Bitcoin — A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Nakamoto combines signed UTXO-like payments, a proof-of-work timestamp chain, a most-work fork choice, incentives, Merkle proofs, and probabilistic catch-up analysis.
The paper's contribution is the composition: public-key authorization does not stop double spending, so a peer network publicly orders transactions into proof-of-work blocks and treats the chain with greatest accumulated work as the accepted history. Rewards and fees incentivize extending that history. Merkle branches permit compact inclusion evidence, and the attacker catch-up analysis motivates confirmation depth as a probability rather than deterministic finality.
The paper is foundational, but current Bitcoin consensus behavior includes later deployed changes and is defined by running implementations and accepted BIPs. “Longest chain” should be read as greatest cumulative work, and SPV limitations require more care than the compact original discussion suggests.
Visual audit #
The archived original paper was inspected. Transaction chains, timestamp chaining, proof-of-work branching, Merkle pruning, and privacy linkage are information-bearing. GTK redraws the fork-choice mechanism and explains UTXO/Merkle semantics without retaining dated web-export visuals.