Keen cryptocurrency inventors understand the importance of a good whitepaper and will spend time going over a project’s whitepaper in order to determine whether or not to invest. With the recent explosion in ICOs, whitepapers have become longer and more complex with project managers hoping to stand out by producing high quality whitepapers. We take a look three of the best whitepapers so far.

Bitcoin

The whitepaper that started it all off, Bitcoin, quietly appeared in 2008 when Satoshi Nakamoto published the first Bitcoin specification and proof of concept in a cryptography mailing list. During a series of communications, Nakamoto outlined a consensus network that would facilitate a new form of digital money and a complete payment system. This all eventually led to the production of a whitepaper, which Nakamoto released on October 31, 2008. The whitepaper explained a “purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution”.

The whitepaper also outlined technical details such as double-spending, hash-based proof-of-work, and a connected system of nodes. This whitepaper proved to be the blueprint that launched a thousand other projects.

Ethereum

In November 2013, a 19-year old named Vitalik Buterin published a whitepaper titled: “A Next Generation Smart Contract and Decentralized Application Platform”. Inside, Buterin would explain the workings of a network that would facilitate the hosting and usage of smart contracts. Despite his youth, Buterin was already a major in the cryptocurrency ecosystem having authored a Bitcoin code library, contributed to Bitcoin’s core development and co-founded Bitcoin magazine.

Nxt

On September 28, 2013, a bitcointalk.org member named BCNext started a forum thread that announced the Nxt project as a second-generation cryptocurrency. BCNext also expressed that the Nxt coin wasn’t the most important aspect of the project as other currencies could be created on top of it. Nxt was to be written completely from scratch and coded in Java, separating it from other projects.

The thread also included requests for Bitcoin donations and the Nxt ICO started on September 28, 2013 and ran until November 18, 2013. The ICO was unconventional and operated through an anonymous Bitcoin talk forum account, with donations being sent to the funder's personal Bitcoin address.

73 people participated in the ICO and donated 21 Bitcoin, worth roughly $14,000 and as 1,000,000,000 coins were distributed to just 73 stakeholders in proportion to their level of contribution the Nxt ICO has proved to be extremely successful for investors and has reached a price of $0.16 and recorded returns of approximately 9400x (940,000%). This makes the Nxt ICO, which started as an online thread the most lucrative ICO of all time.