Topic: Interesting Pre-BitcoinTalk Links and Events (Read 214 times)

OP, great list of information!  Once again I was going to give you some merits, but I'm up against the 50/month limit, and I'm not sure what day that expires.  If you're interested, drop me a PM in a few weeks and I'll do a post history review for you and I'll merit those posts that I wasn't able to.
..
Books about bitcoin's history have already been written (there are at least two big ones, Digital Gold and Bitcoin Billionaires, and I'm sure there are others), and though I've only read one of them so far--Digital Gold--it does go into the fascinating history of the creation of digital money.  That said, I don't know how many forum members are readers of nonfiction books, so they might have missed the great stuff that's in the ones dealing with bitcoin.  I'd definitely recommend picking up one of the above books if you're not familiar with bitcoin's early days and all the crazy/brilliant personalities involved.

2002-12-09 22:06:03

I have this idea of a future with virtual peer to peer banking. A kind of decentralized and secured system. Gone would be the times that governments and banks can track and interfere with our money transfers. Or even interfere with the total amount of money on earth. My envisioned sytem would have a fixed total amount of money. But each money unit (say virtual coin) is divisable[sic] indefinitely. So a kind of deflation would replace inflation. The total value of the money in the world would be a fixed number. It poses no problem for liquidity, because the currency can be divided anytime. However maybe people will not spend their money much, because it's value will increase often. Other problems raise in the areas of security, malicious use, and how to come towards such system from current systems? These are just ideas, I like to hear comments or about net resources on this subject.
2002-12-10 10:47:56

Maybe the community can bypass the old powers (countries and governments). It wouldn't be a revolution, but rather evolution. Slowly a new p2p system might take over. The current monetary systems were mainly backed with gold (not anymore now, to my knowledge). Maybe the underlying values of a virtual peer to peer system could be other scarce resources, relatively easy to exchange via internet. Examples are: computer processing power, bandwith[sic] and data storage. These resources would make a limited peer to peer money exchange system possible. Limited to the total real life value of all these resources. However from that point other resources could back up the virtual currency...
2002-12-10 11:06:11

It is a step in the right direction indeed. Now replace the system operator by a secure peer to peer system. And replace the underlying currency with something else, or slowly uncouple the underlying currency. Then it would be the system of my ideas...

Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!syros.belnet.be!news.belnet.be!newsfeed.wxs.nl!transit.news.xs4all.nl!newsfeed.xs4all.nl!xs4all!news.xs4all.nl!not-for-mail
Reply-To:
From:
Newsgroups: alt.internet.p2p,uk.finance
Subject: Virtual peer to peer banking
Date: Mon, 9 Dec 2002 23:05:31 +0100
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Newsreader: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
Lines: 16
Message-ID: <[email protected]>

In my limited experience creating Internet pseudonyms, I've been quite
distracted by the continual need to avoid leaving pointers to my
True Name lying around -- excess mail to/from my True Name, shared
files, common peculiarities (eg misspellings in written text), traceable
logins, etc.   The penet.fi site explicitly maintains a list of pointers
to the original address.  All kinds of security controls -- crypto, access,
information, inference -- have to be continually on my mind when using
pseudonymous accounts.  The hazards are everywhere.
...
Many of the recent anon posts have been quite productive, eg
"Wonderer's" embarrassing newbie questions which motivated Hal
Finney to first write a nice explanation of digital cash, then
think of an interesting simplification of Chaum's scheme.  Under
any system falling short of truly intelligent filters,
Hal would not have filtered S. Boxx's first posts
without also filtering Wonderer's first posts.

Everything is digital now and I miss the old days.

"Trading cards", as Hal called them, have existed in physical forms decades before someone thought to digitalize them. It was just a matter of time before someone would, but this is the first time I hear that Hal had such ideas. I collected ice hockey cards as a kid and owned hundreds of them with some of the best NHL players from the 80s and 90s. After a quick search, I just discovered that the first cards were manufactured back in the 1910s.

Everything is digital now and I miss the old days.

Hal Finney predicts NFTs, 1993, Compuserve: https://twitter.com/justintrimble/status/1357098395110952964