A white paper was sent to a small group of people in 2008, yes. But the group that acted on that is a subset of those people, that consists of maybe Hal Finney, Craig White, whoever Satoshi is, and a couple others. It's an extraordinarily small group of people.
> Nakamoto stated that work on the writing of the code for bitcoin began in 2007. On 18 August 2008, he or a colleague registered the domain name bitcoin.org, and created a web site at that address. On 31 October, Nakamoto published a white paper on the cryptography mailing list at metzdowd.com describing a digital cryptocurrency, titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Nakamoto