Happy Bitcoin Whitepaper Day! 🎉

54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713

It's October 31st again, exactly 14 years since the day Satoshi first published the Bitcoin Whitepaper to the cryptography mailing list. With little pomp or ceremony, and to a group of folks who first dismissed it as infeasible, Satoshi first shared his vision for the system that we now know as Bitcoin.

We've all come a long way since then, and we thought it would be cool to share a fun little fact about the whitepaper pdf and the bitcoin blockchain.

Did you know that someone once crafted a transaction that encoded the bytes for the whitepaper pdf into 948 separate UTXOs and then broadcasted it to be mined in block #230009?

And it only cost them 59,617,500 sats in fees to do it!

To mark the occasion, we thought we'd add some code to our website that pulls the whitepaper directly from the chain and serves it up.

Try it out: stackorspend.com/bitcoin

(and check out the javascript code)

_____

You can try it in a terminal as well if you have your own node

#!/bin/bash
# Credit: @mutatrum on Twittter
# https://twitter.com/mutatrum/status/1352288123846324224

# Parse the whitepaper
bitcoin-cli getrawtransaction 54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713  \
  | sed 's/0100000000000000/\n/g' \
  | tail -n +2 \
  | cut -c7-136,139-268,271-400 \
  | tr -d '\n' \
  | cut -c17-368600 \
  | xxd -p -r > bitcoin.pdf