lesions.

1 in 5 Still Affected by Long COVID

COVID-19 has affected nearly 40 percent of Americans, with one in five of those still suffering from symptoms of long COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Long COVID is marked by health issues that continue at least four weeks after an individual was initially diagnosed with COVID-19. Symptoms can last for days, weeks, months, or years and may include fatigue, cough or chest pain, headache, brain fog, depression or anxiety, digestive issues, and joint or muscle pain.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/09/2024 - 12:50

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February Employment Situation

By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000…

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5 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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By Paul Gomme and Peter Rupert

The establishment data from the BLS showed a 275,000 increase in payroll employment for February, outpacing the 230,000 average over the previous 12 months. The payroll data for January and December were revised down by a total of 167,000. The private sector added 223,000 new jobs, the largest gain since May of last year.

Temporary help services employment continues a steep decline after a sharp post-pandemic rise.

Average hours of work increased from 34.2 to 34.3. The increase, along with the 223,000 private employment increase led to a hefty increase in total hours of 5.6% at an annualized rate, also the largest increase since May of last year.

The establishment report, once again, beat “expectations;” the WSJ survey of economists was 198,000. Other than the downward revisions, mentioned above, another bit of negative news was a smallish increase in wage growth, from $34.52 to $34.57.

The household survey shows that the labor force increased 150,000, a drop in employment of 184,000 and an increase in the number of unemployed persons of 334,000. The labor force participation rate held steady at 62.5, the employment to population ratio decreased from 60.2 to 60.1 and the unemployment rate increased from 3.66 to 3.86. Remember that the unemployment rate is the number of unemployed relative to the labor force (the number employed plus the number unemployed). Consequently, the unemployment rate can go up if the number of unemployed rises holding fixed the labor force, or if the labor force shrinks holding the number unemployed unchanged. An increase in the unemployment rate is not necessarily a bad thing: it may reflect a strong labor market drawing “marginally attached” individuals from outside the labor force. Indeed, there was a 96,000 decline in those workers.

Earlier in the week, the BLS announced JOLTS (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) data for January. There isn’t much to report here as the job openings changed little at 8.9 million, the number of hires and total separations were little changed at 5.7 million and 5.3 million, respectively.

As has been the case for the last couple of years, the number of job openings remains higher than the number of unemployed persons.

Also earlier in the week the BLS announced that productivity increased 3.2% in the 4th quarter with output rising 3.5% and hours of work rising 0.3%.

The bottom line is that the labor market continues its surprisingly (to some) strong performance, once again proving stronger than many had expected. This strength makes it difficult to justify any interest rate cuts soon, particularly given the recent inflation spike.

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Spread & Containment

Another beloved brewery files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

The beer industry has been devastated by covid, changing tastes, and maybe fallout from the Bud Light scandal.

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5 hours ago

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March 9, 2024

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Before the covid pandemic, craft beer was having a moment. Most cities had multiple breweries and taprooms with some having so many that people put together the brewery version of a pub crawl.

It was a period where beer snobbery ruled the day and it was not uncommon to hear bar patrons discuss the makeup of the beer the beer they were drinking. This boom period always seemed destined for failure, or at least a retraction as many markets seemed to have more craft breweries than they could support.

Related: Fast-food chain closes more stores after Chapter 11 bankruptcy

The pandemic, however, hastened that downfall. Many of these local and regional craft breweries counted on in-person sales to drive their business. 

And while many had local and regional distribution, selling through a third party comes with much lower margins. Direct sales drove their business and the pandemic forced many breweries to shut down their taprooms during the period where social distancing rules were in effect.

During those months the breweries still had rent and employees to pay while little money was coming in. That led to a number of popular beermakers including San Francisco's nationally-known Anchor Brewing as well as many regional favorites including Chicago’s Metropolitan Brewing, New Jersey’s Flying Fish, Denver’s Joyride Brewing, Tampa’s Zydeco Brew Werks, and Cleveland’s Terrestrial Brewing filing bankruptcy.

Some of these brands hope to survive, but others, including Anchor Brewing, fell into Chapter 7 liquidation. Now, another domino has fallen as a popular regional brewery has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Overall beer sales have fallen.

Image source: Shutterstock

Covid is not the only reason for brewery bankruptcies

While covid deserves some of the blame for brewery failures, it's not the only reason why so many have filed for bankruptcy protection. Overall beer sales have fallen driven by younger people embracing non-alcoholic cocktails, and the rise in popularity of non-beer alcoholic offerings,

Beer sales have fallen to their lowest levels since 1999 and some industry analysts

"Sales declined by more than 5% in the first nine months of the year, dragged down not only by the backlash and boycotts against Anheuser-Busch-owned Bud Light but the changing habits of younger drinkers," according to data from Beer Marketer’s Insights published by the New York Post.

Bud Light parent Anheuser Busch InBev (BUD) faced massive boycotts after it partnered with transgender social media influencer Dylan Mulvaney. It was a very small partnership but it led to a right-wing backlash spurred on by Kid Rock, who posted a video on social media where he chastised the company before shooting up cases of Bud Light with an automatic weapon.

Another brewery files Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Gizmo Brew Works, which does business under the name Roth Brewing Company LLC, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 8. In its filing, the company checked the box that indicates that its debts are less than $7.5 million and it chooses to proceed under Subchapter V of Chapter 11. 

"Both small business and subchapter V cases are treated differently than a traditional chapter 11 case primarily due to accelerated deadlines and the speed with which the plan is confirmed," USCourts.gov explained. 

Roth Brewing/Gizmo Brew Works shared that it has 50-99 creditors and assets $100,000 and $500,000. The filing noted that the company does expect to have funds available for unsecured creditors. 

The popular brewery operates three taprooms and sells its beer to go at those locations.

"Join us at Gizmo Brew Works Craft Brewery and Taprooms located in Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Find us for entertainment, live music, food trucks, beer specials, and most importantly, great-tasting craft beer by Gizmo Brew Works," the company shared on its website.

The company estimates that it has between $1 and $10 million in liabilities (a broad range as the bankruptcy form does not provide a space to be more specific).

Gizmo Brew Works/Roth Brewing did not share a reorganization or funding plan in its bankruptcy filing. An email request for comment sent through the company's contact page was not immediately returned.

 

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