Bitcoin's White Paper Is Not a Bible – Stop Worshipping It
Source: www.coindesk.com
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. We've also had 10 years of development to improve usability and scaling.
Yet 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. But, 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.
"The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon," – Satoshi Nakamoto, November 2008.
The white paper was intended as an introductory text for the cypherpunk community. Satoshi went as far as to say he was "better with code than words" in an email to Hal Finney shortly after the white paper's release.
This will prove obvious to those who know the code, as there are quite a few things not mentioned in the white paper, and it even included some claims that were incorrect.
21 million coin cap. Although a 'predetermined number' is referred to, Satoshi only provided the schedule and cap when he announced the release of the code.
Longest chain. The chain representing the majority-accepted transaction history is frequently referred to as the "longest chain," when today we know that this is not the case. The change from 'Height' to 'ChainWork' was authored by Satoshi in July 2010. The white paper itself was not updated.
ASIC mining. CPU mining is mentioned throughout the paper. Satoshi later stated that "compute clusters will eventually hog all the generated coins" and that he didn't "want to hasten that day." Looking back, it's inevitable that a successful Bitcoin would result in CPU mining becoming irrelevant.
Difficulty algorithm. As outlined in the white paper, this would have used a moving average and not the set 2016 block periods implemented in the code, seriously altering the incentives to resist change.
Bitcoin script or smart-contract system. 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.