Thread by @jillruthcarlson

On this day in 2008 the bitcoin whitepaper was published.

We talk a lot about the technological breakthroughs of that day. But we should also pay attention to the genius of the go-to-market. None of it was accidental...

🕓 Timing
📜 Format
📢 Distribution
👥 Creator
👀 Branding

In fact, as it turns out, many of the technical components of bitcoin had been around for decades. They just hadn't been assembled in quite the right way...

queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=…

But what had never been done before? Never in the modern era had a new currency, with no government or corporate backing, been introduced and taken mainstream.

I would argue that this was just as big a problem to solve as the double spend problem.

First: the timing.

To gain acceptance, bitcoin needed to be framed against uncertainty in the global financial system. The world needed to have a moment of doubt about its piles of debt, paper currency, and the masters of the universe pushing it all around.

2008.

The format.

How to introduce this to the world? This was more than an idea but less than fully-baked. It needed to be a proposal. The content was technical, but was also so much more... a policy document.

A whitepaper.

And quickly followed up with code. After all, "cypherpunks write code."

Who are the cypherpunks?

That brings us to distribution... where to release the paper so it'll be picked up by the right people? Who will buy into it and more importantly propagate it?

The activists who had been advocating for internet privacy and electronic cash for decades.

Every creation story naturally has a creator.

With bitcoin, the creator(s) chose to act under a pseudonym. From the federalist papers to Anonymous, from Tank Man to Banksy, activists have chosen to hide their identities throughout history.

So the creator chose to go by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

If you were choosing a pseudonym for the release of your project, what would you go with? It would need to be something that engendered trust, reliability. It would also need to be something that couldn't be traced to you.

And finally, right there in the genesis block was included, partly as timestamp and partly as message to the world the following message: Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.

This final touch of branding brings us right back to the question of context and timing.

I think that maybe Satoshi (whoever he or she or they were) put together the technical architecture of bitcoin years earlier, but was biding his time for the right moment and context to strike. That he was working on the perfect pseudonym and the right forum to release it.

If you agree (or don't), I write more about this (and my thoughts on @dril) in this post: medium.com/@jillcarlson/t…

And I talked about this earlier this year at @Bitcoinis_

And, of course, @Melt_Dem and I discussed this in our most recent episode of @WGMGpodcast...

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/epi…