Historical data of domain name purchases suggest that Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin (BTC), had an alternate naming option in mind that did not make it to the whitepaper.
Bitcoin.org, the website domain linked to the original Bitcoin, was created on Aug. 18, 2008, under AnonymousSpeech, a service in Japan that allowed users to buy domain names anonymously.
Domain purchases under AnonymousSpeech around similar timelines revealed the creation of Netcoin.org on Aug. 17, 2008 — just a day before the creation of Bitcoin.org.
After further research, crypto locksmith Or Weinberger confirmed that no content was ever present on the Netcoin.org domain “except only after it was repurchased by another person later on.”
The decision to stick with Bitcoin may have been crucial to its success because numerous crypto community members highlighted their dislike for the name Netcoin.