The Birth of Bitcoin: A Phoenix Born from the Ashes of the Financial Crisis.
Six and a half weeks after the financial crisis, on October 31, 2008, Satoshi released the Bitcoin white paper, which serves as the genesis for every single blockchain implementation deployed today and forevermore. In the concluding paragraph of his foundational paper, Satoshi wrote: “We have proposed a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust.”
By the time he released the paper, he had already coded the entire system. In his own words, “I had to write all the code before I could convince myself that I could solve every problem, then I wrote the paper.” Based on historical estimates, Satoshi likely started formalising the Bitcoin concept sometime in late 2006 and started coding it around May 2007. In this same time span, many regulators began to believe that the U.S. housing market was overextended and likely in for a rough ride. It’s hard to believe someone with such breadth of knowledge as “Satoshi would be working in isolation from what he was witnessing in global financial markets.
The day after publishing his white paper, Satoshi sent an email to “The Cryptography Mailing List” with a link to his paper. The list was composed of subscribers focused on cryptography and its potential applications. Satoshi’s email sparked a chain of responses.
On Friday, November 7, 2008, in reply to his increasingly passionate group of followers, he wrote: “You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography … but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. Governments are good at cutting off the heads of centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own.”24 It’s clear from this quote that Satoshi was not creating Bitcoin to slip seamlessly into the existing governmental and financial system, but instead to be an alternative system free of top-down control, governed by the decentralized masses. Such decentralized autonomy was foundational to the early days of the Internet as well, where each node on the network was an autonomous agent that corresponded with other agents through shared protocols.
On November 9, the Bitcoin project was registered on SourceForge.net, a website geared toward facilitating open-source software development. In response to a growing number of inquiries and interest on The Cryptography Mailing List, Satoshi wrote on November 17: “I’ll try and hurry up and release the source code as soon as possible to serve as a reference to help clear up all these implementation questions."
Then Satoshi went quiet for a couple months as Wall Street continued to crumble. The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 had done little to ameliorate the meltdown that ensued after Lehman’s bankruptcy. Passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush on October 3, the emergency act had established the $700 billion TARP. As a result of TARP, the U.S. government acquired preferred stock in hundreds of banks as well as massive companies such as AIG, General Motors, and Chrysler. The stock didn’t come for free, though. It took $550 billion in investments to stabilize those teetering mammoths.
In the opening moments of Bitcoin’s life as a public network, Satoshi made clear he was attuned to the failings of the global financial system. In the first instance of recording information on Bitcoin’s blockchain, Satoshi inscribed: “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout of banks,” in reference to an article that appeared in the British publication The Times on the U.K.’s likely need to assist more banks in staying afloat. Many years later people would realize that one of the most powerful use cases of blockchain technology was to inscribe immutable and transparent information that could never be wiped from the face of digital history and that was free for all to see. Satoshi’s choice first to employ this functionality by inscribing a note about bank bailouts made it clear he was keen on never letting us forget the failings of the 2008 financial crisis.
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