Earlier today, our organizer, , orange pilled 10 attendees at a Bitcoin event at White Oaks Ranch in northwestern Georgia, near #Chattanooga. Everyone there was primed & ready to learn about the future of money, & several started getting onboarded right away!

Happy Whitepaper Day! 📃 508 years ago today, Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. This kicked off the Protestant Reformation, and began the revolutionary process of separating church from state. Exactly 491 years later, 17 years ago, an individual calling himself "Satoshi Nakamoto" started another revolution with his own groundbreaking document. He sent it to the Cypherpunk mailing list, announcing that he had "been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party," which he called Bitcoin. The 8-page document attached to the email, the Bitcoin Whitepaper, explained how Bitcoin worked, so the Cypherpunks—a group of programmers who used code to fight for privacy and freedom—could examine it and give him their feedback. This was very timely, as it arrived on the heels of the financial crisis of 2008, when the general public was starting to see the need for something like Bitcoin. For years, the Cypherpunks had tried unsuccessfully to create a hard, digital money that no one could control, so the Bitcoin Whitepaper was initially met with some skepticism. But a few thought it looked promising, so they read the Whitepaper and discussed it with Satoshi. He and some of the Cypherpunks started running Bitcoin's protocol the following January, and the world has never been the same since! For 17 years (and counting!), Bitcoin has attracted freedom-minded individuals, businesses, and even nations. Satoshi was last heard from in 2011, when he left the Bitcoin protocol in the hands of its users, and his roughly 1 million coins remain untouched to this day. The price for a whole coin has reached $126k, with a total market cap of over $2.5 trillion, and it's still just getting started! Much more importantly, millions of people around the world have escaped tyranny in all its forms, storing their time and energy in a money that can't be debased, censored, seized, or corrupted. If you haven't read the Whitepaper that started it all, then you really should! It can be difficult to understand, though, so below you'll find a simple (though lengthy!) explanation of it, one section at a time. Don't feel like you have to read it all in one sitting, but on the other hand, what better day to say you've read (and now understand) the Bitcoin Whitepaper than Whitepaper Day? Ready? Let's go! The title, *Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System*, captures Bitcoin’s core idea: digital money sent directly between people, like handing over cash, without banks. “Peer-to-peer” means it has no middleman, making it faster, cheaper, and private. Satoshi Nakamoto created it to avoid the need to trust institutions, which have long histories that are "full of breaches of that trust." The Abstract explains how Bitcoin works. Digital signatures verify transactions, but preventing “double-spending” (spending the same money twice, or being able to copy-paste your digital money) is key. Bitcoin’s network timestamps transactions in a shared ledger using proof-of-work, which works like a massive lottery. Honest computers with more power keep the network safe, and anyone can join or leave freely, keeping Bitcoin open and secure. The Introduction explains why we need Bitcoin. Online payments rely on banks or companies as trusted middlemen, but this system has flaws: reversible transactions cause disputes, raise costs, and make small payments impractical. Merchants face fraud risks, needing extra customer info, and some fraud is accepted. Cash works in person—no middleman, no reversals—but online, there’s no equivalent without trust. Bitcoin’s solution is a payment system using cryptography, not trust, letting people transact directly. Transactions are hard to reverse, protecting sellers, while escrow can protect buyers. To eliminate the possibility of double-spending, Bitcoin uses a peer-to-peer network with a timestamped ledger, secured by proof-of-work. As long as honest computers outpower attackers, it stays safe and open. The Transactions section describes a bitcoin (the asset) as a chain of digital signatures, like a digital receipt passed between owners. To send a bitcoin, you sign a unique encoded version (a "hash") of the prior transaction and the recipient’s public key, adding it to the coin’s history. The recipient verifies these signatures to confirm ownership. The diagram illustrates this: boxes for each transaction, linked by signatures, showing the coin’s clear, verifiable path. The problem is with preventing double-spending—using the same coin twice. A trusted authority, like a mint, could check transactions, but that’s centralized, like a bank. Bitcoin solves this by making transactions public. To stop double-spending, the network agrees on one transaction history via a timestamped ledger. The recipient needs proof most nodes confirmed the transaction was first, ensuring security without a middleman. The part about the Timestamp Server explains how Bitcoin orders transactions using a timestamp server. It creates a unique code (a hash) for a group of transactions, called a block, and shares it publicly, proving the transactions existed at that point in time. Each block’s hash includes the prior block’s hash, thus forming a chain that gets harder to undo over time. The diagram shows blocks as boxes, linked by hashes, creating a secure, unchangeable transaction record without a central, trusted authority. Part 4, Proof-of-Work, explains how Bitcoin secures its chain of transactions with proof-of-work, based on an older idea called Hashcash. Computers rapidly guess a lot of really big numbers, like a lottery, until one finds a value that, hashed with SHA-256, starts with a predetermined number of zeros. This takes a lot of energy but is easy to verify. The diagram shows a block with a “nonce” adjusted until the hash works, locking it in. Changing a block means redoing its work and all blocks after, making tampering basically impossible. Proof-of-work ensures fair network decisions. Instead of one vote per IP, which can be cheated, it’s one vote per CPU. The longest chain, with the most proof-of-work, is the true history. Honest computers with more power grow the chain fastest, beating any would-be attackers. Altering a block requires redoing all the work and catching up, which gets harder as more blocks are added after it. The difficulty in adding new blocks adjusts to keep rare of new blocks steady, despite faster hardware or varying participation. The Network section explains how Bitcoin’s system keeps transactions secure and consistent. New transactions are sent to all nodes (these days, known as miners), which group them into blocks. Each node/miner expends a lot of energy to guess a correct number for its block, and shares it with the whole network. Other nodes verify the block’s transactions are valid and unspent before accepting it. They show acceptance by working on the next block, linking it to the accepted block’s hash. Nodes follow the longest chain as Bitcoin's true history. If two nodes broadcast different blocks at once, nodes work on the first received but keep the other in case it's version of the chain grows longer. When one branch extends, nodes switch to that as the source of truth. Transactions and blocks don’t need to reach every node; just enough to ensure inclusion. If a node misses a block, it can request it later, keeping the network decentralized and strong. The part about the Incentive to run Bitcoin explains how Bitcoin rewards nodes (miners) to keep the network going. Each block’s first transaction unlocks new bitcoin for the miner who completes the proof-of-work, like gold miners digging for gold. This encourages miners to use CPU power and electricity while distributing bitcoins without a central authority. Gradually, as all the sats are mined, rewards will shift at first primarily to transaction fees, and then exclusively, thereby preventing endless inflation. This system incentivizes honesty: a greedy attacker with more computing power than honest miners could try to cheat by making a single double-spend, but it’s more profitable to follow the rules, earn new coins, and protect the system’s value, including their own wealth. The Reclaiming Disk Space section explains how Bitcoin saves storage. Once a coin’s latest transaction is secured by enough blocks, older spent transactions can be deleted. Transactions are hashed in what's called a "Merkle Tree" (a way to bundle all transaction hashes into one single "root" hash, like a summary), with only the root hash in the block, as shown in diagrams depicting transactions hashed into a tree, then pruned, keeping the block’s hash intact. This compacts old blocks, saving storage space. A block’s header, without transactions, is only about 80 bytes. With blocks created every 10 minutes on average, that’s roughly 4.2MB of data per year. In 2008, computers typically had 2GB of RAM, and with storage growing fast, keeping these headers in memory isn’t a problem, ensuring Bitcoin’s system stays efficient and manageable. The Simplified Payment Verification part shows how to check Bitcoin payments without a full network node. A user keeps block headers from the longest proof-of-work chain, gotten by querying nodes/miners, and uses a Merkle branch—shown in a diagram as a path linking a transaction to its block’s timestamp—to confirm network acceptance. Later blocks solidify this. It works if honest nodes dominate but is vulnerable if an attacker overpowers the network with fake transactions. Alerts from nodes about invalid blocks can prompt software to check the full block. Businesses with frequent payments may run full nodes for faster, more secure verification, ensuring reliability without full network dependence. The part called Combining and Splitting Value explains how Bitcoin simplifies transactions. Instead of separate transactions for every sat, you can combine or split value in one go, using one input from a larger amount or multiple smaller inputs, with up to two outputs: the payment itself and the change from it. The diagram shows inputs merging into outputs, streamlining transfers. This setup avoids issues with transactions depending on many others, known as fan-out transactions. Bitcoin doesn’t need a complete standalone history for each transaction, making the system efficient and practical for users sending any amount without creating a mess of separate transactions. The Privacy part explains how Bitcoin protects user privacy. Unlike banks, which share data only with parties and a middleman, Bitcoin makes transactions public but keeps public keys anonymous, hiding the identities of its users. The diagram shows a transaction with anonymous keys, like stock market data showing trade size and time but not identities. For extra privacy, Bitcoiners often suggest using a new key pair for each transaction to avoid linking them to one owner. Multi-input transactions, combining several amounts, can reveal a single owner, risking exposure of their other transactions if their identity is uncovered, but anonymity generally keeps users’ privacy intact. The Calculations section examines Bitcoin’s blockchain security against an attacker racing the honest chain. Attackers can’t create or steal money, as nodes reject invalid transactions; they can only try reversing their own payment. Equations show this as a Binomial Random Walk, or a model tracking random steps, like a coin flip, where each step is a block either advancing the honest chain or the attacker’s. In these equations, “p” is the honest nodes’ chance to win and “q” the attacker’s. Equations, including a Gambler’s Ruin formula—a math problem calculating the odds of a gambler with limited funds going broke before winning big—show the attacker’s odds drop fast as they fall behind. Recipients wait for enough blocks (z) to trust a payment, using what's called a Poisson distribution—a statistical model predicting the number of events in a fixed time—for the attacker's progress. Math confirms that after a few blocks, reversal odds are tiny if honest nodes lead. New key pairs per transaction block pre-planned attacks. Equations and C code (a programming language used to compute these probabilities) calculate the attacker’s catch-up odds, dropping with more blocks. The table shows that after six blocks, reversal risk is under 0.1%, proving Bitcoin’s transactions are highly secure. The Conclusion summarizes Bitcoin’s trustless digital transaction system. Digital signatures ensure strong ownership, but with that alone, double-spending would still be a problem. So Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network uses proof-of-work to create a public transaction history that's pretty much unchangeable if most of the computing power is coming from honest nodes/miners. Its simple, uncoordinated structure makes the whole system robust. Nodes (meaning miners) work freely, unidentified, sending messages as best they can. They join or leave anytime, accepting the longest proof-of-work chain as the true record. They “vote” with computing power, building on valid blocks and ignoring invalid ones, enforcing rules and incentives in Bitcoin's reliable, decentralized network. That's it! If you read all that, you now have at least a better understanding of Bitcoin and the Whitepaper that started it all! Have a wonderful rest of your Whitepaper Day!

China, 2160: [buys bitcoin, prospers] World, 2160: "Finally!"

China, 1890: [buys silver] "Ha ha! Gold is for suckers!" World, 1890: [buys gold, prospers] China, 2025: [buys gold] "Ha ha! Bitcoin is for suckers!" World, 2025: [buys bitcoin, prospers] History doesn't repeat, but it often rhymes.