A nine-page paper by an author nobody has identified created a trillion-dollar asset class

In October 2008, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto published a nine-page paper describing a currency that needed no bank or government to verify transactions. Bitcoin launched in January 2009. Nakamoto mined roughly a million coins, then vanished from public correspondence in 2011 and has never been definitively identified.

— Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System — 2008