On October 31, 2008 the Bitcoin paper was published by Satoshi Nakamoto. Much has happened since then. We have ethereum, smart contracts, countless blockchains, defi, and the most infamous duo of web3 and NFTs. It's easy to forget about Bitcoin. However, let's revisit bitcoin and it's white paper and compare it with the crypto/blockchain scene we have today.
Before diving into the bitcoin, let's talk about when the bitcoin paper was published. It was in the depths of the financial crisis of 2007-2008 that bitcoin was born. Only forty six days after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers the famous bitcoin paper was published. The first bitcoin block was minted on January 3, 2009 with a reference to the financial crisis embedded in the coinbase payload.
The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
A core component of bitcoin is that it's trust less. There is no third party necessary to establish trust, instead cryptographic proofs are used to verify the veracity of transactions. That third party which Bitcoin automates out of the equation is almost always a bank or some other financial institution. Given the circumstances, one may believe that Bitcoin was created in response to the financial crisis. A solution for a world where neither governments or banks could be trusted with money. However, work on digital assets predate Bitcoin. The bitcoin paper itself references b-money a paper by Wei Dai, for whom the smallest unit of Ethereum's currency is named. The idea of using cryptography to create a digital currency was not new to the community of cypherpunks which Satoshi was a part of.
Enough history. Let's get to the bitcoin paper. It's very short and I recommend you read it yourself. One thing you will notice is that it's very concise. The purpose of Bitcoin is very clear and well defined. It is a peer to peer electronic cash system. The end. Everything else is how it accomplishes this neat feat. Bitcoin's development was not funded by any venture capitalists, nor was there a coin pre-sale, or any of the other methods used today to fund new block chains. Bitcoin was created and released for free. Satoshi never even spent any of his Bitcoins. Taking this into account, I will summarize these attributes of Bitcoin in one word: pristine. Bitcoin is pristine. It's creation was a passion project. It asked you for nothing. It's creator has disappeared, and his coins locked away and never moved. Satoshi did not create Bitcoin to enrich himself. And since it's creation, there has only been one other pristine block chain created. Every other blockchain was created with the pre-mining or other methods of funding such as Initial Coin Offerings.
Where there is money, there is corruption. As Bitcoin gained value and popularity, there were copycats. The original copycat being Litecoin. As the value of Bitcoin rose, people saw a money making opportunity. And the inevitable happened. The cryptocurency scene blew up with innumerable scam coins. Pump and dump schemes. Even the original Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox was a scam. Ethereum, witnessed a hack of its DAO which resulted in a hard fork, violating it's claimed "immutability". The Ethereum you see today is not the real Ethereum, that would be Ethereum Classic. ERC20 gave rise to the Defi movement. Defi quickly summarized, wants to decentralize your finances, so you can swap coins anonymously without using an exchange as a trusted third party. Defi projects run smart contracts to do coin swaps. Smart contracts also allow for the creation of yield farms. A place where you deposit a pair of coins which are used to provide liquidity to an automated market maker. And you the liquidity provider is in return paid a cut of the transaction fees. Finally we have NFTs which are smart contracts that allow one to claim ownership of usually an image which may either be stored on IPFS or some other host.
The sheer number of hacks, shit coins, scams, and IP theft involved in NFTs has nearly cemented the public image of crypto currencies as being scams. It is unfortunate that this also tarnishes the image of Bitcoin which has nothing to do with any of this.
So let's take a moment to remember the spirit of Bitcoin. It didnt' claim to revolutinize every aspect of your life. It claimed to do only what it actually could. It didn't try to fool anyone into enriching it's creator. It stood on it's accomplishements. Bitcoin is a pristine project which doesn't deserve to be tarnished by the selfish and illegal behavior of the indviduals in the crypto scene today who sell lies to enrich themself. If the crypto community wants to be taken seriously it needs to learn this valuable lesson from Bitcoin.