2008 · 2 recorded events
What happened in crypto in 2008? All 2 events on this timeline, including Satoshi Nakamoto Publishes the Bitcoin Whitepaper — each dated, categorised and sourced.
Nothing ran on a blockchain in 2008. Both entries for the year are preparation: a domain registered in August through a registrar that specialised in anonymity, and, ten weeks later, a nine-page paper posted to a cryptography mailing list under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. The paper introduced no new cryptographic primitives — hash chains, Merkle trees, digital signatures and proof of work all predate it by a decade or more — but it was the first design to combine them into a working answer to double-spending without a trusted third party. The network it described would not produce a block until January of the following year.
By category, 2008 breaks down into one entry on cryptographic foundations and one technical milestone.
Cryptographic Foundations
Technical Milestones
Every entry gives the date it happened, its category, a factual summary, and links to the original source and to the same entry in the full timeline.
Ten weeks before the whitepaper appeared, someone registered bitcoin.org through anonymity-friendly registrar AnonymousSpeech. The registration is the earliest public timestamp associated with the project and is routinely used to date the start of Satoshi Nakamoto's visible activity.
A nine-page paper posted to the Cryptography mailing list described a peer-to-peer electronic cash system where proof-of-work ordering replaces a trusted third party. It combined hash chains, Merkle trees, digital signatures and an incentive scheme into the first workable answer to distributed double-spending.
This archive keeps a page for every year from 2008 to 2026. The sparser pre-Bitcoin entries from 1979 onward live in the full timeline.
