Topic: Bitcoin Prehistory (Read 2545 times)

I've been working on a new electronic cash system that's fully
peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party.

The paper is available at:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The main properties:
 Double-spending is prevented with a peer-to-peer network.
 No mint or other trusted parties.
 Participants can be anonymous.
 New coins are made from Hashcash style proof-of-work.
 The proof-of-work for new coin generation also powers the
    network to prevent double-spending.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

Abstract.  A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would
allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another
without the burdens of going through a financial institution.
Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted party is still required to prevent
double-spending.  We propose a solution to the double-spending
problem using a peer-to-peer network.  The network timestamps
transactions by hashing them into an ongoing chain of hash-based
proof-of-work, forming a record that cannot be changed without
redoing the proof-of-work.  The longest chain not only serves as
proof of the sequence of events witnessed, but proof that it came
from the largest pool of CPU power.  As long as honest nodes control
the most CPU power on the network, they can generate the longest
chain and outpace any attackers.  The network itself requires
minimal structure.  Messages are broadcasted on a best effort basis,
and nodes can leave and rejoin the network at will, accepting the
longest proof-of-work chain as proof of what happened while they
were gone.

Full paper at:
http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Satoshi Nakamoto

Tomorrow @reason is publishing the 1st of my 4-part documentary series about the cypherpunk movement of the ‘90s, which led to bitcoin, @wikileaks, among other things.  Here's a thread about some of the participants & screenshots from my interviews.

One of the first supporters, adopters, contributors to bitcoin and receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was programmer Hal Finney. Finney downloaded the bitcoin software the day it was released, and received 10 bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world's first bitcoin transaction on 12 January 2009

When Bitcoin started out there wasn’t really a price for it since no one was willing to buy it. The first time Bitcoin actually gained value was on October 12, 2009 when Martti Malmi, a Finnish developer that helped Satoshi work on Bitcoin, sold 5050 Bitcoins for $5.02.

An introductory guide to popular Bitcoin memes and their significance.

Coinbase also notes that Bitcoin markets are currently posting year-to-date gains of 20% and 12% respectively.

https://i.imgur.com/IFSVjop.png
https://twitter.com/halfin/status/1110302988

11 Years ago from this, thanks Hal.

(The link was added)

I'm reading Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper on the suggestion of gentlemand

If you have the opportunity to get 1 Bitcoin, you are very lucky, many will not get it.

If you've read about bitcoin in the press and have some familiarity with academic research in the field of cryptography, you might reasonably come away with the following impression: Several decades' worth of research on digital cash, beginning with David Chaum,10,12 did not lead to commercial success because it required a centralized, banklike server controlling the system, and no banks wanted to sign on. Along came bitcoin, a radically different proposal for a decentralized cryptocurrency that didn't need the banks, and digital cash finally succeeded. Its inventor, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto, was an academic outsider, and bitcoin bears no resemblance to earlier academic proposals.

This article challenges that view by showing that nearly all of the technical components of bitcoin originated in the academic literature of the 1980s and '90s (see figure 1). This is not to diminish Nakamoto's achievement but to point out that he stood on the shoulders of giants. Indeed, by tracing the origins of the ideas in bitcoin, we can zero in on Nakamoto's true leap of insight—the specific, complex way in which the underlying components are put together. This helps explain why bitcoin took so long to be invented. Readers already familiar with how bitcoin works may gain a deeper understanding from this historical presentation. (For an introduction, see Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies by Arvind Narayanan et al.36) Bitcoin's intellectual history also serves as a case study demonstrating the relationships among academia, outside researchers, and practitioners, and offers lessons on how these groups can benefit from one another.

Those coins can never be recovered, and the total circulation is less.  Since the effective circulation is reduced, all the remaining coins are worth slightly more.  
It's the opposite of when a government prints money and the value of existing money goes down.

Graphical visualisation of the Bitcoin Github repository from 2009 to 2018