Every time I heard people hyping up how awesome the Bitcoin whitepaper is, I was totally confused — English plus technical jargon, it's really off-putting.

Until last month when I forced myself to read the original text, I realized it's not a paper at all; it's Satoshi Nakamoto's "eviction notice" to the world: banks, Alipay, WeChat—these middlemen, get ready to be unemployed.

The entire core answers three questions that ordinary people care about most:

1. How can online transfers avoid double-spending without banks?

In the real world, when you transfer 100 bucks to a friend, the bank records it and deducts it.

But on the internet, money is just a string of 0s and 1s; you can copy-paste it. How to prove I won't spend the same money twice?

Satoshi's answer is ridiculously simple: Put the whole world into one Excel spreadsheet, who transfers to whom, how much is left, all publicly written there, everyone watching you.

This spreadsheet is called blockchain. Want to secretly change an entry? Sorry, you'd have to change the same sheet in tens of thousands of computers across thousands of countries at the same time.

Congratulations, you're now harder than the Fed.

2. Who keeps this spreadsheet? Can't do it for free, right?

Satoshi came up with another genius idea: Let everyone compete to record it.

He designed a super hard math problem (SHA256 hash), whoever solves it first gets the right to record the next page of the spreadsheet, and gets newly minted bitcoins as salary.

This is called mining.

Even harsher: if you want to tamper with past records, you have to re-solve the problem from that page onward, and faster than all the honest people in the world combined.

Not enough computing power? Then behave.

16 years later, no one's done it. That's why it's awesome.

3. What about mobile users? Can't expect everyone to download hundreds of GB of spreadsheet, right?

Satoshi anticipated this; he created two "simplified versions":

  • Light nodes (SPV): You only need to save the "header" of each page; to check if a transaction is spent, just ask others for proof, done in seconds;

  • Merkle tree: Compress thousands of transactions in a page into a 32-byte "root", saving space and preventing forgery.

Thinking about mobile wallet storage issues in 2008—what's this called? This is dimensional reduction strike.

My biggest feeling after reading it:

The Bitcoin whitepaper's awesomeness isn't in the technical details, but in how it uses math to eliminate "trust," the most expensive thing in human society.

Before, to transfer money, you had to beg banks or Alipay; now, you just need to believe that a math problem is unsolvable forever.

In the past decade or so, 99% of shitcoin whitepapers are 200 pages long, full of charts, formulas, roadmaps, but they don't even explain "who prevents me from running away."

While Satoshi's 9-page paper eliminates global payment intermediaries and open-sources the solution. Just one word: Epic.

So, don't be scared by "not understanding the whitepaper" anymore. Find a simplified Chinese version (or just look at my mind map below), and you'll get it in half an hour. Once you understand, when you see new projects claiming to "disrupt Bitcoin," you'll spot who's bullshitting and who's actually working.