"At 2:10 p.m. on October 31, 2008, a message popped up on an obscure cryptology mailing list. The message was written by a man going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. Nakamoto had never posted to the site before, and he was entirely unknown to its participants. But in his message, he made a bold claim. "I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party," he wrote. It was now ready to be unveiled to the world.

He included a link to a nine-page white paper bearing the title "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System." In the paper, Nakamoto outlined in crisp and uncluttered English his idea for a new kind of digital money. This money, or bitcoin as Nakamoto called it, would allow people to send money directly to each other over the internet. Banks would have no control over the system, and neither would governments. It would be run, instead, by everyone. Bitcoins would be a kind of pure money, completely democratic, with minimal transaction costs, no middlemen, and completely digital"--.