Case Board — Findings, Traces and Timelines

The privacy section promises pseudonymity, not anonymity, and names its own limits. The final section combines applied probability with a short working C program printed inside the paper.

Security is argued economically: the attacker is modelled as someone who counts costs. The scalability objection is answered in section 8, weeks before it was raised publicly.

The whitepaper explicitly points to earlier work for the timestamping mechanism and for proof-of-work. It gives no earlier source for the particular combination of these elements with the rule of choosing the valid chain that carries the greatest proof-of-work. In section 4 the author analyses not only cryptography but also the problem of representation: network identities can be multiplied, so the vote is tied to a costly resource — processing power.

The whitepaper uses the convention of a scientific publication (structure, abstract, references) but without the institutional apparatus: no affiliation, no acknowledgements, no reviewers. In the argument, economic reasoning (cost of mediation, micropayments, reversibility) sits alongside cryptography.

First audience: a few hundred cryptographers. The author sought review, not publicity.

Anonymity prepared since at least August 2008 — long before anyone was looking for the author.

The corpus is finite and public: ~600 documents. The investigation has a measurable end.