Topic: Why did no one think of Satoshi's system/solution before Satoshi (Read 1703 times)

I view Bitcoin and Satoshi as a culmination of thought from the early days of worldwide web. Ben Laurie's Lucre or (David) Chaumian blinding concepts. Hal Finney and the PGP Phil Zim. read/discussed/torn-up/began again and again the pursuit of pre-Bitcoin-esque projects. John Smart and futurists predicted its arrival as a disruptive technology.
It is here, now because of continued involvement and clear vision. The most exciting thing is the "what's next" phase. Many are pushing the next projects forward. IRC is full to the brim with "what if?"
The engineers are frothing, theorists are hypnotic, practitioners are pacing at the clarity just coming into view.
Bitcoin, whether regulated or free, is just a player on a grander stage. Its the idea of Bitcoin and company that is the true victor. Times are ripe and summer is nearing. Should be a good one.

FF
PS. Shout-out to OT(FellowTraveler, Randy-Waterhouse,MarkM and da2ce7(Win))/BM(Atheros),  for all the attention - they deserve what is coming their way!

I agree with one point, in 2005 I did the law of banking, and came realise exaclty what FRB/FIAT/CRR's was.

I would try and explain to some people what money was, and the very first moment I said FIAT, that was it....no one but no one knew what FIAT was, let alone FRB or CCRs.

At least now FIAT is on the radar.

Bitcoin, what took ye so long?
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.html

Reality is the ultimate arbiter of who is wrong and who is right.  All the great inventions were not made by governments but single individuals free of coercion or the repression of being a wage slave; Edison, Tesla, Einstein, graham bell and others, they though selflessly, where the rest of the market was thinking of how to make money off the competitor, Satoshi was thinking: Fight them where they aren't and so too did these science greats.

Alexander Graham Bell worked with the deaf.
Einstein worked on changing the understanding of physics.
Tesla wished to help the world by giving them free electricity.
Edison worked on improving the state of society.
Gutenberg created a press to democratize access to the bible.

The idea for a Genius is freedom, and Genius is seldom understood so it leaves them no choice but to create the change in the world they wish to see themselves; No one understands them or can even accept them and worse they come to despise their incessant chatter which they have no interest in, why would they tolerate them when they are not tolerated by them?  So the Genius sets about on their lonely errand free of the constraints of society: money, influence, power... acceptance, they create whatever they want, without anyone telling them it's not possible; Reality will be the arbiter of that.

People are afraid, the Genius is not afraid, society condemns them, their governments and institutions condemn them but they create freely regardless of imaginary or real consequences of poverty, isolation, loneliness, violence brought on by those in power to decide their fate.

They create ceaselessly and in shifts, thinking not as some, of where their next meal will come from or will they get laid tonight; The Geniuses mind is contemplating the Universe, Reality, the construction of poems and sonatas; oh how they dazzle their minds, and of systems and logic. They make the world a better place because they are still human and yet have made a unspoken vow to forgo the world so they can solve these problems that no one wishes to solve because they are too entrenched in their job, worried about money, what other people think, drowning their fears in drugs and alcohol or simply content never having found out what life truly is.

Satoshi's idea was an old one, they simply put it together and took all the steps to guarantee it's success. I can see it now, in how it has survived all these years. Satoshi's Genius was in the payload, Arming this digital nuke to the brim with the most well thought out ideas of the past hundreds of years with a delivery system akin to a ICBM with multiple warheads to spread the mayhem smoothly and evenly.

Satoshi knew where all the gate keepers were and bypassed them, made sure that they would be outmatched and unable to stop it once it had planted itself in their territory. This is why these great ideas never happen, because of the gatekeepers, they control all the doors they have all the keys and their lines of power are well known.

how did this idea get through? If the gatekeepers cannot understand the idea they cannot see it, if they are overwhelmed they cannot stop it once they identify it, If it is outside their lines of power they cannot block it, If they do not have enough resources they cannot defend against an onslaught from a million fronts: death by a thousand cuts.

Satoshi never revealed themselves: no attack against it's creator is possible, they cannot be tied up in the courts by corporate interests.

The client is open source: it is available to everyone to use and create their own projects with; it can be cloned into hundreds of different projects that no one knows where they are.

It is distributed, no single attack against the network is possible, only parts of the system can be shut down and those nodes will be repaired once brought back online.

The users are anonymous they cannot be attacked and made an example of.

The BlockChain is 100% open as well all transactions are recorded, anyone who has a copy can restart the network on their own and if necessary use it to gauge the health of the ecosystem, all this information about the network is able to be used by all. If the majority of users are not actively attacking the system they will take this information and attack those who are not working in it's best interest. an attack from within is very difficult to succeed.

The system is monetized so it will spread extremely rapidly it cannot be slowed down to deal a restriction attack, people will open the gates to gain access to that prize.

Bitcoin is a program it cannot be sued, bribed, corrupted in anyway, it is not political, it is objective and consistent at all times and holds no allegiances.



 

Because Satoshi is a prime mover. Whoever he was, it's Bitcoin that moves the world and it's Bitcoin that will pull it throught.

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or Bitcoins. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out.

You may be right, it just seemed a little humorous to me. 

I think that's only how it appears to you. For example, people sometimes look at someone who gained success, like billionaire Mark Cuban, and think they had the right set of circumstances and got lucky, without appreciating the whole story.

I think a lot of people were thinking of things in the direction of Bitcoin (not necessarily cryptography related), but Satoshi had all the right pieces for everything to fit in place.

For my 2c - I think that there are a number of firsts presented by Satoshi, that really is a culmination of:
1 - Someone with the proper coding experience to be able to think through the problem
2 - That someone needed to understand Macro and Micro economics and understand historical currency successes and failures
3 - Sufficient social dissatisfaction to facilitate the initial adoption of a non-sovereign based currency (like the financial crisis)
4 - The maturation of cryptography, public and private AND the maturation of peer-to-peer software

The fact that Bitcoin has attributes of Cash, Check and Credit Cards and is really a comprehensive payment system is a first and then couple that with the concept of an Economic Majority rule to replace 3rd party or sovereign trust and you have a concept that is untouchable by any central government and anonymity when the user wants it.

Dont be surprised if Governments try and re-use this same technology for official currencies. It would save the government billions if they could stop printing coin and cash AND could own the payments mechanisms for their nation.

Throw in the latest piperwallet.com (the ability to print Bitcoins) and you have completely anonymous cash (like printing postage).

Cheers!
  

I think it is related to technological progress. In 2009 smartphones and computers were much more common than some years before. Imagine making bitcoin in 2000. No smartphones, very few notebooks, few computers too, fail connections, most common os was what, windows me? And so on.

Well think about it -- anytime I proposed something related to Open-Transactions, I eventually ended up having to code it myself, too.

Therefore I believe the same is true of Satoshi: he proposed some great idea, and no one did anything with it, so eventually he just coded it himself. Who else would be more likely to have done so, other than "himself" ?  In my own experience, that's the way it goes.

So, your answer to the question "Why didn't someone think of this before Satoshi?" is "Someone did, but he was probably Satoshi too."

> Why did no one think of Satoshi's system before Satoshi?

Have you seen Wei-Dai's bmoney proposal?

Hmm...

--- Wei Dai lives in the UK. Satoshi writes with UK English.

--- Wei Dai invented the cryptopp library. Satoshi wrote Bitcoin using the cryptopp library.

--- Wei Dai is Asian. Satoshi is probably Asian.

--- Wei Dai proposed the original idea for "B Money"...

--- Wei Dai is a professional Windows developer. Satoshi was obviously a Windows developer (see his code...)

--- IMO, Wei Dai IS Satoshi.

exactly.. kind of a paradox question.

what if true crypto currency wasn't invented until 2020.. but then research historians of the year 2020 revealed that a guy named satoshi invented it in 2009...

theres no reason to ask why, who. or when.... just be happy its here

no one realy cares that they cannot talk to alexander hamilton about why or how he came up with the idea of paper money. we just know he did. there is no reason to talk about what if alex hamilton didnt invent it but it was around before that.

just be happy about the reality we live in and don't exert your energy thinking about the what if's that cannot be changed after the fact.

Are you seriously asking why the first person to think of something is the first person to think of something?

Or are you asking why it took until 2008 for it to happen?

Let's not forget that probably the most important new idea in Bitcoin, making it different from earlier digital money architectures, was the proof of work to prevent double spend. Satoshi attributed it to Adam Back:

From the whitepaper:

An idea like Bitcoin (I don't suggest it is the same), started development (3rd party I beleive) for a few large banks working together, a few years before Bitcoin's Genesis block, according to a good friend of mine, who works in the banking sector.

It ultimately failed, due to disagreements in it's core operation between the Banks involved at the time, according to that same good friend in the industry. I don't feel overly inclined to mention her name, since I doubt she wants to answer your questions on it.

It never got off the ground or went into full active use, but it did work on the same core principle, of a very high encryption digital currency, that was traded directly between Bank A and Bank B, almost instantly, regardless of location with the data of those transactions stored in some kind of ledger by all parties using it. It would of help facilitate their IOU's on the international market of currency exchange.

This is a very profitable business for banks, international transfers and all those involved in it, so I'm sure they had a very good reason why not to reduce their bottom line, as this could of made a huge difference by cutting out all the intermediate banks.

Did they feel like it wasn't secure enough?
Was it still a financial aspect of it they saw a problem with?
or
Maybe, they just dislike change.

Satoshi brought about a great system, made it available to the general public at no cost, that I have no doubt would not exist in the dinosaur era that our banks still live in, if they controlled it.
It is now going to be a threat to the banking industry profits, rather than being something they could of used for their gain in my opinion.

The history of technical development goes totally against the grain of the hollywood storyboard way of inventing things!

People don't wake up one day and say, the world needs one of these, spend a few days working on the idea and release it on a grateful public.

Ideas come in waves and one layers a development on to something else.  Eventually all the ideas come together, and someone invents something useful, which is made better by a bunch of other people.  IF enough other people grab on to the idea, it takes off, and everyone remembers the person who did it.

Of course, there are plenty of great ideas out there, which are being used by millions of people, but the core person who developed it, gets nothing.  That happens a lot too - but again, Hollywood covers that bit up.

As for bitcoin, its a great idea which took a lot of people a lot of development time to bring to a working model, and Satoshi is just the name everyone remembers.

Actually not as many people care that much about crypto or (potential) anonymity - they care much more for usability and ease of use.

Chaum's blinded money is a great example as are some more intricate Visa payment schemes. In some other areas TOR, JAP or Freenet - all great projects but with quite limited user numbers compared to the internet population.

Block chains are nothing new the big thing that Satoshi did was not just talking about some potential solutions but quickly implementing a working client and releasing it into the wild. There are several other e-money systems out there but they only exist on paper/pdf.

The need was not as urgent. Torrent was created out of necessity after Napster type services were shut down. There is a new paradigm growing out of open sourced distributed and decentralized networking. There are plenty of breakthroughs to come nobody has imagined.

What were the critical blockages in thought, or the zietergiest (sp?) that meant 1 entity person satoshi out of nowhere produces a theory and working solution to a holy grail problem.

I am left strachting my head to think of the last time this happened.

Why was no solution found earlier, I mean there are UNI's/Companies/Gov's full of cyrpo/maths/com sci and really really smart people.

Yet zip.