Joseph Bonneau is an assistant professor at New York University and co-author of “Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies,” a popular textbook. 

This exclusive opinion piece is part of CoinDesk’s “Bitcoin at 10: The Satoshi White Paper” series.

The Bitcoin white paper has been, rightfully, recognized as one of the most original and influential computer science papers in history.

It has launched a billion-dollar industry and thousands of follow-up papers.

But it’s worth turning a critical eye on the paper (and elements of the original Bitcoin design omitted from the paper) to ask what did the paper get right? What did it get wrong? And what questions do we still not know the answer to?

What Bitcoin got right

This may be the hardest category to compile.

One mark of a truly successful idea is that we forget how people thought about the world before that idea came around. Many of the most fundamental contributions of Bitcoin seem obvious only in hindsight.

It’s easy to forget that cryptocurrency was a research backwater for most of the 2000s. After the failure of many attempts in the 1990s to build a working system (largely using the ideas outlined by David Chaum in the 1980s), few papers were published in the area. Many simply believed there was no viable market for a non-state currency.

Prior to Bitcoin, decentralized systems were an active research area in the 2000s (often described as peer-to-peer networks) and anonymity research was coming into its own (with the development of Tor and other systems).

But these were not seen as necessary features for a payment system. What did Bitcoin contribute?

  1. Incentives for miners. One of Bitcoin’s core contributions is providing incentives for miners via inflation and fees. This model has generally been successful and it’s fair to say few saw it coming. Many P2P systems in the pre-Bitcoin era that offered open participation (anybody can run a node) were plagued by Sybil attacks and other problems. There were many attempts to incentivize honest participation, but prior to Bitcoin no system quite got it to work.
  2. Light clients. Bitcoin’s support for both full nodes and light (or SPV) nodes has proven quite powerful, and the block structure embedded into Bitcoin has made it not just possible but natural to implement a light client.
  3. Scripting. While limited, Bit

Read More