Bitcoin White Paper's 18th Anniversary Tests Decentralization as Wall Street Embraces Crypto

Bitcoin’s white paper was published on October 31, 2008, proposing a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that did not rely on banks or central authorities. According to Odaily, Bitcoin has since developed from a fringe experiment associated with darknet markets and online forums into an asset class embraced by Wall Street and institutional investors; its price is hovering near $80,000 and is on track for its worst month since June. BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF has reached about $66 billion in size, several publicly traded companies have added Bitcoin to their balance sheets, and traditional financial institutions are expanding into stablecoins, asset tokenization and blockchain financial infrastructure. This adoption contrasts with Bitcoin’s original aim of challenging centralized finance. Bitcoin also saw $19 billion in leveraged positions liquidated in a single day last October. The 2022 crypto winter erased more than $2 trillion in digital-asset market value.