The Creation of Bitcoin.....
New updated info 01/21/15. New info concerning a Jim McCoy concept will be added very soon. The Intro: I started going down this rabbit hole when I first started researching about the concept of bitcoin. The following information and links in this blog is where I kept going in circles for several months. I did find the answer to the mystery, but I feel each person should review the facts and make an educated decision for themselves. Take into account the level of genius thinking and preparation that was involved in creating and launching Bitcoin anonymously. This is all IMHO. The answer is below, it’s hidden in plain sight. You will have to read between the lines and look beneath the layers of protection. The real proof is found in the links provided, use them. Research not only the following people, but their work and it’s influence on each other, in some cases, without them even knowing it(so they claim). Remember, Bitcoin is an example of equilibrium game theory that has been rethought to include a slight deviation for it to work correctly. Assume that every aspect about Bitcoin is very well thought out. Bitcoin is a question that can only be answered by a question unless someone generates us the private key to unlock it. It was carefully designed that way, just like bitcoin itself. In the end we only know one thing for sure….Bitcoin was created by the cypherpunks. The Real Bitcoin wiki: http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/wiki/User:Dusan_Barok/Bitcoin_bits,_trivia_and_anecdotes IMHO....Gwern and the other people that Satoshi first contacted are part of the mystery....I have had conversations with most of those people and their answers are all scripted...if you look at their emails side by side almost every word of every sentence matches up...you can definitely detect deception in their response to my questions...I won't publish these emails because they are personal and not part of a puplic archive like the ones below. @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ New insight with old information: I had never put the beginning of Wei Dai’s “bmoney” paper to much thought until it was brought to my attention by a software designer named Oleg Andreev. This information seems to be the "key" that Satoshi left for us to unlock the puzzle. The first credit to Bitcoin in the white paper was a citation for Wei Dai's "bmoney". The first paragraph of "bmoney": (read carefully) “I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations”. ~Wei Dai The Concept of Bitcoin: The Internet and Bitcoin were created to allow people to solve social problems in a novel way: Instead of the ancient formula of “the strongest wins and then beats the crap out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments. Let's start with some history: Cypherpunk movement started as a mailing list in 1992.(Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, etc…) Here’s an excerpt from Cypherpunks FAQ: 2.3. “What’s the ‘Big Picture’?” "Strong crypto is here. It is widely available. It implies many changes in the way the world works. Private channels between parties who have never met and who never will meet are possible. Totally anonymous, unsinkable, untraceable communications and exchanges are possible". "Transactions can only be voluntary, since the parties are untraceable and unknown and can withdraw at any time. This has profound implications for the conventional approach of using the threat of force, directed against parties by governments or by others. In particular, threats of force will fail". "What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call “crypto anarchy.” (Voluntary communications only, with no third parties butting in)". * Below is a Tim May quote which explains why a system like Bitcoin would have to be created and launched open-sourced and anonymously. Tim May: "Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.” "Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”. "The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend". The Facts: Those that are familiar with Satoshi’s work already know Bitcoin was not a whim. It was decades of contemplation, study and waiting on the advancements of systems needed for modern implementation. Satoshi could foresee future technology and change occurring in the world because of the solution he knew existed (HyperMoney), and because he could see so far into our past. Satoshi seems to have surpassed Adam Smith by learning much more from the history of the Indians than anyone could have known. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Smith.html http://www.adamsmith.org/research/reports/cryptocurrency-gets-real/ Szabo’s blog is a vast encyclopedia of puzzle pieces that were being put together to solve the existing problems in his life long endeavor of implementing “BitGold”. His blogs cover everything, right down to the invention of the time keeping devices that changed our culture, and the value of it, up until Satoshi creating Bitcoin, and even beyond that with his vision and realization of smart contracts. Szabo’s research includes an extreme amount of past history and technology that allows him to explain what we have here today so well. Whoever created Bitcoin knew they had to become a lawyer to make sure it was fully created above law. “Lawyer” Nick Szabo describes the entire significant history of law right up until the Non-Delegation doctrine and it’s implications that are above our National Constitutions. He taught us all how to be lawyers, because you need this to be free. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/delegation.pdf Szabo on the history of money from the Nakamoto Institute: http://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/ http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1994/02/msg01429.html http://marc.info/?t=95281417900015&r=1&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=e-lang&m=98979341007439 Note: Please read this next section until it makes sence: Szabo “came up” with the technology that will become ethereum(Bitcoin 2.0) including smart contracts which was solely contingent on Satoshi’s work that Szabo never knew would be produced? Smart contracts come about because Bitcoin is the beginning of the completion of a “Kula Ring”, a unifying solution that bridges among other things, game theory, encryption, economics, finance, programming, and law… there are not multiple random people capable of this…... The Devil is in the Details: -The Cypherpunks create an anonymous mailer for like-minded users to share ideas.(Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, etc….) http://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/crypto/cypherpunks/may-virtual-comm.html -Tim May posts a request for the Cypherpunks to assist him in creating a decentralised electronic currency idea(not detailed) that he has and now wants to start working on. PLEASE READ: http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html -Nick Szabo implies he will be running lead in the Cypherpunks quest of anonymous decentralized currency.(He also has smart contracts to include once it gets going) PLEASE READ: http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html 9/15/95 quote: Nick Szabo: "Hal and Tim have made some interesting comments about payee untraceability. I suspect it will clarify things to point out the orthogonality in two of the major design choices: * Clearing: Offline vs. online * Settlement: Deposit to payee's account vs. sending new cash to payee". Note: Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Wei Dai and Tim May were aggressively working on developing digital currency together from at least 1993 as recorded in the Cypherpunks emails. The Cypherpunks dedicated work: 1997 Tim Mays Anonymous Digital Cash paper.(Still General statements, seems Szabo is getting further ahead seen in 1998/1999) http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm 1997 Adam Backs "Hashash" http://www.hashcash.org/ 1998 Wei Dai "bmoney" http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt http://www.weidai.com/ 1998 Nick Szabo intial "BitGold" 1999 Szabo mentions bitgold and talk of a special "ASIC" type chip that could be used for mining. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ttps.html 1999 Zooko moving up in the cupherpunks http://www.shmoo.com/mail/cypherpunks/jun99/msg00373.html http://web.archive.org/web/20010331105544/http://zooko.com/ Wei Dai c++ library http://www.cryptopp.com/ Szabo, and apparently Satoshi, had figured out that Hal Finneys “RPOW” could be used to solve the Byzantine General’s Problem, a problem in ordinary computing that demonstrates through “game theory” how a group of potential co-operators can come to the best consensus even with the possibility of having malicious operators among them. This was the final piece to the BitGold/Bitcoin puzzle. http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs614/2004sp/papers/lsp82.pdf -“The computer can be used as a tool to liberate and protect people, rather than to control them” ~ Hal -“Nash made major contributions to economics among other fields before descending into schizophrenia. But this list of his earlier character traits sounded eerily familiar” ~Hal (2002) http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html?m=1 Szabo: "One possible answer to central mint vulnerability is bit gold -- a currency the value of which does not depend on any particular trusted third party. Another alternative is an object barter economy." 2007 Satoshi says he started putting Bitcoin together 2007 Szabo Blogging about his two ideas. BitGold and Scarce Objects(finite supply like Bitcoin) plus "Nanobarter" Note: These two ideas put together with Zookos's "p2p with nodes" create Bitcoin = "Nanobarter" http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html 2007 http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m=1 http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html?m=1 Szabo calls out to the cypherpunks for help to finalize coding BitGold and run a test net a few months before the white paper gets published online. *Szabo’s post for assistance: “Bitgold would greatly benefit from a demonstration, an experimental market (with e.g. a trusted third party substituted for the complex security that would be needed for a real system). Anybody want to help me code one up?” https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09975.html https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf In 2009 the Bitcoin pdf was brought to the attention of certain communities with a citation to Wei Dai on it. This was simply a single title page of links to papers written by Dei and kept there to catalog his work. Among the links were “portals” to anonymous chat groups, where no doubt many “like-minded” people found themselves going through a screening process they never knew was being done. Satoshi was able to use “intelligence” as “assets” by using the internet in a sideways fashion. All of the confusion you see, was the only way around the barriers, and what’s amazing, it was probably ALL PERFECTLY LEGAL. It’s all incredibly interesting, I don’t tend to enjoy “conspiracy” theories and stories, but for what I have researched and can understand, this is all truth and reality. * Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be. Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply. Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world’s M1 money supply at that time was”. "We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure". ~Ray Dillenger (Bear) Bitcoin is the exact implementation of the system envisioned by Tim C. May, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Hal Finney and Zooko. The only requirement is for transacting parties to remain anonymous. If there’s no trace to physical persons, there is no place for the violent intervention and thus the contracts can only be enforced according to the voluntarily agreed-upon rules between the parties. Bitcoin allows encoding these rules right in the transactions so they are automatically enforced by the whole network. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=721.msg8114#msg8114 http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.html?m=1 *Hal Finney quote: “How do you find someone who has spent a lifetime covering his tracks?…For some, he was a guardian angel. others, a ghost, who never quite fit in…What’s the S stand for?” *Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled. The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him. Thus ends the story”. Nick Szabo: “(assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)”…..Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme”.(read this carefully) Note: Szabo is always continuing in education and acquiring knowledge from all the great thinkers of humanity. Every line from the cryptic lecture of John Nash’s “Ideal Money” has a linking paper from Szabo’s blog: http://szabo.best.vwh.net/ http://thewealthofchips.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/us-congressional-research-service-on-bitcoin-rebutal-via-john-nashs-lecture-ideal-money/ http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/spring02/papers/nash50a.pdf http://wp.me/p4FsrC-2a http://thewealthofchips.wordpress.com/2014/10/01/why-bitcoin-is-and-isnt-ideal-money/ Note: Be careful with the quotes, Szabo and these others are super smart....but who is Szabo? -Hal said he had a chance to meet and extensively correspond with both Szabo and Dai, but he didn’t use the words “meet in person”. -Szabo says “I went to the same university Wei Dai did ”. (Dai has a simular play on words saying they never saw each other there). *Szabo didn’t create bitcoin….”Szabo” and “Dai” went to the same school...but never met. Note: Szabo’s “BitGold” blog date was changed from 2005 to 2008 to appear being released after the bitcoin white paper. This can be confirmed by the url date in Hal Finney’s email link. It has been reported Szabo had announced prior to Dec2008 he would rerelease some work. https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography%40metzdowd.com/msg09975.html It’s hard to read Wei Dai. It appears he has a keen ability to misdirect people’s attention when certain questions are asked. Please don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for Wei Dai, but if you watch his careful wording, it smoothly dances around certain straight forward questions and leaves you with a misguided answer. He’s currently stating that Satoshi is problably a very young guy with a lot of energy that just spent a little time and effort to figure it out and write the paper…what?…on summer break or something? Bitcoin is such a complex idea on so many levels. Someone would need the equivalent of several college degrees, 20 years of research and a life time of acquired working knowledge on multiple complex subjects to get from an idea on paper to the reality of Bitcoin, especially at that time. Question: "Does bitcoin seem cyberpunk project to you? In that case, can one expect they ever disclose identity?" Wei Dai: "Not sure what the first part of the question means. I don't expect Satoshi to voluntarily reveal his identity in the near future, but maybe he will do so eventually?" Question: "In that case, the libertarian motivation wouldn't be a risk to anyone who invest in the community? Like one this gets all formal and legal, it blow?" Wei Dai: "Don't understand this one either." http://lesswrong.com/lw/kk5/look_for_the_next_tech_gold_rush/#comments The comment has been made that Dai and Szabo came up the the ideas for Bmoney and BitGold right after college so Satoshi is probably that age. This is where that smooth talking comes in. They may of had the idea right after college, but they sure were not able to create and implement a working system like bitcoin at that age or we would be have been using it for years. Why? It takes years of study and researching that idea to acquire the knowledge to create and implement a system like Bitcoin. I understand c++ is complex and unforgiving, but it’s been around for years, Adam Back doesn’t seem to have a problem with it. The fact is Bjarne Stroustrup is 63 and Tatsuaki Okamkoto is no young college kid and they are large numbers of older people, especially in the circles that cypherpunks worked in that are very efficient in c++. Dai also implies, that if Szabo was Satoshi, Nick would tell him in private and Dai would let us know….but who is Wei Dai? Question: "Also, I understand you haven't read the original bitcoind code but do you have any guess for why the author(Satoshi) chose to lift your SHA256 implementation from Crypto++ when the project already required openssl-0.9.8h? Is there anything odd about the OpenSSL implementation that wouldn't be immediately obvious to someone who isn't a crypto expert?" Wei Dai: "Hmm, I’m not sure. I thought it might have been the optimizations I put into my SHA256 implementation in March 2009 (due to discussions on the NIST mailing list for standardizing SHA-3, about how fast SHA-2 really is), which made it the fastest available at the time, but it looks like Bitcoin 0.1 was already released prior to that (in Jan 2009) and therefore had my old code. Maybe someone could test if the old code was still faster than OpenSSL?" Dai: “No, my monetary policy views were firmly mainstream, which considers rapid unpredictable changes in prices, in either direction, to be a really bad thing for a currency. So I designed b-money to have a (((stable value relative to a basket of commodities))), and (((until Bitcoin came along, never thought anyone))) might deliberately design a currency to have a fixed total supply.” -Did Wei Dai admit he didn’t think of “Bitcoin” or printing a fixed total supply? Or did he say he never thought of it until “Bitcoin”? 2007/2008 Zooko c++ https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/3 http://www.stroustrup.com/ http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Author/1002804/tatsuaki-okamoto http://www.bloodshed.net/devcpp.htm Note: This video is kind of funny because as Gavin is explaining what really happened with Satoshi, there is a guy(Legendary Member) in full conspiracy mode talking right over what Gavins trying to tell us. This may be the point that Gavin and Satoshi decided to let the stories run wild, because this video shows the conspiracy theories are more fascinating than the truth that Gavin was trying to let us know. Start @01:05 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDRwgbWkxFw Gavin Andersen’s real name is Gavin Bell. I could not find a connection to Jim Bell or anyone like that. He was known as Gavin Bell at Princeton. Gavins appears to have been chosen because he was a knowledgable associate that had no public or private ties to any groups or organizations that could be spun to look criminal, crazy or anti-goverment. http://m.wsj.com/articles/BL-MBB-17626 -Bitcoin was influenced by Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, Adam Muller’s “HyperMoney”, Thomas Edison’s “Commodity Currency”, William Feller's "Probability Theory", Friedman, Hayek, John Nash’s “Ideal Money”, Tim May’s “Crypto-anarchy” and “David Chaum’s “DigiCash” with the help of Nick Szabo’s acquired knowledge (including “BitGold” & "Scarce Objects"), Wei Dai’s “bmoney”(website & c++ lib.), Hal Finney's “RPOW & PGP” ,Adam Back’s “HashCash” and Zooko's "p2p with nodes". http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nlh/summary/v031/31.2gray.html http://moneymorning.com/ext/bitcoin/videos/html-bitcoin.php?iris=167662&link_source=popup http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_money *One of the first places where Satoshi Nakamoto mentioned bitcoin was at the P2PFoundation.ning.com. When you register there, you have to give your birthdate. Satoshi gave April 5th 1975. April 5th was one of the most significant dates in history. On that day in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 6102, which made it illegal for American citizens to own gold. So what happened in 1975? 1975 was the year it became legal for American citizens to own gold again. The Summary: -1992 The Cypherpunks create an anonymous mailer for like-minded users to share ideas.(Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, etc….) https://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt -1995 Tim May posts a call to the Cypherpunks to create a decentralised electronic currency. http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html -1995 Nick Szabo answers Tim’s call(He also has smart contracts to include once it gets going) http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html 1996 Wei Dai PipeNet 1.1 http://www.weidai.com/pipenet.txt -1997 Tim Mays Anonymous Digital Cash paper. http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm 1997 Adam Backs “Hashash” http://www.hashcash.org/ - 1998 Wei Dai elaborates on Tim’s idea for a digital currency and called it “Bmoney”.(It reads like the beginning idea of BitGold/Bitcoin) http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt -1998 Szabo had a simular more detailed idea “BitGold” soon after Dai’s paper and he worked relentlessly on making that idea work. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00988.htmle -1999 Szabo mentions bitgold and talk of a special “ASIC” type chip that could be used for mining. http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html - 2004 Hal Finney’s “RPOW” was the missing piece of the puzzle. “RPOW” was added on top of Adam Back’s “HashCash”. (The solution for the Byzantine General’s Problem which allows BitGold/Bitcoin to be completed) http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm -2004 Wei Dai's c++ library -2005 Nick Szabo publishes BitGold paper. http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html?m=1 2007 Satoshi says he started putting Bitcoin together. 2007 Szabo & Zooko put ideas together. Zooko: "I want to invent something else: a truly decentralized economic mechanism." https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000022.html https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000025.html 2007 Szabo Blogging about two ideas. BitGold and Scarce Objects(finite supply like Bitcoin) plus "Nanobarter" Note: These two ideas put together with Zooko's "p2p with nodes" is Bitcoin = "Nanobarter" http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html 2007 http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m=1 -2008 Szabo calls out to the cypherpunks for help to finalize coding BitGold and run a test net a few months before the white paper gets published online. https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/ -Satoshi Nakamoto appears out of thin air and introduces Bitcoin right in the middle of the economic crisis that was saturated in the news at that time and then disappears. *Szabo didn’t create bitcoin….”Szabo” and “Dai” went to the same school….but never met. Bitcoin is the true work of a “Game Theroy Master”. Satoshi Nakamoto will always be a mystery that can never be 100% solved. It was carefully designed that way a long time ago. New info:(The Zooko Factor) 2007 Zooko: "I want to invent something else: a truly decentralized economic mechanism. Research that points in this direction includes the sub-field of "algorithmic mechanism design" within economic game theory, some peer-to-peer research such as GNUnet, Wei Dai's and Nick Szabo's ideas about "bit gold", Nick Szabo's "smart contracts", and much more. Another inspiration is BitTorrent's tit-for-tat mechanism, which is decentralized and minimal, but gets the job done within its limited problem domain." https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000022.html 2007 Zooko: "Nick Szabo is a very interesting thinker whose domain includes law, economics, networking, cryptography, and so on. I've been acquainted with his ideas for many years (starting with his inspiring and mind- expanding "Smart Contracts", which I became aware of in approximately 1996). He has just now posted a blog entry about Allmydata-Tahoe economics:" https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000025.html 2007 Szabo applies BitGold and his "Scarce Object" theory to Zookos p2p hard drive project. Szabo: "One possible answer to central mint vulnerability is bit gold -- a currency the value of which does not depend on any particular trusted third party. Another alternative is (an object barter economy"Scarce Objects")." http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html 2007 http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m=1 2007 http://lowlife.jp/yasusii/blogmark/2007/08/ 2007/2008 Zooko c++ https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/3 http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko's_triangle "Nick Szabo and Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn disagree strongly with the thesis that “Bitcoin is Worse is Better”. They contend while there may be bad parts to Bitcoin, there is a novel core idea which is actually very clever - the hash chain is a compromise which thinks outside the box and gives us a sidestep around classic problems of distributed computing, which gives us something similar enough to a trustworthy non-centralized authority that we can use it in practice." ~gwern Zooko: May 31, 2011 at 6:42 PM "Gwern's post fails to appreciate the technical advances that BitCoin originated." "I have been trying, off and on, to invent a decentralized digital payment system for fifteen years (since I was at DigiCash). I wasn't sure that a practical system was even *possible*, until BitCoin was actually implemented and became as popular as it has. Scientific advances often seem obvious in retrospect, and so it is with BitCoin." Zooko: May 31, 2011 at 6:44 PM "Oh wait, I have to revise this, as I remember trying to invent a decentralized digital payment system in about 1995, which was before I joined DigiCash. :-)" Zooko (creates Tahoe-LAFS) wrote: Decentralized Money Zooko, 26 January 2009 (created 26 January 2009) "I've been spending a little bit of time thinking about how gaming services like World of Warcraft and (don't-call-it-a-gaming-service) Second Life have succeeded where we at DigiCash failed — convenient, widely-used, programmable digital cash. A problem is that each of these new currencies are centrally controlled by one entity. This limits the scope of who will rely on that currency and how much value they will risk on that currency. There are ideas floating around about how to facilitate transactions between currencies, but this would not solve the problem. A plethora of competing centralized services is not the same as a decentralized service. Even if it were cheap and convenient to trade some LindenBucks for some WoW Gold, this would only lead us back to the equivalent of the modern nation-state currencies: mostly centralized (because of the Network Externality), heavily taxed/regulated/manipulated, and prone to disastrous failure. What I want is a currency which everyone can cheaply and conveniently use but which no-one has the power to manipulate. No-one has the power to inflate or deflate the currency supply, no-one has the power to monitor, tax, or prevent transactions. Truly the digital equivalent of gold, during the times and places when gold was the universal currency. See the BitGold idea by Nick Szabo and b-money idea by Wei Dai, and recent effort to actually implement something along these lines: BitCoin by Satoshi Nakamoto." The End for Now. Note: I failed to mention the Electronic Frontier Foundation but all founders (Kapor, Gilmore and Barlow) need a lot of respect from each and everyone of use for the little freedom we do have on the internet. NOTE: This is info that threw me off track for awhile. I have consulted with some people closer to the cypherpunks and have determined that Tim May was retired from this project. I do not think he is Satoshi. These emails show May knew too much about being a coder to be Satoshi. 2007-2008 Tim May strong math programming http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2519#comment-37979 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2562#comment-38756 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2845#comment-42205 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2604#comment-39404 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2845#comment-42205 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2519#comment-37969 Feb 6 2009 Tim May CPU/GPU high performance http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2988#comment-43931 Tim May "Matrix" type math programming. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3712#comment-53009 @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Extra research info: The Joke: SAmsung - TOSHIba - NAKAmichi - MOTOrola The Who: Tim May (Intel scientist-Tech/political- genius/writer & CP movement leader) Nick Szabo (BitGold)(CP/Knowledge) Wei Dai (b-money)(CP/portal) David Chaum (DigiCash) Adam Back (HashCash)(CP/British) John Nash (Ideal Money-Game Theory-Economics) Tatsuaki Okamoto (1986-present eCash crypto c++ visual) Hal Finney (CP, PGP, RPOW) Zooko (Mojo, p2p,c++,CP) Ray Dillenger (CP/coder) Neal King (Patent timing) Vladimir Oksman Charles Bry Michael Weber (Mystery internet security guru)(the Japan connection) Gavin Andersen (Possible patsy if things went wrong but most likely just a knowledgable associate that had no public or private ties to any groups or organizations that could be spun to look criminal, crazy or anti-goverment)(the results of Satoshi’s reaction to the pc magazine article with wikileaks/Ron Paul is a great example of this patsy theory)(connection between Gavin and Nick Szabo is also worth a lot of attention) More links for Research, Review or Linguistics: Note: I am sure Satoshi could have very easily changed his own writing style as not to identify himself through linguistics if he wanted. I’m sure it was thought of due to the level of game theory and crypto-anarchy being involved. “Szabo has extensively studied British history for his legal and monetary theories (it’s hard to miss this if you’ve read his essays), so I do not regard the Britishisms as a point against Szabo”. ~ gwern (Include Cypherpunks emails above also) http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/9395_008038Intro.pdf http://diswww.mit.edu/menelaus/cpunks/13035 Additional research links: http://www.quora.com/Is-Satoshi-Nakamoto-now-with-about-1B-in-Bitcoins-really-Nick-Szabo http://www.academia.edu/5015634/DIGITAL_DOLLARS_MASKS_AND_BLACK_MARKETS_THE_CYPHERPUNK_LEGACY http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-4-value-and-currency/peer-reviewed-articles/the-politics-of-cryptography-bitcoin-and-the-ordering-machines/