> If your point is that nothing stopped people doing this a generation ago, if they'd thought about it, then I agree completely. > But the key bit is they didn

> If your point is that nothing stopped people doing this a generation ago, if they'd thought about it, then I agree completely. > But the key bit is they didn't think about it (or think it was sufficiently important). My opinion on this topic rather is: everything (except how to build decentralized trust) has been known for a long time. It is also known for a very long time that these techniques work well (otherwise Satoshi Nakamoto would never have come up with the idea to make them a central piece of Bitcoin). The central reason why it wasn't implemented before rather was that the people who knew about it did not have the charisma to convince "the people with money" that they should finance an implementation. For example, already in 1989, there was an attempt to build a digital anonymous (though not decentral as far as I know) currency called DigiCash by David Chaum: > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigiCash&oldid=838558773 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=DigiCash&oldid=83... What happened to them? This company simply went bankrupt in 1998.