The whitepaper and the genesis block

31 October 2008: the whitepaper

Satoshi posted a nine page paper to a cryptography mailing list: "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System". Its first sentence sums up the whole project: a purely peer to peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.

It was a few weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in the middle of the financial crisis.

3 January 2009: the genesis block

Satoshi mined the first block of the chain, block 0, called the genesis block. Inside it, Satoshi wrote a headline from that day's edition of The Times:

The headline proved the block could not have been created before that date. It also said, without a word of comment, why Bitcoin existed.

The first steps

• 9 January 2009: the first version of the software is released.
• 10 January 2009: Hal Finney posts "Running bitcoin".
• 12 January 2009: Satoshi sends 10 bitcoin to Hal Finney, the first transaction between two people.