Bitcoin Whitepaper

The exact date and time of the first publication of the white paper is Friday, October 31, 2008, at 7:10 p.m. German time.

There is an assumption that Satoshi specifically chose the day of Luther's theses because it symbolizes the reformation of the church and Bitcoin for the reformation of the monetary system.

The initial publication took place on the metzdowd.com mailing list.

The white paper is only about eight A4 pages long (+ one page of sources).

In total, the white paper consists of 3,219 words. (Depending on how footnotes etc. are counted, the number may vary slightly)

12 different topic sections are covered in the white paper.

The shortest topic section is “Timestamp Server” with just 80 words.

The longest topic section is “Calculations” with 559 words.

Satoshi only referenced eight other sources in the white paper.

Ten different people were named in the white paper. Including Adam Back, the current CEO of Blockstream.

Satoshi wrote the code first and then the white paper. He wanted to make sure that everything really worked and that he could solve all the problems in practice.

There are now 43 confirmed translations into other languages. In addition to German, these also include Chinese, Korean, Persian and Russian.

Neither the word “blockchain” nor “wallet” nor “mining” appear in the white paper.

The limit of almost 21 million BTC is also not mentioned in the white paper.

According to Google Scholar, the Bitcoin white paper has already been cited around 30,000 times in other works.