How Did Bitcoin White Paper Alter Over Years?

David A. Harding has published a list of Bitcoin white paper “known problems” and pointed at the changes the cryptocurrency had during the first years of its existence.

The Harding’s documents now available at GitHub also include altered terms used to describe various phenomena of Bitcoin. All such elements represent aspects known before that “Bitcoin’s implementation differs from that described in the paper.”

At the top of the list there is a link to Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) algorithm: blockchain now functions in accordance with “the chain demonstrating the most PoW”, not “the longest chain” as was initially described by the founder Satoshi Nakamoto. Harding notes:

“The change from checking for the longest chain to checking for the most-work chain occurred in July 2010, long after Bitcoin’s initial release.”

Other changes relate to privacy:

“Some linking is still unavoidable with multi-input transactions, which necessarily reveal that their inputs were owned by the same owner,” the document runs. But Harding adds that isn’t the case since 2015 due to new realization known as CoinJoin.

Bitcoin’s white paper keeps starting controversies among both users and industry agents and especially for the self-proclaimed cryptocurrency creator Craig Wright. This year saw the number of attempts to discredit Wright rising which resulted in a 1-million-bitcoin-worth lawsuit in February.

Harding also spoke in against Wright. Last year he described him as “a person who previously fraudulently claimed to be the creator of Bitcoin, among many other fraudulent claims.”