What Bitcoin's White Paper Got Right, Wrong and What We Still Don't Know

The Bitcoin white paper has been, rightfully, recognized as one of the most original and influential computer science papers in history.

The division in Bitcoin between full nodes and light nodes has proven quite powerful, and the block structure embedded into Bitcoin has made this not just possible but a natural way of viewing the system.

We'll ignore some quaint-in-retrospect features in early versions of the bitcoin code, such as pay-to-IP-address and a built-in e-commerce system, that never saw the light of day.

There are a few features of Bitcoin that appear "Wrong" in that no system built today would repeat them.

Interestingly, the Certificate Transparency project gets it right and puts each update into a tree, while few successors to Bitcoin have strayed from the linear chain design.

Bitcoin miners track the system state as the set of unspent transaction outputs.

The Bitcoin white paper devotes a relatively large amount of space to analyzing the chances of a miner with less than 51% mining power successfully launching a fork by getting lucky.

Satoshi described Bitcoin as a system where most participants would be miners using their CPUs.

The arguments sketched in the white paper about Bitcoin providing anonymity as only public keys are posted are now known to be quite incomplete due to the development of transaction-graph analysis.

Bitcoin hardcoded a slow transition from rewarding miners primarily by inflation to rewarding them primarily via transaction fees.