On Thursday, the Bitcoin whitepaper published by Satoshi Nakamoto turned 16 years old. In that time, Bitcoin, a once niche and fringe technology, has now become mainstream, as shown in particular by the billions of dollars now flowing into spot bitcoin ETFs, as well as U.S. presidential nominees giving the industry significant attention.

The pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto introduced Bitcoin to the world in a whitepaper published on Oct. 31, 2008 that detailed the motivation for creating the world’s first cryptocurrency and the technical requirements for doing so. The whitepaper criticized how commerce on the internet was reliant on trusted third parties for electronic payments, and also elucidated how a peer-to-peer system based on cryptographic proof could avoid the “double-spending problem” by ensuring that online currencies could only be spent once.

As stated in the whitepaper, Nakamoto “proposed a peer-to-peer network using proof-of-work to record a public history of transactions that quickly becomes computationally impractical for an attacker to change if honest nodes control a majority of CPU power.” 

The 16th anniversary of the Bitcoin whitepaper comes as spot BTC ETFs have recently posted record net inflows. The twelve U.S. spot BTC ETFs collectively hold nearly $72.5 billion worth of bitcoin, after Tuesday and Wednesday saw $870 million and $893 million in net inflows, respectively, making for two of the top four days by that measure since the ETFs first rolled out in January, data from SoSoValue shows.

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As a result of these flows and resulting demand, BTC earlier this week was within striking distance of its all-time high of $73,798 reached earlier this year in March, according to CoinGecko. 

“With there only being about 400-500 [bitcoins] mined per day, these types of flows have triggered the most basic economics of supply and demand,” Scott Guenther, head of finance for exchange infrastructure provider 0x, told Unchained.

The anniversary of Bitcoin’s whitepaper also comes five days before the closely-watched 2024 U.S. presidential election between former president Donald Trump and current vice president Kamala Harris. Despite having opposed pro-crypto measures in the past, Trump has changed course and made his strong support of the crypto industry a campaign issue in 2024. For her part, Harris has been much less vocal and specific about her views on crypto, but has said some encouraging words about the industry. And both candidates have courted fundraising dollars from the crypto industry, which has been the largest contributor of political donations during the 2024 US election cycle.    

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Since Bitcoin’s inception, speculation has flourished about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, including whether Nakamoto is a single person or a group of people. And the past year has not been any different. Just this month, HBO released a documentary claiming that Nakamoto was, in fact, Canadian Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd, a claim that many in the industry, including Todd himself, have rejected. And on Thursday, Stephen Mollah, who said he is a scientist, held a press conference in London to declare, with no credible evidence, that he was the one who had created the peer-to-peer blockchain that’s now valued at roughly $1.4 trillion.