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Bitcoin White Paper Turns 18: From Peer-to-Peer Cash to Government Reserve
Bitcoin, designed to send money without a bank, turns 18 years old. Its founding white paper, published in 2008, has now been adopted by Wall Street funds and government reserves. The system, built to reduce reliance on institutions, is now an asset that institutions want to own. The announcement of Bitcoin's white paper was made on a cryptography mailing list, not at a bank or government briefing. Bitcoin's intellectual roots can be traced back to the cypherpunk movement, which used cryptography to defend privacy. The system, which uses a shared transaction history maintained across a network, is now used by institutions for storing reserves.