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Personally I think the inventor of Bitcoin is Nick Szabo. In a blog post predating Bitcoin, he described all its aspects, and even called his invention "bit gol

by mrb 14y ago

Personally I think the inventor of Bitcoin is Nick Szabo. In a blog post predating Bitcoin, he described all its aspects, and even called his invention "bit gold"(!): http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html He also seems to have tried to postdate his blog post (URL says 2005, but date in the post says 2008) to perhaps hide the fact he was the first one to come up with these concepts :D He was even a contractor for Digicash back in 1994-95.

jacquesm 14y ago
Interesting! One thing I'm pretty sure of is that it isn't a single person.
- mrb 14y ago
  I think it is quite probable that Bitcoin was written by a single person. It is not that complicated: block chain of merkle trees + signing transactions with public/private crypto + proof-of-work with hashing function + peer-to-peer networking. The first public release (0.1.0) was only 20k lines of code. Someone like Szabo, Wei Dai, or Hal Finney, who have each spent more than a decade thinking about and attempting to design decentralized currencies certainly have the expertise to design Bitcoin all by themselves.
  - gojomo 14y ago
    My admittedly vague feeling is there are so many balances in the system that it was likely reviewed by a larger group, having lengthy expert-level discussions in a non-public forum, before release. I've heard the theory that it's a government think-tank project that in asome sense 'escaped', in that it was thrown out to see what happened and has thrived beyond expectations.
zby 14y ago
Here are his own comments on bitcoin: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-y... I vaguely remember he also denied being Satoshi Nakamoto somewhere - but I cannot find it now.
makomk 14y ago
Nothing he describes there is terribly remarkable - all those ideas were widespread. His description lacks the key innovation that made Bitcoin better than its prececessors, which is that it doesn't rely on trusted centralized timestamping servers.
- mrb 14y ago
  Szabo's bit gold ideas, or Bitcoin's ideas, when taken individually, are not remarkable. It is the combination of all of them, that truly gives the whole distributed currency its elegance. And I would argue that Szabo is the first one to put almost all of Bitcoin's ideas together, in writing. Yes bit gold's proof-of-work takes a trusted timestamp as input, but simply changing it to take a head of the "chain of title" as input is really the only (minor) difference between bit gold and Bitcoin.

by mrb 14y ago

jacquesm 14y ago

Interesting! One thing I'm pretty sure of is that it isn't a single person.

mrb 14y ago
I think it is quite probable that Bitcoin was written by a single person. It is not that complicated: block chain of merkle trees + signing transactions with public/private crypto + proof-of-work with hashing function + peer-to-peer networking. The first public release (0.1.0) was only 20k lines of code. Someone like Szabo, Wei Dai, or Hal Finney, who have each spent more than a decade thinking about and attempting to design decentralized currencies certainly have the expertise to design Bitcoin all by themselves.
- gojomo 14y ago
  My admittedly vague feeling is there are so many balances in the system that it was likely reviewed by a larger group, having lengthy expert-level discussions in a non-public forum, before release. I've heard the theory that it's a government think-tank project that in asome sense 'escaped', in that it was thrown out to see what happened and has thrived beyond expectations.

zby 14y ago

Here are his own comments on bitcoin: http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-ye-so-long.html http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/05/bitcoin-what-took-y... I vaguely remember he also denied being Satoshi Nakamoto somewhere - but I cannot find it now.

makomk 14y ago

Nothing he describes there is terribly remarkable - all those ideas were widespread. His description lacks the key innovation that made Bitcoin better than its prececessors, which is that it doesn't rely on trusted centralized timestamping servers.

mrb 14y ago
Szabo's bit gold ideas, or Bitcoin's ideas, when taken individually, are not remarkable. It is the combination of all of them, that truly gives the whole distributed currency its elegance. And I would argue that Szabo is the first one to put almost all of Bitcoin's ideas together, in writing. Yes bit gold's proof-of-work takes a trusted timestamp as input, but simply changing it to take a head of the "chain of title" as input is really the only (minor) difference between bit gold and Bitcoin.