Bitcoin's Genesis Block and Its Roots

Ideas like Hashcash by Adam Back 1997 then 2002 (primarily aimed at preventing denial of service attacks on servers, referenced directly at start of original bitcoin doc),

b-money Wei Dai, 1998 (mentioned in 2002 Hashcash paper 'hashcash as a minting mechanism for Wei Dai’s b-money electronic cash proposal, an electronic cash scheme without a banking interface') - also is the first listed reference at end of Satoshi's Bitcoin proposal.

See also Bit Gold (Nick Szabo various 1998 through 2005) for proof-of-work, decentralized money, and digital scarcity ideas.

Satoshi described bitcoin as follows "Bitcoin is an implementation of Wei Dai's b-money proposal http://weidai.com/bmoney.txt on Cypherpunks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunks in 1998 and Nick Szabo's Bitgold proposal http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html" [https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/249/]

Satoshi Nakamoto posted "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" to the cryptography mailing list, outlining a decentralized system to solve double-spending without trusted parties. Link is below.

The paper was intentionally concise, an overview introducing the core innovation: solving double-spending in a decentralized way via a peer-to-peer network, proof-of-work (PoW) timestamping chain, incentives for honest nodes, and probabilistic security assumptions. It deliberately left out many implementation details, such as exact data structures, network protocols, scripting language specifics, difficulty adjustment mechanics, coinbase transaction format, and how to bootstrap the system from nothing.

It appears that Satoshi had been coding draft versions for some time before the white paper, and needed to continue refining this for some months thereafter.

Block 0 launched the network. Coinbase message: "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks." Reward: 50 BTC (unspendable). Hash: 000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26f. Timestamp: 18:15:05 UTC.