Over 13 years ago, on Halloween day, the entity known as Satoshi Nakamoto completely revolutionized the world’s economy. He created the most important cryptocurrency in history, Bitcoin.
The cryptocurrency’s whitepaper was released on October 31st, the date which most people know as Halloween.
However, Nakamoto’s choice to release the whitepapers on this date was not out of nowhere. In fact, there is a deeper meaning behind the date. The dates surrounding the birth of Bitcoin include easter eggs to assist us in connecting the dots behind Bitcoin’s creation.
Inspiration in The Protestant Reform: Not Halloween
It is said that the creation of Bitcoin took insíration from the protestant reformation, which began 500 years ago on the same date, October 31st.
When the monk Martin Luther delivered his 95 theses at Wittenberg, he was protesting what he perceived to be manipulated by the Roman Catholic Church.
The Protestant Reformation marked the beginning of Protestantism and the division of the Western Church into Protestantism and what is now known as the Roman Catholic Church. It is also regarded as one of the events in Europe that marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period.
In the year 1500, Luter became aware of the church’s abuses of power and launched the Protestant Reformation, a peaceful and separatist movement. Today, this religious revolution is regarded as one of the most significant developments in the history of power.
Luther translated the Bible (which was previously only available in Latin) in order to ease the reading for religious entities around the world. He saw each person as being self-educated and having a direct relationship with God without the need to rely on the so-powerful church.
The Protest Reform generated evolution in other non-religious areas.
The Bible translations culminated in aiding the creation of printing presses, which enabled the reproduction of documents and allowed the Bible to be distributed in a cost-effective manner for the first time.
This also took away the church’s role as the exclusive source of information and culture at the time.
Correlations Between The Protestant Reform And Bitcoin
Much like the Protestants revolutionized the way people’s religiousness – by making a more free and less autocratic religious space for the general population – Bitcoin was created in order to take power away from the monopoly of the world’s largest banks in order to create a “people’s currency”.
After the separation of church and state, the world completely changed. Bitcoin’s goal was to create a similar effect by creating a world where governments lost the ability to print money for their own benefit, at the expense of the destruction of everyone’s purchasing power.
The correlations to Protestantism do not stop there.
The “Genesis block” — all other blocks’ common ancestor, built into the Bitcoin node client software where it cannot be deleted — was first mined on January 3rd of 2009. The same exact date when Martin Luther was excommunicated by the Pope.
