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What is a whitepaper?
A whitepaper is the document in which a project's creators describe what they are building and how it is meant to work. Bitcoin's is 'Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System' by Satoshi Nakamoto; Ethereum's was published in 2014.
What it means for you
A whitepaper describes intentions, not what the code does today: Ethereum's own site says its original paper no longer reflects what Ethereum is. Anyone can write one, so compare its claims with the coin's actual contract, supply and holdings.
How it works
Bitcoin's paper sets out the whole design in a few pages: a coin defined as a chain of digital signatures, a timestamp server built from hashed blocks, proof of work whose difficulty follows a moving average aimed at a set number of blocks per hour, nodes that treat the longest chain as correct, and a first transaction in each block that creates new coins. Ethereum's 2014 paper proposed a blockchain with a built-in Turing-complete programming language for contracts, secured by mining. A paper fixes intentions at a date; the running code and later upgrades, such as Ethereum's 2022 move to proof of stake, decide what a system actually does.
Sources: bitcoin.org: Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, ethereum.org: Ethereum Whitepaper, Bitcoin whitepaper (PDF), Satoshi Nakamoto · checked 4 October 2026
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