Bitcoin Forum

"The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed, it's a reliable e-cash. A method where buying on the internet you can transfer funds from A to B, without A knowing B or B knowing A. The way in which I can take a 20 dollar bill and hand it over to you and there's no record of where it came from. And you may get that without knowing who I am. That kind of thing will develop on the Internet."

- Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman in 1999

The Interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MnQJFEVY7s

the first Crypto coins appear before that, he didn't predict nothing was enough if someone talk about E-cash with him

His paragraph sums up the concept of trustlessness. The biggest attempts pre Bitcoin never managed to address that and were centralised and thus vulnerable. Look up the history of E-gold.

The exception is that bitcoin leaves a public record of transactions in the blockchain forever. And bitcoin transactions are far from being as anonymous as (www.bitcoinisnotanonymous.com) giving someone cash.

I don't think that anonymity part is that important at all. I think that Bitcoin has many more things going for itself and that are much bigger inventions than its anonymity or non-anonymity.

Who wants to hide something has already so many ways that he doesn't need Bitcoin. It just a matter of how much trouble are you ready to go through to get something done.

so if i walked up to you in a coffee shop. no names, i gave you $20, you gave me btc..

tell me what government database will show my name against that transaction..

next i send the funds to 4 addresses
1abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
1zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcba
1azbycxdwevfugthsirjqkplomn
1zabcydefghxijklmnwopqrsvtu

now tell me.. one of them is for a friend in the bahama's. what government database tells which one is my friend.

now. can my friend by knowing the transaction links..(taint). know the name of the person i met in the coffee shop.
now can the guy in the coffee shop know the name of my friend.

?? ?? the answer is no

This is of course amusing to listen to but there were many early concepts that could be related to what bitcoin is today. So I wouldn't say that this is surprising. Speculating that the internet would revolutionize things maybe didn't seem that realistic to the general population in the 90's but academics knew better.

Http error code 402 has been around for years.

https://m.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/27g1z0/402_payment_required_this_code_is_reserved_for/

Might have been a motivation for satoshi to create it. Can't call it prediction exactly. And I don't think he even imagined it would turn out to be so good. And from the video it seems he wasn't expecting a blockchain transparent system.

Yes, we know that. it's an old idea. In the nineties (possibly in the 80's, too), they were computer games with some e-tokens in it. It was only Monopoly money, but quite many people had thought of an electronic currency which could freely exchanged. But it took a few years for someone to turn it into reality.

Name someone else who said this? You can't. This man is a genius.

and the 1990's star trek franchise preddicted the apple ipad
http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/blogs/geekdad/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/padd.jpg

the 1970's star trek predicted the flip phone
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f2/20090704-1971_StarTrekTOSCommunicatorReplica.jpg

also the 1970's predicted bluetooth headsets
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/140725173020-nichelle-nichols-lt-urhura-2-horizontal-gallery.jpg

and 1940's charlie chaplin predicted obama and david cameron and the current economic and social environment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBpX0pkWKDY

They are being anonymous, block chain doesn't store your name and address after all. They are just not private. As everyone can see them. That is a difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#Death


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patri_Friedman


I found Satoshi! What did I win?

Yes he is a genius and understands it well. But I won't say that no one else predicted it to . Even Nick Sbazo posted a paper back in the days  about the currency. EHe is also suspected to be Satoshi.

Milton Friedman was a genius with or without this one quote. He also brought free market ideas to a huge audience.

Sbazo could easily deny being Satoshi if he was only working under contract for Satoshi, i.e., Peter Thiel + Patri Friedman + Wayne Gramlich (http://web.archive.org/web/*/gramlich.net) (dude loves trains and lives in California, and could've easily met Dorian).

Maybe, it could be them. Even I don't believe it is only an individual behind it. Very less likely to have so much knowledge in so many things and implement it perfectly. I guess we will never surely know.

Too bad google's indexing was different back then or you would have found out.  ;D

I am not surprised at all with that 'prediction' of e-money. Everyone knew it will happen someday. Exact method of transfer, protocols, infrastructure were of course a mystery at that time.
In the future we may see even something far superior than bitcoin invented. And the question is not 'if' we see it but rather 'when'.

Walter Wriston, former CEO of Citibank, 1997

Money is a social construct, not just a technological one. For e-cash to be money, everyone has to agree that it's money.

“Money is a terrible thing.” Gene Roddenberry, Creator of Star Trek

“We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions.” Jean Luc Picard, Captain, USS Enterprise

Could it be true?

Could the future not just be cashless, but moneyless?

Doing a prediction is easy, even the movie industry can do it.  ::)

Bitcoin was predicted in the 1990 cyberpunk movie RoboCop 2. The punks used it to trade an illegal designer drug called "nuke". The movie also predicted the 2013 bankruptcy of Detroit.

It's only a matter of time before police forces are privatized and ED209 is patrolling our streets keeping us "safe".

The future of law enforcement ---> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9l9wxGFl4k

The part about not having a record is the only part that is not correct about the prediction if you look at bitcoin.

As long as the address is not linked to you it is however almost anonymous.

That is why we call it pseudo anonymous.

a wallet that does not have a name associated not mean it's pseudo anonymous.

IP addresses , logins, id Verifications...

You could use Tor, never use a single address twice, don't send your ID to third party exchanges unless you absolutely have to, don't get verified voluntarily if all you want to do is trade crypto for crypto- in other words use bitcoin as it was intended to be. Don't be lazy.

bitcoin does not ask for logins..
bitcoin does not ask for ID
bitcoin does not ask for retain the IP address of the sender..

what you are talking about is businesses, who also trade in FIAT and are required to do KYC because of the fiat stuff..
again the blockchain does not ask for these things. and if you stay away from such exchanges. and not publicise your real life and bitcoin address.. bitcoin IS pseudo anonymous.. which means anonymous until you decide to link your name to the address.

and if you rebuttle that IP addresses appear on the blockchain.. that IP address is not you..

Um...What. He kind of did predict Bitcoin. The first crypto currency that people actually used, is Bitcoin. Which was released in 2009. That is 10 years after 1999, maybe you need to work on your maths skills mate. In Bitcoin you can kind of see where it came from if some is sent to you, Bitcoin address!

There were many other e moneys before, but they all had problems. Biggest of them all was double spend. Network would get filled with noise and in a short time frame you could spam a transaction from the same account multiple times before it hit the server. If it got to the server it would register both or all transactions. Bitcoins public ledger called the blockchain eliminates double spend. If I got anything wrong, feel free to correct me.

Well he could be talking about other "e-cash" that existed before bitcoins. He never mentioned anything about cryptocurrency.

not suprised,many people will think about e-cash on past,just they cant make sure when it happen..

Yeah but it's alot easier to hide $1,000,000 with Bitcoin than it is with cash in a suitcase.

To the OP, thanks for sharing. I didn't know Milton Friedman made these comments...he's a legend!

But there are a lot better ways and less traceable ways to hide that kind of money than in Bitcoin. Right now Bitcoin doesn't have the transaction volume to adequately hide/mask a million dollar transaction - whereas you could probably get away with it a little easier with the current financial system.

Because current financial system is designed to be flawed and exploited. Creation of money from thin air.
Behind the scenes transactions and lack of transparency is major issues and are crucial problems for many people.
Total transparency of bitcoin will be a remedy for this rotten financial system.

Years back (2001) there was a fellow on the internet that went by the Name John Titor. He claimed to be a time traveler from 2036 and made the following statement in response to a question about money:


His statement about no "computerized economic systems" would seem to refute the who deal but I find the statement interesting non-the-less.

Good article.  You know, a lot of people don't realize that the theory and the technology behind Bitcoin has been around for quite sometime.  It just took a little while to consolidate the knowledge base and to work out some of the kinks which ended up being worked out in Satoshi's whitepaper.

Friedman is a giant. the Nobel is to few for him. To many thing was "predicted" by him and were verified. This prediction I hear for the first time. But make me to respect even more him. Are to many other him's predictions which wait to be verified. I am giving below another one which I like to much and is something that have to do with the above write at the main post. Here him's thought (I like to call prediction that must becaome true in the future; maybe spreading and re framing in a wider way the above prediction):

“We don’t need a Fed,” Milton Friedman says, twirling a letter opener as he speaks. “I have, for many years, been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer,” he adds. Each year, it “would print out a specified number of paper dollars” to augment the money supply. “Same number, month after month, week after week, year after year.”

Read the entire interview here: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/milton-rose-friedman-offer-radical-ideas-21st-century (http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/milton-rose-friedman-offer-radical-ideas-21st-century)

Imagine if the e-cash predicted in the main post be the stamped money by the computer. Can be, in the essence, the same but expressed in different way.

Bitcoins, which are now a very famous and useful currency over the world. But, guess what a Nobel laureate in 1999 had already guessed about a currency in which money can be transferred to any person without any third party's consent.
It was just a prediction of what can happen in the future.. And this has turned into a reality in the form of bitcoins. Isn't it amazing!

To be honest its not that shocking, it's just the natural step forward in mankind. A lot of people predicted mobile phones back in the day too (Back in the Future for example) what counts is making it real. Satoshi made this vision great for the first time ever, that's why Bitcoin is worth trillions of dollars.

Exactly this. It's was an evolutionary step foward after the invention of the internet. Bankers of the world begin to understand this now and are desperate to slow down the process or try to stop it. Due to BTC's decentralization and the current fucked up state of the financial economy, it's only a matter of time until it succeeds on a large scale, no matter what shills do or say. All these new accounts spreading FUD on bitcointalk will only bring down prices temporarily. We should use it as a buying opportunity, just like they do. I doubt 300 Dollars/BTC will last very long. Major uptrend is imminent.

LoLz... u failed to understand bitcoin. :-*

If Bitcoins was predicted by a Nobel Laureate in 1999 then why it took so many years to become so popular at this time. It means the Bitcoins future is very strong and day by day many new users of bitcoins is joining from all around the world.

The predictions have nothing to do with the inventions.Things take time to succeed and a lot more than we imagine.
People getting into bitcoin is not enough until they know the need to get in.

i dont think its peoneer of bitcoin,its just method of online transaction,and bitcoin more than that method,bitcoin also investement. and if that prediction true,and than  Laureate Milton Friedman will become father of e-money or bitcoin?