So some people organized themselves, launched a testnet, then the live net with a shaky network of CPU miners that dwindled in the summer of 2009. However, in autumn it picked up really fast and people got interested. This forum was created, so let's look at what happened 5 years ago:
UID - alias - rank - activity - details
1 - admin - disabled - 7 - wiped and disabled for security reasons
2 - ###
3 - ###
4 - sirius - staff - 429
5 - ###
6 - ###
7 - ###
8 - ###
9 - ###?
10 - Xunie - full - 132
11 - madhatter - new - 1
12 - nanaimogold - sr - 406
13 - SmokeTooMuch - hero - 862
14 - The Madhatter - hero - 626
15 - ###
16 - xuO4k04c6Ng - new - 1
17 - The Doctor - new - 1
Then 2010 came around. thermos has user number 35, there are still few people registering every month. I registered when the forum was 2 years old, after about 1 year of dicking around because people were trying to mine on Arduinos or something.
As you can see, the first 8 users except sirius were either very naughty (completely wiped before mod rules were made) or requested their accounts to be deleted for various reasons. Unfortunately you can't see these profiles, they are not indexed outside the site due to permission restrictions.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2008/04/bit-gold-markets.html?m=1Szabo calls out to the cypherpunk types 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?”
Who do you think would have answered at that time? I'm sure those same names that are missing from the members list.....
Zooko: (January 26 2009)
"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."
* 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)
*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”.