November 1, 2008

Bitcoin white paper

Satoshi Nakamoto announces the Bitcoin white paper

A short email with five bullet points and a PDF link. The sender supplied no biography, no institution, no credentials — and two archives disagree on which day it arrived.

An email to a mailing list

On 31 October 2008 — or possibly 1 November, according to a second surviving archive — a sender using the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a message titled “Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper” to the Cryptography Mailing List. It linked to a nine-page paper at bitcoin.org describing a fully peer-to-peer electronic-cash proposal requiring no trusted third party.

The announcement listed five principal properties, including peer-to-peer prevention of double-spending and Hashcash-style proof of work for coin creation and network security. The paper cited Adam Back's Hashcash and Wei Dai's b-money.

31 October or 1 November

The mailing list's own Pipermail archive dates the message to Friday, 31 October 2008 at 14:10 EDT — 18:10 UTC. The Mail-Archive copy displays 1 November at 16:16:33 −0700.

The two timestamps differ by more than a timezone conversion, probably because the archives recorded different stages of a moderated delivery or import. Most modern histories use 31 October, but 1 November is not simply an error.

What the email was not

It was an announcement and a link, not the launch of an operational network; no bitcoins were created or spendable that day. The paper was not peer-reviewed, and “Satoshi Nakamoto” is a byline and email identity rather than a verified civil identity or proof of a single author.

The paper proposed ordering transactions through an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work, with the chain representing the greatest accumulated CPU effort treated as authoritative — a security claim conditional on honest nodes collectively controlling more CPU power than any cooperating attacker. It never uses “blockchain” as one word.

The first preserved reply, from James A. Donald on 2 November, said such a system was badly needed and then questioned whether it would scale.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at 2008-10-31.

What the sources leave uncertain

The slug’s 1 November date matches the contemporaneously preserved Mail-Archive display, but the Cryptography Mailing List’s own Pipermail archive places the message in its October archive and timestamps it 31 October at 14:10 EDT.
The two timestamps differ by more than a timezone conversion, probably because the independent archives recorded different stages of a moderated mailing-list delivery or import process. Surviving archive evidence does not fully resolve the discrepancy.
Most modern histories use 31 October, which is therefore the best-supported normalized date, but 1 November should not be dismissed as a simple error.