Topic: July 2002: Welcome to the radian economy: I had a dream: Decentralized currency (Read 1231 times)

Your dream will become the truth soon LOL

Obviously, Satoshi didn't wake up one morning and create the whole idea behind Bitcoin from scratch. What actually happened was a series of multiple developments which built on top of each other. Hal Finney's reusable proof of works was already quite similar to Bitcoin and that was way back in 2004. Adam Back's Hash Cash and Wei Dai's B-Money are even older (1997 and 1998, respectively) and thus more primitive but they still share many of the same characteristics with today's cryptocurrencies. It's interesting to see that the creator of Electrum also had the same ideas and it's not something that I was aware of previously but the news doesn't come as a huge surprise since the concept of decentralized money was a goal shared by many in the cypherpunk scene.

I can see that Voegtlin's proposal looks very similar to these early proposals although the requirement that the private keys of both the sender and the receiver are required for a transaction to occur is interesting. Both his proposal and Szabo's Bit Gold are vulnerable to Sybil attacks which was a flaw that Bitcoin was able to remedy by using proof-of-work as a means of consensus. The other major improvement that Bitcoin had over Bit Gold was its adjusting difficulty algorithm which allowed for fungibility of coins in spite of increasing processing power.

Finally, there isn't enough information about the "decentralized emission system" on that page to verify whether or not it's based on proof-of-work. I can't find any mention of it so I'm curious to know how he would have tackled this problem. I suppose the currency units would be "just there" and initially distributed on a pro rata basis since the presence of an issuing body would make it no longer decentralized.

Great post. It showes that free folks dreamed about decentralised currency way before Satoshi implemented that in his blockchain technology and bitcoin. In my opinion, decentralised global currency is greater step forward than coinage.

Yeah there are a lot of people quoted by talking about decentralized methods of payment, like David Irvine for example, back in 2004 or so.

Cypherpunks were dreaming of this long before 2002: more like 1990's.

Maybe "you" have a new candidate for Satoshi

Bitcoin is the exactly Decentralized currency what he dreamed.
That is amazing, is Satoshi read this before he create bitcoin?

Maybe we have a new candidate for the Satoshi search :O

Interesting read to say the least, certainly seems like a number of similar ideas to Bitcoin, Public/Private Key, Byzantine Generals, Worried about 51% attack (Malicious Nodes)

Oh fffuuuuu...

Ok, now we're in the way back machine so I don't even know what to say at this point. Bitcoin is so strong that throwbacks have to know better by now on this. K thanks

So Bitcoin and its decentralized feature is actually not Satoshi's idea? It's 2002 when this was posted, 7 years before Bitcoin was invented. Amazing.

Amazing foresight by Creator of Electrum
http://bowman.infotech.monash.edu.au/~pmoulder/gossip/goss_DD4psg-biI+Mop2u-OEcF9.html