The Bitcoin Whitepaper Footnotes — Part 1

Examining Satoshi's References and beyond for breadcrumbs

Recently I've been diving down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, reading the Whitepaper references. My goal is to get a sense of what Satoshi was thinking about at the time, and how they arrived at their invention of Bitcoin from these eight cited sources.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

There were likely other sources of inspiration that contributed to Satoshi's invention of Bitcoin, such as the references within the 8 Whitepaper footnotes, or other academic publications before 2009.

If you want to get a head start on this series, I've done a few twitter threads analyzing most of the 8 footnotes. The plan is to more formally review these threads, and include two more reviews looking at b-money by Wei Dai[1], and an interesting theory about these references that was recently put forward by Stornetta[3][4][5]. Stornetta is one of the godfathers behind timestamp servers.

Through this review, it became evident the primary people of interest are Adam Back, Scott Stornetta & Stuart Haber, and Henri Massias. Stornetta and Haber are cited multiple times for their foundational works on timestamp servers. While Adam Back is cited for his proof work paper. Meanwhile, Massias is the outlier, being an unknown name in the field of timestamp servers, which suggests something subtle.

By reading through these papers, it became evident that Bitcoin is a distributed timestamp server driven by a proof of work mechanism that fairly distributes the "money" of that server in such a way that aligns incentives for the parties involved. A Nash equilibrium emerges through this fly wheel of value creation via a consistent issuance schedule lottery on a permission-less, global, open source, censorship resistant timestamp ledger.

All these pieces were floating around in these papers and elsewhere before 2009. It appears Satoshi was simply the first to amalgamate these into a working digital bank. Thus, Satoshi's innovation was in creating a chimera hydra of a timestamp server powered by a p2p proof of work incentive mechanism.

Twitter Threads:

An analysis of a very obscure paper [2] H. Massias, X.S. Avila, and J.-J. Quisquater, "Design of a secure timestamping service with minimal trust requirements," In 20th Symposium on Information Theory in the Benelux, May 1999.

https://x.com/BITCOINALLCAPS/status/1945513736464212241

A thread on [3] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "How to time-stamp a digital document," In Journal of Cryptology, vol 3, no 2, pages 99-111, 1991.

https://x.com/BITCOINALLCAPS/status/1942269673195585782

A thread reviewing [4] D. Bayer, S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Improving the efficiency and reliability of digital time-stamping," In Sequences II: Methods in Communication, Security and Computer Science, pages 329-334, 1993

https://x.com/BITCOINALLCAPS/status/1942637942821814602

A thread looking at [5] S. Haber, W.S. Stornetta, "Secure names for bit-strings," In Proceedings of the 4th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pages 28-35, April 1997.

https://x.com/BITCOINALLCAPS/status/1944769580070494711

A thread reviewing reference [6] A. Back, "Hashcash - a denial of service counter-measure," http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf, 2002.

https://x.com/BITCOINALLCAPS/status/1950947877565424100

A thread on [7] R.C. Merkle, "Protocols for public key cryptosystems," In Proc. 1980 Symposium on Security and Privacy, IEEE Computer Society, pages 122-133, April 1980

https://x.com/BITCOINALLCAPS/status/1946234193714851943

A thread on the Whitepaper’s 8th and final footnote, the second edition, first volume, 1957 print of W. Feller’s, "An introduction to probability theory and its applications,"

https://x.com/BITCOINALLCAPS/status/1978206240288264607

I'll be updating this article on medium, as the series progresses: https://medium.com/@Fiach_dubh/the-bitcoin-whitepaper-footnotes-part-1-2fb7200b6eb6

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