Bitcoin's White Paper Is Not a Bible

It's been 10 years since Bitcoin's white paper was released, and the world has had 10 years to understand the profound impact of Bitcoin.

Despite all this time to evolve our understanding, we somehow have had the emergence of zealots that attempt to interpret the Bitcoin white paper as if it were scripture.

The Bitcoin white paper is not a bible, it wasn't even meant to be definitive.

Case in point, Bitcoin's white paper was released in October 2008, just a few months before the source code for version 0.1 was made publicly available.

The software itself had already been in development for a year and a half and contained features and important consensus rules that were not mentioned at all in the white paper.

Satoshi would later suggest that Bitcoin scripts could be used for "Escrow transactions, bonded contracts, third party arbitration, multi-party signature," but script capability was not mentioned at all in the white paper.

If the white paper quickly fell out of date, Satoshi didn't seem to notice.

The point I'm making with these examples of white paper omissions and differences to the implementation itself is that while software evolves, read-only text documents do not.

The white paper was an attempt at a high-level introduction by someone who had already put far more time and care into writing the code itself.

I'm sure Satoshi also wouldn't have wanted people to try and divine the future from his white paper, especially since the Bitcoin codebase has been extensively amended by both himself and others.