There could be a better thread for my question, yet I would like to raise a question that came into my head while I was reading OP, which I understood attempted to suggest both an ideological underpinning to bitcoin that was achieved through technological progressions and/or improvements to what ended up being bitcoin.
So, when you described b-money in OP, you suggested that it seemed to have a lot of bitcoin's attributes but it was both subject to sybil attacks, but also suffered from the problem of NOT being coded or implemented. Bit Gold was also subject to sybil attacks, and I am suspecting that the network of proof of work was not decentralized enough in bitgold so it ended up having potential hashpower manipulation vulnerabilities?
A question came in my thinking regarding what aspects of bitcoin exactly helped bitcoin to overcome the deficiencies of b money and Bit Gold? [...]
I am coming back on this question, and this time I'm going to explain it also using Satoshi's own words, as maybe
my own explanation was not clear enough.
...........
Please let me know if my previous explanation plus these quotes explained properly the question.
I am not unsatisfied with your various answers and explanations, but I had been hoping for a kind of short explanation that presents the matter in a kind of layman way.. It could be that I am kind of looking for a chart to show features of various previous systems to show which features each of them have and to see that bitcoin has many of the same features, but maybe even more. I wonder if such a chart might already exist?
Frequently i hear that with bitcoin, satoshi did not really invent anything new, but instead satoshi was able to combine a lot of different prior inventions and technologies in such a way that no one else had done previously.. so maybe there were not too many new things within bitcoin, but just the implementation and combination of what had largely already existed in one form or another, but there also is a bit of genius in terms of applying those technologies together.. and especially, for example, I had heard of the two week difficulty adjustment as being one of those very powerful mechanisms that might not really had existed in prior systems, so maybe difficulty adjustment every two weeks is not any kind of powerful invention, but it really makes bitcoin powerful in terms of how the difficulty adjustment is applied (and creates incentives).. within the context of other bitcoin features.
So, maybe there is no real short explanation to what I had been attempting to ask that makes sense when delving into some of the technicalities for what bitcoin fixed at the time of bitcoin's launch and how it was fixed and whether we even knew that certain bitcoin technical features were a fix at the time of launch versus finding out later after bitcoin went live for a while, and then ONLY realize that the bitcoin plane had to be fixed further while it was flying because there were problems with the original set up that needed to be fixed....
If we are mostly trying to figure out what was put into place upon bitcoin's launch rather than how it might have changed after launch, maybe even a synopsis regarding both the deficiencies of certain earlier proposed money systems that bitcoin fixed. Although, I don't believe that a chart would limit bitcoin development towards only at launch, because some features would have been added to bitcoin at a later date.. or maybe even removed from bitcoin at a later date.. but still could be shown in a chart.
Something like the below, but maybe not everything would need to be in the chart because once the features are shown, then the question of bitcoin fixing it may or may not need to be added to the chart because there are likely variations to the features too, both at the time of bitcoin's launch and down the road:
b-money - had this, this and this feature and defects, and bitcoin fixed this this and this through these mechanisms
bitgold had this this and this feature and defects, and bitcoin fixed this, this and this through these mechanisms
hashcash had this, this and this feature and defects, and bitcoin fixed this this and this through these mechanisms
Bitcoin had this this and this feature, and maybe a chart would show if the features overlap and whether bitcoin has all of the features of the previous projects and even show if bitcoin chose not to implement some features that might have been present in some of the earlier projects.
Maybe my thinking is too narrow or I am merely a bad student, but summaries of features was kind of how I was thinking about the question when I originally asked it, so even though I got some further history and context for bitcoin's various features, and even though you did describe several of the changes/improvements, GazetaBitcoin, I am still not quite sure if I understand the answers to my question in a way that I could outline the answers in a summary form (to show that I actually learned the answers to my questions) about which projects bitcoin had built upon and fixed and how bitcoin fixed those earlier projects.