A Serendipitous Connection

I was born and raised in Morristown, NJ. My parents settled there in the late 80s and I was born in 1991 at Morristown Memorial Hospital. My childhood home was a modest two-story colonial with a small backyard.

It wasn’t until just recently that I realized how close I lived to the birthplace of a seminal idea.

The original Bitcoin whitepaper published on October 31, 2008, references the works of Haber and Stornetta on three seperate occasions. In fact, three of the eight citations in the whitepaper are references to Haber and Stornetta’s work. The first reference is to their 1991 paper titled “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document” which is a foundational work in the field of cryptography. It is this paper that was written just minutes from my childhood home.

The main idea Haber and Stornetta proposed was a method for time-stamping digital documents in a way that would prevent tampering. They proposed a system that would allow for the creation of a tamper-evident log of digital documents that could be verified by anyone. This system would be decentralized and distributed, meaning that no single entity would have control over the log. This idea was revolutionary at the time and laid the groundwork for many of the concepts that would later be incorporated into Bitcoin.

In a way, the birthplace of Bitcoin is just a five-minute bike ride from my childhood home. It’s a serendipitous connection that I never would have imagined. The fact that such a seminal idea was born so close to where I grew up is a wonderful connection.