Bitcoin was assembled, not invented
Every component of Bitcoin existed before 2008. Satoshi Nakamoto's contribution was the assembly and one new rule.
| Year | Contribution | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 1980–1982 | The Byzantine Generals Problem — how nodes agree when some lie or go silent | Lamport, Shostak, Pease |
| 1991 | Cryptographic timestamps — documents chained by hash so order cannot be rewritten | Haber, Stornetta |
| 1997–2002 | Hashcash — spend compute, prove effort; an anti-spam mechanism | Adam Back |
| 2001 | SHA-256 standardised | NSA / NIST |
| 2008 | The Bitcoin whitepaper — the longest chain rule, combining all of the above | Satoshi Nakamoto |
| 2009 | Genesis block, mined 3 January | — |
The genuinely new part is the longest-chain rule: a way to select one history from many competing ones without asking anybody's permission or identity.
The problem, stated in the whitepaper
The 2008 paper is unusually direct about what is wrong:
- Online payments run through banks as trusted middlemen.
- Because payments can be reversed, disputes must be mediated.
- Mediation raises costs, which kills small, casual payments.
- Merchants respond by demanding more information than they need, and simply accept a certain amount of fraud as a cost of doing business.
The insight: replace trust with cryptographic proof, so any two willing parties can transact directly. The solution: electronic cash sent peer to peer, with double-spending prevented by a proof-of-work chain that acts as a timeline everybody agrees on.
The Byzantine Generals Problem
Several generals surround a city. They must agree on one plan. But:
- Some lie — traitors send false orders.
- Some go silent — messages never arrive.
- Some arrive late — the network is not instant.
Mapped onto Bitcoin: each general is a node, each message is a transaction, and the plan they must all agree on is the order of the blocks. This is why the problem matters — ordering, not arithmetic, is the hard part of a distributed ledger.
Ethereum's separate origin
Ethereum did not fork Bitcoin's goal. It asked a different question: if a network can agree without a middleman, what else could it run?
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 2011–2012 | Vitalik Buterin helps found Bitcoin Magazine; sees Bitcoin's potential and its limits |
| Nov 2013 | Ethereum whitepaper — a blockchain that runs smart contracts, not just payments |
| 2014 | Gavin Wood's Yellow Paper (the EVM spec); crowdsale raises ~31,000 BTC |
| Jul 30 2015 | Frontier — the genesis block is mined and the network goes live |
Bitcoin optimises for being one thing that cannot be changed. Ethereum optimises for being a machine that runs whatever anyone deploys. Almost every later difference follows from that split.