Original BTC White paper from Satoshi Nakamoto

[Belisarius]

Seems this is not an original... 

https://twitter.com/wizsecurity/status/1345801257340919808

[Heisenberg_Hunter]

I would like to BTCump this topic regarding the hunt behind this ecash.pdf mysterious version. @DdmrDdmr pointed out to a site which hosted a comparable copy of ecash.pdf here : https://draftable.com/compare/rCuIgdwzImUI but what I found out is that whichever paper referencing itself as ecash.pdf should have less than 8 references in Page 8 as said in gwern!

As per satoshi's first published email :

I need to find out the year of publication of your b-money page for the
citation in my paper.  It'll look like:
[1] W. Dai, "b-money," http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt, (2006?).

You can download a pre-release draft at
http://www.upload.ae/file/6157/ecash-pdf.html  Feel free to forward it to
anyone else you think would be interested.

So based upon this scenario, it seems like Satoshi contacted Wei Dai to get the year of publication and thereby presented his paper! So going by this, W.Dai's b-money should not have been referenced in ecash.pdf hence what we found seems to be a highly modified version and thereby should not be trusted upon as said in the gwern website. I hope this wasn't addressed in our previous topic discussions and I firmly believe this ecash.pdf to be a lost collectible forever in this digital era!

Or is there any other way to hunt this down? I think, it is one among the important pdf for the future generations to come.

[icopress]

Today marks 14 years since the publication of the white paper, and if you read this topic, you will understand why I brought it up.

[nullama]

Very interesting topic.

Here's a summary of all the early drafts of the bitcoin paper known so far: https://www.gwern.net/docs/bitcoin/2008-nakamoto

I think that contains all the details relevant to this discussion.

I wonder if people have searched in the blockchain itself. The 2009 white paper lives there.

You can get it like this:

seq 0 947 | (while read -r n; do bitcoin-cli gettxout 54e48e5f5c656b26c3bca14a8c95aa583d07ebe84dde3b7dd4a78f4e4186e713 $n | jq -r '.scriptPubKey.asm' | awk '{ print $2 $3 $4 }'; done) | tr -d '\n' | cut -c 17-368600 | xxd -r -p > bitcoin.pdf

The idea that there's something hidden in the paper makes it really interesting, although I don't think there's anything in there...

About the "Chinese characters" in the original Bitcoin paper, I think that could just be Notepad interpreting the pdf data as random Chinese symbols as default. You don't see that in Linux for example, and that might explain why the text itself is nonsense. Also, you're comparing a pdf made with v1.7 with one made with v1.4 (bitcoin.pdf) so there might be big differences in the structure of the pdf files, which might explain what you see.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_PDF

Here are a few metadata details about the discussed files:

Code:

File Name                       : 20081003-nakamoto-bitcoindraft.pdf
PDF Version                     : 1.4
Linearized                      : No
Page Count                      : 8
Language                        : en-GB
Creator                         : Writer
Producer                        : OpenOffice.org 2.4
Create Date                     : 2008:10:03 13:49:58-07:00

Code:

File Name                       : bitcoin.pdf
PDF Version                     : 1.4
Linearized                      : No
Page Count                      : 9
Language                        : en-GB
Creator                         : Writer
Producer                        : OpenOffice.org 2.4
Create Date                     : 2009:03:24 11:33:15-06:00

Code:

File Name                       : ecash.pdf
PDF Version                     : 1.6
Linearized                      : Yes
Page Count                      : 8
Language                        : en-GB
Creator                         : Writer
Producer                        : OpenOffice.org 2.4
Create Date                     : 2017:08:26 18:31:20-04:00

Also ecash.pdf reveals the use of a library that allows editing metadata, Adobe XMP:

Code:

XMP Toolkit                     : Adobe XMP Core 5.6-c015 84.159810, 2016/09/10-02:41:30

With that tool you can edit any metadata in a file, so it can't really be trusted at all as genuine. Maybe it is, but it's not possible to know anything else has changed. Also the pdf property linearized was set to No in the early drafts but set as Yes in ecash.pdf. It might be that they forgot to match that field.

Also, if we focus on the pdf version, we can see that ecash.pdf was probably created in another computer, or application, which used a more modern version of the pdf standard (v1.6 vs v1.4). It's really strange to see that the file was supposedly created with the same version of Open Office, v2.4, but the pdf version of the created file doesn't match. A quick search on the source code of Open Office 2.4 shows that they indeed use pdf v1.4 in that version of the software:

// PDF spec ver. 1.4: see there for details