Whitepaper publication

Satoshi Nakamoto announced the Bitcoin whitepaper ("Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System") on October 31, 2008, in a post titled "Bitcoin P2P e-cash paper" to the cryptography mailing list hosted at metzdowd.com. The nine-page paper describes an electronic cash system using a proof-of-work chain to solve double-spending without a trusted third party. The network itself launched about two months later with the genesis block on January 3, 2009.

Common misstatements:

• "Bitcoin was created in 2009." — The paper is 2008; the running network is 2009. Both statements are right with the right referent.
• "The whitepaper describes everything in today's Bitcoin." — Much of modern Bitcoin (difficulty adjustment details, script, SegWit, Taproot) is implementation history, not whitepaper content; conversely a few whitepaper details differ from what shipped.
• "Satoshi published it on a website/forum." — It went to a niche cryptography mailing list; bitcointalk did not exist yet.