Welcome to the HIS201 course! This course aims to tell you the story of Bitcoin's creation in a way you've never read before. Although it is filled with fascinating details, it is often overlooked. We will endeavor to describe it in all its complexity, from its conception by Satoshi Nakamoto to his early disappearance and the handover to the community.

Bitcoin was designed by an individual (or a group) using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. On October 31, 2008, the latter shared a white paper describing his model via an obscure Internet email mailing list. On January 8, 2009, he put his concept into practice by publishing the software’s source code and launching the network through the mining of the first blocks of the chain. Keen to attract a critical mass of users, he promoted his creation through various communication channels.

After a difficult start, the system's bootstrapping finally took place in October 2009, when the unit of account – also called bitcoin – gained a price. The first merchant services began to appear in 2010, starting with exchange services that bridged to the dollar. It was also around this time that mining with a graphics card (more efficient), was initially implemented, and the first exchange for a physical good, specifically a pizza, took place, following the initiative of Laszlo Hanyecz.

The project took off during the summer of 2010, following the publication of an article on the very popular site Slashdot. The exchange with the dollar, Bitcoin mining, and software development significantly improved during this period. From the fall, Satoshi Nakamoto gradually began to withdraw, stopping public writing and gradually delegating his tasks. He eventually disappeared completely in the spring of 2011, after handing over his access to his right-hand men, Martti Malmi and Gavin Andresen. The community finally took over and managed to carry the project to what it is today.

Besides this narrative, Bitcoin also has a prehistory. Indeed, it is not an object that came out of nowhere. Its creation is part of a specific context: the search for a way to transcribe the properties of cash into cyberspace. In particular, the technical elements composing it result from decades of research and experimentation that preceded it. Bitcoin is based on:

In designing Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto was greatly inspired by the eCash model, a concept proposed by cryptographer David Chaum in 1982 and implemented through his company DigiCash in the 1990s. This model, which relied on the blind signature process, allowed users to make exchanges in a relatively confidential manner. However, it was based on a centralized network of banks that intervened to prevent double-spending. Therefore, when DigiCash went bankrupt, the system collapsed. Bitcoin corrected this problem by eliminating the need for a trusted third party.

The creation of Bitcoin also occurred during the state closure of private currency systems such as e-gold and Liberty Reserve. Bitcoin constituted a robust digital currency model that could resist direct assaults from the U.S. federal government. Distributing risk among its participants, similar to peer-to-peer file-sharing systems like BitTorrent, ensured its survival.

Finally, the Bitcoin project is the heir to the ethos of the cypherpunk movement, a movement of rebel cryptographers from the 90s, who sought to preserve the privacy and freedom of people on the Internet through the proactive use of cryptography. Bitcoin is in line with projects like b-money, bit gold, or RPOW imagined by these individuals at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s. Although Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned them, he was unaware of them before designing Bitcoin, and probably was not part of the original movement.

This course is divided into four parts, addressing respectively the origins of Bitcoin (3 chapters), its slow emergence (3 chapters), its initial rise (3 chapters), and the formation of its community (4 chapters). In total, it includes 13 chapters, which are the following (the relevant period is also specified):

All dates and times are given according to the UTC zone (corresponding to the Greenwich Meridian) and may thus differ from American dates. Satoshi Nakamoto was likely in the United States when working on his project. However, Bitcoin is an international project that notably included contributions from Finnish developer Martti Malmi (Eastern European Time, UTC+2 / UTC+3), and we will refer to the universal time zone. Thus, we say that the effective launch of the main network took place on January 9 at 2:54 AM, rather than January 8 at 6:54 PM, which corresponds to the East Coast time zone (Pacific Time, UTC-8 / UTC-7).

The content is partially adapted from the French book L'Élégance de Bitcoin (2024), written by the author of this course. In addition to direct sources archived on the Internet, we rely on several reference works. Here are the main ones:

Note that for the non-English version of this course, most quotes come from American English and have been translated for the occasion. The term coin is generally translated as "unit" (and not "piece") when it refers to the unit of account.

Are you ready to explore the incredible saga of Bitcoin's creation? Then let’s dive together into this extraordinary story!