The Weirdest Thing About the Bitcoin White Paper Written
I wasn't surprised to find that the paper was written in LaTeX. After all, that's what most of technically-minded people use when creating complex documents. However, one thing that stood out to me was its quality. It wasn't great. Here are a few typographical errors that I spotted right away...
I wasn't surprised to find that the paper was written in LaTeX. After all, that's what most of technically-minded people use when creating complex documents. However, one thing that stood out to me was its quality. It wasn't great. Here are a few typographical errors that I spotted right away: Some of the variables or calculations were not typeset in math mode. Contents inside math mode were often over-italicized, e.g. the word "if" is written in italics, even though the convention would be to make it upright. Satoshi used " to enclose text in quotation marks, even though the preferred way is to use `` (two backticks) for opening quotation marks and '' (two single quotation marks) for closing quotation marks2. I know what you are thinking: “YOU NERD, WHO THE HELL CARES ABOUT THE TYPESETTING CONVENTIONS OF QUOTATION MARKS?!”
Sure, if you prefer Microsoft W*rd, that’s not something you’ll ever consider, but people who use LaTeX, on average, pay more attention to such things. The first documents I wrote in LaTeX weren’t great, and I’m learning new things up to this day. But Satoshi looked like someone a lot more experienced so these mistakes seemed out of place. And so I DuckDuckWent3 “satoshi nakamoto bad latex” or something like that. It was at that moment in time that I realized—I am an idiot. I found this discussion on StackExchange which essentially showed that the Bitcoin white paper was not written in LaTeX. I went back to the paper and became convinced of this myself. I had been fooled and I felt terrible about it. But why was I fooled? Well, the white paper does mimic LaTeX: The margins are huge which is a feature of the default templates. The font used is very similar to Computer Modern (the default font in TeXTEX documents). Centered title and numbered sections in bold. Author name followed by an abstract in the center of the page with even larger margins than the rest of the document. The totality of these observations made me not even question that this is a LaTeX document when I first opened it.
