In late October 2008, someone calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto—and who to this day, incredibly, has kept his identity a secret—published a paper that introduced the idea of Bitcoin. It was mostly a technical description of what would become the world’s first cryptocurrency. A bitcoin was an “electronic coin”; it existed on a public ledger called a “proof-of-work chain”; each time it was transferred from one person to another, its authenticity was verified by programmers, who added the transaction to the public ledger; those programmers, who would eventually become known as bitcoin “miners,”
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