Satoshi Nakamoto publishes Bitcoin Whitepaper

Satoshi Nakamoto’s bitcoin.org is important to the story of digital art as it was the first conceptualization of a decentralized blockchain. Decentralization was long part of the net.art global ethos, along with an anti-authority mindset, lerandom.art, specifically Bitcoin. He elaborates,

“In retrospect, people think of net.art as websites and HTML but it was more diffuse than that. Websites are the things that can easily survive after the fact, but it was all kinds of performances, events, software or tools that people could work with. Net.art was just an element in a broader form of digital experimentation and digital creativity that was happening and that broader ethos was very much about decentralization, anti-authoritarianism, bottom-up approaches and anti-surveillance. Then I started seeing with Bitcoin, especially at that early time, a very cypherpunk, anti-authoritarian project. It was easy to connect with that for me. I definitely saw this in that same vein.”

But it also had an enormous impact on digital art, as quickly artists would begin exploring the intersection of blockchains and art. McCoy himself released some of the earliest proto-NFTs on NameCoin, Bitcoin fork, in 2014. This list also extend to Rhea Myers early Bitcoin art experiments, and Sarah Meyohas’s Bitchcoin from 2015.

As for the landmark paper itself, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” introduced the concept of Bitcoin and the mechanics of a decentralized digital currency to the world in the midst of the worst financial crisis since arguably the Great Depression. The paper proposed a long-sought solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network, which timestamps transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based proof-of-work. This forms a record that is computationally impractical to change, creating a robust ledger without the need for a trusted third party. Nakamoto’s introduction of Bitcoin fundamentally challenged traditional notions of currency and financial systems in an era of uncertainty.