Bitcoin: 18 years without a bank, but not without questions

The Bitcoin whitepaper turned 18 on October 31, 2026, since Satoshi Nakamoto published it in 2008. The proposal for electronic cash without a bank grew into a network that keeps running without its creator, but the anniversary brings back questions about the coins attributed to him and about security against future technological threats.

What did Satoshi propose in the Bitcoin whitepaper?

Satoshi proposed an electronic cash system in which transactions would take place directly between users (peer-to-peer), without a trusted intermediary. Computers on a network would verify transactions and prevent double spending, that is, using the same Bitcoin twice.

Think of a digital file that can be copied easily: for it to work as money, something has to stop its owner from spending it again and again. Bitcoin handed that job to the network instead of a bank. Satoshi stopped posting publicly in 2010, but the system kept running.

According to BeInCrypto, in its October 31 market snapshot Bitcoin was trading near $77,330, with a total market cap of about $1.55 trillion. These are the prices the source recorded that day, not a live valuation.

Why do the Bitcoin attributed to Satoshi still matter?

Researchers attribute about 1.1 million BTC to an early miner whom many believe was Satoshi, although that identity has never been confirmed. Most of these coins remain dormant, and their estimated value, at the source’s prices, comes to about $85 billion.

No one knows who controls the private keys today, that is, the cryptographic credentials that allow the coins to be moved. A sudden movement of them could cause alarm: has the creator returned, or has someone else gained access?

Here we need to avoid putting the cart before the horse. A Bitcoin transfer does not prove a sale. The uncertainty, however, could rattle the market even without a confirmed sell-off.

Could artificial intelligence threaten Bitcoin?

The sources do not describe any current, practically feasible artificial intelligence (AI) attack on Bitcoin. They describe research into its past and concerns about future risks.

In October, the developer T4T5 used Anthropic’s Claude to reconstruct recovered Bitcoin software from 2009, achieving a byte-for-byte match with the original file. The software from launch day itself remains lost. The reconstruction did not reveal any flaw in Bitcoin.

Researchers have also raised the possibility that future advances in AI could find mathematical shortcuts that would threaten exposed public keys. Investor Chamath Palihapitiya even warned that Bitcoin could one day be broken and go to zero. That is a warning, not evidence that such a capability exists today.

What do we take away from 18 years of the whitepaper?

For us, the real achievement is that Bitcoin carried on without its creator around. Nikhilesh De, in an opinion piece on CoinDesk, argues that the whitepaper achieved much of what Satoshi set out to do, while its cultural impact may reach beyond Bitcoin itself.

Our own view is that the next test is also about coordination: will the decentralized community be able to agree on security changes before a new threat becomes practical? For Greek readers, as for any Bitcoin holder, this distinction between a real risk and a hypothetical scenario matters more than a sensational headline about the “end” of the network.