bitcoin.org was registered 2008-08-18, so presumably Satoshi had been developing the bitcoin idea at least as early as 2008_16ya. He refers to working on it earlier than that, but the earliest draft of the Bitcoin whitepaper appears to have been circulated privately sometime before 2008-08-22 when he contacted Wei Dai for comments.↩︎

Although Bonneau & Miller2014 describe a cryptocurrency design using just cryptographic hash functions (with commit-and-reveal) without any need for public key cryptography and pointedly note that “Bitcoin itself is something of a curiosity from an academic standpoint in that it was discovered decades after the requisite cryptographic primitives were available. Our work shows that it was in fact possible even before the discovery of public-key cryptography.”↩︎

The first revision in the Github repository is dated August 2009_15ya by sirius-m.↩︎

Satoshi claims that before he write the whitepaper, he wrote a prototype.↩︎

In the same vein of ‘the network is a third party which keeps a copy of all signed transactions’, you could include Ian Grigg’s 2005_19ya paper “Triple Entry Accounting”.↩︎

I had a hard time figuring out when bit gold was first thought of; Szabo kindly blogged that he had written about it in 1998_26ya on a private mailing list

Here are some more specific reasons why the ideas behind Bitcoin were very far from obvious: (1) only a few people had read of the bit gold ideas, which although I came up with them in 1998_26ya (at the same time and on the same private mailing list [libtech) where Dai was coming up with b-money—it’s a long story) were mostly not described in public until 2005_19ya, although various pieces of it I described earlier, for example the crucial Byzantine-replicated chain-of-signed-transactions part of it which I generalized into what I call secure property titles.

“Pricing via Processing, Or, Combating Junk Mail”, , Dwork 1993_31ya, published in CRYPTO’92.↩︎

This is Satoshi’s citation date; Diffie-Hellman, the first published system, was in 1976_48ya, not 1980_44ya.↩︎

In cryptography, new parts are guilty until proven innocent. Hundreds of past systems have been broken, sometimes after decades of study & use.↩︎

Another person or group to ask this same question is Barber et al 2012 (although this essay was posted in early 2011_13ya, so Barber et al 2012_12ya may not be entirely independent):

Despite some pessimists’ critiques and disbelief, Bitcoin has admittedly witnessed enormous success since its invention. To the security and cryptographic community, the idea of digital currency or electronic cash is by no means new. As early as 1982_42ya, Chaum has outlined his blueprint of an anonymous e-cash scheme in his pioneering paper [10]. Ever since then, hundreds of academic papers have been published to improve the efficiency and security of e-cash constructions—to name a few, see [15, 8, 9]. Naturally, an interesting question arises: Despite three decades’ research on e-cash, why have e-cash schemes not taken off, while Bitcoin—a system designed and initially implemented possibly single-handedly by someone previously unknown, a system that uses no fancy cryptography, and is by no means perfect—has enjoyed a swift rise to success?

…Bitcoin has a completely distributed architecture, without any single trusted entity. Bitcoin assumes that the majority of nodes in its network are honest, and resorts to a majority vote mechanism for double spending avoidance, and dispute resolution. In contrast, most e-cash schemes require a centralized bank who is trusted for purposes of e-cash issuance, and double-spending detection. This greatly appeals to individuals who wish for a freely-traded currency not in control by any governments, banks, or authorities—from libertarians to drug-dealers and other underground economy proponents

…Incentives and economic system. Bitcoin’s eco-system is ingeniously designed, and ensures that users have economic incentives to participate. First, the generation of new bitcoins happens in a distributed fashion at a predictable rate: “bitcoin miners” solve computational puzzles to generate new bitcoins, and this process is closely coupled with the verification of previous transactions. At the same time, miners also get to collect optional transaction fees for their effort of vetting said transactions. This gives users clear economic incentives to invest spare computing cycles in the verification of Bitcoin transactions and the generation of new Bitcoins. At the time of writing the investment of a GPU to accelerate Bitcoin puzzle solution can pay for itself in ~6 months…the earlier in the game, the cheaper the coins minted.

I am only a layman with an interest in cryptography, but I am not alone in seeing this lack of really novel primitives or ideas in the Bitcoin scheme; Ben Laurie expresses exactly this idea in an aside in a blog post attacking Bitcoin:

A friend alerted to me to a sudden wave of excitement about Bitcoin. I have to ask: why? What has changed in the last 10 years to make this work when it didn’t in, say, 1999_25ya, when many other related systems (including one of my own) were causing similar excitement? Or in the 20 years since the wave before that, in 1990_34ya? As far as I can see, nothing.

One thinks of the formidable mathematical difficulties surrounding the area of homomorphic encryption where one would expect any breakthrough to be from a bona fide genius, or at least a credentialed expert.↩︎

Although ironically, proof-of-work never seemed to go into widespread use because of general inertia and because to deter large amounts of spam, proof-of-work would also deter legitimate users under some models.

Spam seems to have been kept in check by better filtering techniques (eg. Paul Graham’s “A Plan for Spam” using Bayesian spam filtering) and legal action against botnets & spammers.↩︎

For more on that history, see Wikipedia on Industrial Revolution#Causes in Europe, Chinese_industrialization#Reasons_for_the_delay_in_industrialization, the Great Divergence; I recommend Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms.↩︎

“Voices From A Virtual Past: An oral history of a technology whose time has come again” (2014):

Palmer Luckey: I spent a huge amount of time reading through basically every single published piece of literature on VR. I think that there were a lot of people that were giving VR too much credit, because they were working as VR researchers. You don’t want to publish a paper that says, “After the study, we came to the conclusion that VR is useless right now and that we should just not have a job for 20 years.” There were a few people that basically came to that conclusion. They said, “Current VR gear is low field of view, high lag, too expensive, too heavy, can’t be driven properly from consumer-grade computers, or even professional-grade computers.” It turned out that I wasn’t the first person to realize these problems. They’d been known for decades.

Here’s a secret: the thing stopping people from making good VR and solving these problems was not technical. Someone could have built the Rift in mid-to-late 2007_17ya for a few thousand dollars, and they could have built it in mid-2008 for about $702.41^$500₂₀₀₈. It’s just nobody was paying attention to that.

SHA-1, as of 2011_13ya, had not been cracked in practice; it was defeated in 2017.↩︎

My understanding is that simply no one has bothered to program this functionality since 400MB is not that much space.↩︎

Or rather, the objections were that cryptocurrencies had to be mobile—usable on the contemporary PDAs and cellphones, with the computing power of a watch.↩︎

Garbage collection and most of artificial intelligence (or machine learning in particular) seem to have waited decades for sufficiently fast hardware. Indeed, I sometimes feel that Alan Kay’s entire career has essentially been sketching out what he could do if only he had some decent cheap hardware.↩︎

It probably will. Some informal projections have been made of what it would take to run millions of transactions worth trillions of dollars, and they tend to come in at comparable to the existing resource use of companies like Google (which fund their own power plants or monopolize convenient hydroelectric dams to run their datacenters).↩︎

Recent criticism, too, sometimes focuses on the quality of the C++ codebase and ad hoc nature of many of the choices; from an anonymous Facebook comment:

The protocol is not well-defined and clearly designed by an amateur (that is, not someone who has done much protocol implementation work). It’s a binary protocol with a smattering of length-prefixing, null terminated strings, etc. The messages look reasonable, just a horrible encoding. The rules of the protocol are poorly defined and tightly coupled to implementation; the implementation is done by someone who feels it’s good and well to have only 5 major source files for 17 KLOC. Due to lack of a well-specified protocol, there is also a bit of client monoculture going on.

It’s worth noting that the whole system assumes SHA-256—the bitcoin community says that rolling over to something else is just a matter of introducing a new algo, but in actuality it’s not nearly that simple. The protocol has no concept of upgrading to different algos, so it would necessitate a complete overhaul of the protocol (since there’s a lot of 32-byte fields in there) AND a re-computation/rollover of the entire transaction history. …The protocol also has had no thought put into it re: network architecture—there are peers and that’s it. Due to the cryptographic nature of transactions, it’s simply not possible to have realtime transactions with bitcoin as the network scales (it already take 5–10 mins on average for the network to see a single transaction). Thus, there will need to be some concept of a node in the network that can facilitate interactions between two peers in a faster fashion, with the assumption of a measure of trust. You shouldn’t require it, of course, but it should be defined, I think.

Security expert Dan Kaminsky is similarly appalled at the bandwidth requirements to scale (“:0” was his emoticon) and predicts that the Bitcoin network will eventually turn into a quasi-bank-like oligarchy of supernodes (which changes the system and “offers a host of ugly semantics” since the supernodes “don’t need 50%—just need to inconvenience 50% to accept your opinion”). He comments that while “Normal Code” seems good but “Scratch the surface, it’s actually really bad”, the Bitcoin codebase “Looks really bad up front” but “Scratch the surface, it’s actually surprisingly good”. The New Yorker article’s “The Crypto-currency: Bitcoin and its mysterious inventor”:

“When I first looked at the code, I was sure I was going to be able to break it”, Kaminsky said, noting that the programming style was dense and inscrutable. “The way the whole thing was formatted was insane. Only the most paranoid, painstaking coder in the world could avoid making mistakes.”…He quickly identified nine ways to compromise the system…when he found the right spot, there was a message waiting for him. “Attack Removed”, it said. The same thing happened over and over, infuriating Kaminsky. “I came up with beautiful bugs”, he said. “But every time I went after the code there was a line that addressed the problem.”…“I’ve never seen anything like it”, Kaminsky said, still in awe…“Either there’s a team of people who worked on this”, Kaminsky said, “or this guy is a genius.”

On a technical basis, he dislikes the use of SHA-256 as opposed to slower time-lock crypto functions like bcrypt, because SHA-256 “can be accelerated massively with GPUs” leading to GPU shortages and massive hashing disparities between peers, and his slides conclude “BitCoin is actually well designed, if you accept that anonymity and scaling forces the entire present model to be shifted into something that effectively looks like banking”. He reiterated his positive impression of Bitcoin in 2013_11ya—“But the core technology actually works, and has continued to work, to a degree not everyone predicted.”—and has begun to reconsider some of his earlier criticisms about the resource demands & gradual centralization of nodes. Another testimony to the protocol’s security comes from TechCrunch:

While researching Bitcoin, Lemon’s Casares hired two separate teams of hackers to examine the Bitcoin source code for vulnerabilities for about a half-year. “They are arguably the best in the world. I spent a lot of time and money on the best hackers I could find and came back from that convinced that Bitcoin’s security is robust,” he said. “What they found was very, very compelling for me.”

Bruce Schneier mentions offhandedly that “I haven’t analyzed the security, but what I have seen looks good.”↩︎

Nick Szabo, discussing Chaumian ecash (“the greatest simple equation since e = mc²”), comments with almost palpable distaste of a hypothetical system akin to Bitcoin in this respect:

A use-once-address communications mix plus forswearing any reputation gain from keeping accounts, in theory also buys us unlinkability, but a communications mix [BTC: “mixing service”; not necessarily easy] is weak and very expensive.

The most widely known, popular, and secure communications mix is probably Tor; a number of flaws have been found in it over time, and Tor will never be very secure—it’s fundamentally difficult to impossible to have an anonymizing communications mix which is also near real-time. Some flaws can’t be removed by the Tor network, like the ability of exit nodes to snoop on traffic (as has been done many times, most memorably during the startup of Wikileaks). Communications mixes are usually expensive in resources, so typically only make up a part of an overall network—and the rest of the network leaks considerable information, including in Bitcoin.

These are not necessarily fatal objections from a practical point of view. A simple mix or laundry may well buy one all the anonymity one needs; they can be chained to substantially reduce risks; more elaborate and secure off-blockchain laundries can be constructed using secure multi-party computation; and finally, there is always the hope that someone will figure out how to build upon the existing pseudonymous Bitcoin system to enable genuinely anonymous and untraceable transactions (which may have been accomplished in 2013_11ya with the proposed Zerocoin extension to the Bitcoin protocol).↩︎

Perry Metzger summarizes Laurie’s approach:

I think people have missed the more subtle point that Ben Laurie made here. Bitcoin requires the use of an unusual sort of secure consensus protocol to work reliably, and such protocols are not known to exist in this context. In the presence of such a protocol, however, there is no longer any need for mining—the system can simply elect a member to acquire a new coin every N seconds via a secure election protocol (and those are known given the rest). Thus, Ben’s point that if you’re going to have a system like bitcoin, one could at least have an efficient system of this sort rather than a stupid one based on an electrical potlatch.

Not everyone agrees with me or those initial posters, though; “Bitcoins create truly democratic policy, followers say”, Canada.com:

“It’s like the Mona Lisa.” said Bruce Wagner, an IT consultant who discovered bitcoin in October and now hosts an online TV show about it. “It’s a masterpiece of technology.”

From the New Yorker article:

Haber is a director of the International Association for Cryptologic research and knew all about bitcoin. “Whoever did this had a deep understanding of cryptography”, Haber said when I called. “They’ve read the academic papers, they have a keen intelligence, and they’re combining the concepts in a genuinely new way.”

“The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin”, Wired:

But slowly, word of bitcoin spread beyond the insular world of cryptography. It has won accolades from some of digital currency’s greatest minds. Wei Dai, inventor of b-money, calls it “very significant”; Nick Szabo, who created bit gold, hails bitcoin as “a great contribution to the world”; and Hal Finney, the eminent cryptographer behind RPOW, says it’s “potentially world-changing.”…Stefan Brands, a former ecash consultant and digital currency pioneer, calls bitcoin “clever”…

More recently, Wei Dai has said:

…it involved major technical and conceptual/philosophical advances on the existing state-of-the-art, and these advances didn’t originate from nor was likely funded/supported by academia, government or industry. Also, its social impact seems larger—if Craigslist or PayPal didn’t exist, something essentially identical would have been created very soon anyway, but if Bitcoin didn’t exist, another Bitcoin may not have been created for another decade, and/or may have been created with very different characteristics, for example it might have been coded with a monetary policy that emphasized price stability instead of a fixed supply of money.

Computing power is useful because it’s impossible to fake: you either can regularly bruteforce a hash or you cannot, assuming the hash is still secure. But strictly speaking there are other possible unfakeable properties which future digital cryptographic currencies may use; Szabo lists 3 others:

Canonically Byzantine agreement assumed each node had a secure true-name identity, but because privacy is a desiderata, and because it would be very difficult to implement such a secure identity system on the Internet, we have to use some characteristic of users provable within the Bitcoin or bit gold system to weigh Byzantine “votes”. I’ve now come up with a list of provable attributes in Bitcoin (or bit gold) by which message correctness “votes” might be weighed:

• proof-of-work/mining effort (what Bitcoin currently does)

• value or number of coins or solution bits owned by key

• number or value of transactions as payor, payee, or both by a key

• number or value of transactions weighted by how recent they are

• various combinations of the above

This is an incomplete list, especially if we add new attributes. One of the general ideas here is to weigh Byzantine “voting” towards those with more experience in the system, making a novel invasion more difficult. However in a currency there should also be a balance between various stakeholders (holders, creditors, and debtors). Since Bitcoin- or bit gold- denominated contracts generally exist outside the system, one would have to, at the very least, publicly register those contracts signed by the parties’ keys for creditor or debtor status to be provable.

One proposed scheme for Bitcoin is Proof of Stake:

With Proof of Work, the probability of mining a block depends on the work done by the miner (eg. CPU/GPU cycles spent checking hashes). With Proof of Stake, the resource that’s compared is the amount of Bitcoin a miner holds—someone holding 1% of the Bitcoin can mine 1% of the “Proof of Stake blocks”….Each block must be signed by its miner using a single bitcoin account. The account used to sign a block must also be the recipient of txn fees and generation from this block. Blocks are mined by proof-of-work hashing as before, but with modified difficulty criteria. The difficulty criterion for block validity is modified as follows: Hash generates valid block if and only if

Hash Difficulty >= Difficulty Target / ( max(Coin-confirmations used to sign block, 100 satoshi-confirmations) )^( p / (1-p))

where 0 <= p < 1. Stake becomes more and more important as p approaches 1. p = 0.8 is suggested as an appropriate choice. p = 0 is identical to the current proof-of-work system. If the block is signed by a bitcoin account holding less than 100 satoshi-confirmations, this is treated as if the account held 100 satoshi-confirmations. Thus non-stakeholders are allowed to verify blocks, but relative to stakeholders they must meet extremely stringent difficulty criteria. Permitting non-stakeholders to verify blocks solves the initial distribution problem. As before the Difficulty Target is a periodically adjusted constant which is set to maintain a target generation rate of 1 block every 10 minutes.

“Decentralised Currencies Are Probably Impossible: But Let’s At Least Make Them Efficient”, Ben Laurie:

Now that we understand the core problem, namely that of agreement, we can quite easily understand Bitcoin’s solution to the problem. Bitcoin defines the consensus group as “all the computing power in existence”, and requires participants to prove their possession of whatever fraction of this power they care to spend on Bitcoin by using it to produce proof-of-work tokens. And once we state the problem like this, we can quite clearly see the flaw. Until at least half of the computing power in existence is actually used to produce Bitcoins, we cannot know that we have consensus! If, for example, 1% of the total power available^{Strictly, I mean energy rather than power, since Bitcoin actually, in effect, sums power over time.} is used to produce Bitcoins at present (in fact, the amount is far less than that), then at any point someone could come along with a further 1.1% of the total power and use this to define their own consensus^{By forking history right back to the first block, and producing a hash chain that is longer than the current consensus.}, thus invalidating all the work, and all the money, of the initial group, and instead take possession of the entire currency for themselves.

…Even worse, it is clear that arriving at the equilibrium state for Bitcoin is incredibly expensive: half of all the computing power in existence must be burnt, in perpetuity, maintaining agreement about the current state of the currency. It also unknowable: we can never be sure that we actually are burning half of all the power in existence, because we do not know how much power exists.

Laurie points out that in practice, the Bitcoin community does depend on a centralized authority which periodically passes down ‘blessed’ block-chains—the Bitcoin developers periodically hardwire known-good states of the block-chain into the clients (which of course is a theoretical weakness).↩︎

Zooko Wilcox O’Hearn, 2013-04-05 (in hidden comments):

…I recall upon first hearing about Bitcoin, losing interest in it for precisely one of those “ugliness” issues that you cite: it depended on (what was described as) globally synchronized clocks, which I had a negative emotional reaction to.

Chaum pays a price for his systems’ ability to work offline / without directly processing transactions. Don’t take my word for it; see Tim May in section 12.6.6 of his early ’90s Cyphernomicon (not to be confused with Stephenson’s novel):

…Chaum went to great lengths to develop system which preserve anonymity for single-spending instances, but which break anonymity and thus reveal identity for double-spending instances. I’m not sure what market forces caused him to think about this as being so important, but it creates many headaches. Besides being clumsy, it require physical ID, it invokes a legal system to try to collect from “double spenders”, and it admits the extremely serious breach of privacy by enabling stings. For example, Alice pays Bob a unit of money, then quickly Alice spends that money before Bob can…Bob is then revealed as a “double spender,” and his identity revealed to whomever wanted it…Alice, IRS, Gestapo, etc. A very broken idea. Acceptable mainly for small transactions.

• Multi-spending vs. on-line clearing

  • I favor on-line clearing. Simply put: the first spending is the only spending. The guy who gets to the train locker where the cash is stored is the guy who gets it. This ensure that the burden of maintaining the secret is on the secret holder.

  • When Alice and Bob transfer money, Alice makes the transfer, Bob confirms it as valid (or verifies that his bank has received the deposit), and the transaction is complete.

  • With network speeds increasing dramatically, on-line clearing should be feasible for most transactions. Off-line systems may of course be useful, especially for small transactions, the ones now handled with coins and small bills.

Further contemporary description can be found in a declassified June 1996_28ya NSA review, “How to make a mint: the cryptography of anonymous electronic cash”.

The fate of Chaum blind signatures should keep technologists up at night. So many uses for privacy-preserving credentials like proving age or citizenship, and 4 decades of math/R&D later we use… next to none of it, because incentives. (Large entities want knowledge, not proof.)↩︎

For example, see some of the most recent research I linked in Death Note: L, Anonymity & Eluding Entropy.↩︎

The UNIX-HATERS Handbook, which contains many entertaining and often still-applicable descriptions of the fecklessness and sharp edges of Unixes, also contains an extremely funny ‘Anti-Foreword’ by Dennis Ritchie:

To the contributors to this book: I have succumbed to the temptation you offered in your preface: I do write you off as envious malcontents and romantic keepers of memories. The systems you remember so fondly (TOPS-20, ITS, Multics, Lisp Machine, Cedar/Mesa, the Dorado) are not just out to pasture, they are fertilizing it from below…You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in whining. Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy. Bon appetit!

“Oral History of Butler Lampson”, 2006_18ya:

Alan Kay: “But I wish that you had been at CERN on a sabbatical when that…”

Butler Lampson: “I probably would have been a disaster.”

Kay: “I don’t know. But I think you would have made a slightly better…”

Lampson: “No. No. No. No. No. No. What Tim [Berners-Lee] did was perfect. My view about the web is that it’s the great failure of computer systems research. Why did computer systems researchers not invent the web? And I can tell you the answer. It’s because it’s too simple.”

Kay: “It is too simple.”

Lampson: “If I had been there I would have mucked it up. I swear to God. The idea that you’re going to make a new TCP connection for every mouse click on a link? Madness! The idea that you’re going to have this crusty universal data type called HTML with all those stupid angle brackets? We never would have done that! But those were the things that allowed it to succeed.”

Many anonymous commenters point this out because it makes Bitcoin smell like some sort of Ponzi scheme or multilevel marketing scheme:

Bitcoin, like the recent commercial phenomenon Groupon, tends to turn people into marketers because they feel they have something to gain, however small it might be in the end; I think that partly accounts for its temporary success.

Or “The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin”, Wired:

Stefan Brands, a former ecash consultant and digital currency pioneer, calls bitcoin “clever” and is loath to bash it but believes it’s fundamentally structured like “a pyramid scheme” that rewards early adopters.

John Robb, “More Thoughts on Bitcoin”:

Lots of people are saying: “The deflation built into bitcoin was a terrible idea. People are getting rich.” In fact, it was a brilliant idea. It brought in speculators (people that are buying/selling it as if in a game). It created a bubble. The bubble put it on the map. The bubble has attracted thousands of developers/participants. Think of how the Netscape IPO fueled the Web/Internet.

Szabo is a little more generous in his explanation of why people were uninterested in Bitcoin-like strategies:

2. Hardly anybody actually understands money. Money just doesn’t work like that, I was told fervently and often. Gold couldn’t work as money until it was already shiny or useful for electronics or something else besides money, they told me. (Do insurance services also have to start out useful for something else, maybe as power plants?) This common argument coming ironically from libertarians who misinterpreted Menger’s account of the origin of money [see “On the Origins of Money” as being the only way it could arise (rather than an account of how it could arise) and, in the same way misapplying Mises’ regression theorem [see The Theory of Money and Credit]. Even though I had rebutted these arguments in my study of the origins of money, which I humbly suggest should be should be required reading for anybody debating the economics of Bitcoin.

There’s nothing like Nakamoto’s incentive-to-market scheme to change minds about these issues. :-) Thanks to RAMs full of coin with “scheduled deflation”, there are now no shortage of people willing to argue in its favor.

Decentralized systems are usually convertible into centralized systems easily, while the converse is not true. (Much like parallel versus serial programming—to make a parallel program serial, just insert a lot of blocking.) For a simple example, consider cases where n = 2: imagine a BitTorrent swarm (a decentralized system) with one seed and one leech. Or take Distributed Revision Control Systems like Darcs or Git; it’s a commonplace to point out that if a group really wants a ‘centralized’ workflow, they can just designate one particular repository the ‘master’ canonical repository and continue onwards with the DVCS as a more capable replacement for Apache Subversion or CVS.↩︎

betterunix offers an interesting defense of DigiCash:

…It is worth pointing out that Digicash survived longer than Bitcoin has even been around—twice as long, in fact. The reasons for its failure are not as simple as “people just did not care.” There were forces in the US government actively working against all civilian use of cryptography, especially those systems that might thwart law enforcement investigations. Patents on cryptography (ironically, this includes patents held by Chaum himself) did what they typically do: prevent systems from being deployed on a large scale. There were bad management decisions, like Chaum’s refusal to accept a huge monetary offer from Microsoft to integrate his system with Windows 95 and another large offer from Visa…In another four years, if the news about Bitcoin is something other than, “Bitcoin trading at all-time lows”, or “Analyzing the failure of cryptocurrencies”, you can at least claim that Bitcoin fared better than Chaum’s systems.

Zooko, May 31, 2011_13ya 6:42 PM↩︎

Wei Dai, 2011-02-25:

…If you read the Wikipedia article, you should know that I didn’t create Bitcoin but only described a similar idea more than a decade ago. And my understanding is that the creator of Bitcoin, who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto, didn’t even read my article before reinventing the idea himself. He learned about it afterward and credited me in his paper. So my connection with the project is quite limited.

Dai has also criticized the monetary policy built into Bitcoin:

I would consider Bitcoin to have failed with regard to its monetary policy (because the policy causes high price volatility which imposes a heavy cost on its users, who have to either take undesirable risks or engage in costly hedging in order to use the currency). (This may have been partially my fault because when Satoshi wrote to me asking for comments on his draft paper, I never got back to him. Otherwise perhaps I could have dissuaded him (or them) from the “fixed supply of money” idea.) I don’t know if it’s too late at this point to change the monetary policy that is built into the Bitcoin protocol or for an alternative cryptocurrency to overtake Bitcoin..

Adam Back, 2013-04-18 (confirmed by Wei Dai):

…So anyway I know a few things about ecash, privacy tech, crypto, distributed systems (my comp sci PhD is in distributed systems) and I guess I was one of the moderately early people to read about and try to comprehend the p2p crypto cleverness that is bitcoin. In fact I believe it was me who got Wei Dai’s b-money reference added to Satoshi’s bitcoin paper when he emailed me about hashcash back in 2008_16ya. If like Hal Finney I’d actually tried to run the miner back then, I may too be sitting on some genesis/bootstrap era coins. Alas I own not a single bitcoin which is kind of ironic as the actual bitcoin mining is basically my hashcash invention.

Which is a comforting lie scammers tell themselves and others to blame the victim—‘really, the victim deserved it, you can’t cheat an honest man!’—and which makes for funner fictional (ie. ‘not true’) stories. But I think the sordid reality looks more like simply good people being ripped off as they lose their life savings because they aren’t specialists in an area and trusted an expert. I think it’s relatively rare that you get a complicated setup like this scam, or like the Madoff scam in which people assumed Madoff was simply frontrunning the people he was trading for; although now that I think about it, only the savviest investors with Madoff understood the sheer impossibility of his returns and concluded he was scamming by frontrunning, most of the people who gave him money were just ordinary middle-upper-class folks.↩︎