Bitcoin was made public in October 31, 2008 through a Whitepaper, a document describing the basic features of the system, sent to the participants of a mailing list dedicated to cryptography, associated with the website metzdowd.com. The creator of the system is an individual or group of people known by the pseudonym of Satoshi Nakamoto, of which there is no more news since 2010.
For years, the real identity of Satoshi has been debated and even today presumed exposures and bombastic statements by characters who claim to be him without being able to prove it, follow each other.
The truth is that it is not possible to know who Satoshi is and it is not even important: as we have said, Bitcoin is an open source system and works well even without its original creator, just as any Linux distribution works without Linus Torvalds, the creator of this operating system.
Changes to the network can become "official" if the majority of the nodes that are part of the system adopts them (see "What is a Bitcoin node?"), through a mechanism called " Consensus".
Often one is led to believe that Bitcoin was built overnight, without considering that in reality its history is much longer.
In fact, if we consider Bitcoin as an instrument born in 2008 and started in early 2009, we lend ourselves to those who continue to propagate the bad transparency of the system, born "out of the thing air".
Would you believe me if I said that the Bitcoin story begins in the 70s? Don't you?
Well, you have to think again!
Bitcoin is in fact the meeting point of pre-existing technologies: from public key digital signature to the cryptographic hash tree structure, from the concept of decentralized sharing between peers to the Proof of Work (PoW).
In 1977, what was then known as the public key cryptographic system (RSA) was devised. This system is based on the existence of two cryptographic keys, technically called "direct key" and "reverse key", which over time have assumed the name of "public key" and "private key".
From the name it can be easily deduced that one of these keys can be made public while the other will be kept private: let's imagine that two friends, Alice and Bob, want to send each other a confidential message using an unsafe channel; perhaps one of them is in a totalitarian state, or, more simply, they need to keep their conversations private. With the RSA system, Alice will be able to encrypt the message with Bob's public key and send it publicly. Bob will be the only one able to read the content of the message because this will be decodable only thanks to his private key, which he jealously guarded.
The concept of public and private key has since been used widely in many areas where it was necessary to resort to cryptography and in Bitcoin too: even if the Bitcoin protocol uses the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), it owes its operation basic to the invention of the RSA. Even WhatsApp uses an end-to-end cryptographic system to ensure the privacy of your messages.
RSA therefore introduces the system of primitive digital signatures which guarantees, in the example above, that Bob is effectively the recipient of the message, since he is the only one to have his private key.
The blockchain idea? It is borrowed from that of Merkle Tree , a tree structure that uses cryptographic hashes patented in '79 by Ralph Merkle.
In 1983 David Chaum used the RSA and DSA public key signature schemes to implement the blind signatures, a cryptographic technology that allows to digitally sign a message whose content is hidden before being signed and sent; a system that then he applied to its ecash electronic money, in 1990.
The Proof of Work is a consensus mechanism that was developed in 1993 by professors Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor; designed as an antispam system, it was then used, together with Adam Back's hashcash algorithm, by Hal Finney in 2004 to create the RPoW (Reusable Proofs of Work) and applied in its payment system.
BitTorrent (BT), a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) protocol for decentralized files sharing on the Internet, to which Bitcoin is inspired if we look at the sharing mechanism between nodes and censorship resistance, must also be added to this list; if some nodes are forcibly closed, the network is held up by the others scattered on the planet (or above it, see Blockstream Satellite network in the glossary).
However, it was not only these and other not mentioned technological inventions that paved the way for Bitcoin, but also theoretical postulates of an economic, political and sociological nature.
Without The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto by Timothy C. May of 1988, the Cypherpunk Manifesto by Eric Hughes from 1993 and the Austrian economic school, probably today we would not have Bitcoin and a digital cash system alternative to the cashless society.
