The white paper is the first-principles document. It is the blueprint: the design, the purpose, and the assumptions behind Bitcoin. Some of those assumptions turned out to be wrong; most did not. The assumptions that were wrong nevertheless helped shape Bitcoin into what it is today, and we can debate whether that is good or bad.

But the white paper still provides the rationale and context behind a pile of code that can otherwise be changed infinitely to do whatever its maintainers or users want it to do. Without the context provided by the paper, the code alone tells us very little about what Bitcoin was actually designed to be.