On October 31, 2008 — exactly 18 years ago today — Satoshi Nakamoto published the nine-page Bitcoin white paper, proposing a peer-to-peer electronic payment system with no banks or central authorities. As CoinDesk argues in an anniversary opinion piece, it was born as an answer to the bailouts — and the author says small businesses are still paying the price of the rescues it answered.
Bitcoin logo (Credits: CoinDesk)
The timing was no coincidence. Satoshi published the white paper just four weeks after Congress passed a $700 billion bank bailout, and the first Bitcoin block, mined January 3, 2009, carried a London newspaper headline: “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks.”
Bitcoin white paper at 18: who got rescued, and who paid
The piece traces every rescue since. In March 2020, the Federal Reserve cut rates to near zero and pledged unlimited bond buying. In March 2023, regulators invoked a systemic-risk exception to protect every depositor at Silicon Valley Bank — including those far above the $250,000 insurance cap. Behind it all, the Fed’s balance sheet ballooned from $0.9 trillion in 2008 to $9.0 trillion in 2022, and M2 money supply growth peaked at 26.8% in February 2021, its fastest pace in data going back to 1960.
Small businesses, the article argues, absorbed the cost. Ground beef cost $3.87 a pound in February 2020 and $6.79 by September 2026 — a 76% increase. In September, a net 31% of small business owners reported raising prices, more than double the historical average. New York State lost a net 1,928 food-service businesses between early 2025 and early 2026 — a steeper drop than in the pandemic’s first year.
Bitcoin’s fixed supply vs. printed money
The beauty of Satoshi’s design, the piece argues, is the fixed supply: 21 million coins, money no rescue package can print more of. Priced in sats, the smallest unit of bitcoin, that same pound of ground beef actually fell 79% — from about 40,100 sats in 2020 to about 8,400 in September 2026.
Whether or not you buy the argument, the numbers mark the milestone: 18 years after a nine-page white paper challenged the financial system, the debate it started is louder than ever.
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Source: CoinDesk — read the full story there.
