Evil Genius....
http://web.archive.org/web/20010331105544/http://zooko.com/

This should be in the altcoin section......

http://nakamotoinstitute.org/mempool/the-problem-with-altcoins/

Bitcoin took a lot longer than 7 years to create:

-1992 The Cypherpunks create an anonymous mailer for like-minded users to share ideas.(Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, Zooko, etc….)
https://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt

-1995 Tim May posts a call to the Cypherpunks to create a decentralised electronic currency.
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html

-1995 Nick Szabo answers Tim’s call(He also has smart contracts to include once it gets going)
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html

-1996 Wei Dai PipeNet 1.1
http://www.weidai.com/pipenet.txt

-1997 Tim Mays Anonymous Digital Cash paper.
http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm

-1997 Adam Backs “Hashash”
http://www.hashcash.org/

- 1998 Wei Dai elaborates on Tim’s idea for a digital currency and called it “Bmoney”.(It reads like the beginning idea of BitGold/Bitcoin)
http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

-1998 Szabo had a simular more detailed idea “BitGold” soon after Dai’s paper and he worked relentlessly on making that idea work.
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00988.htmle

-1999 Szabo mentions bitgold and talk of a special “ASIC” type chip that could be used for mining.
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html

- 2004 Hal Finney’s “RPOW” was the missing piece of the puzzle. “RPOW” was added on top of Adam Back’s “HashCash”. (The solution for the Byzantine General’s Problem which allows BitGold/Bitcoin to be completed)
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm

-2004 Wei Dai’s c++ library

-2005 Nick Szabo publishes BitGold paper.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html?m=1

2007 Satoshi says he started putting Bitcoin together.

2007 Szabo & Zooko put ideas together.
Zooko: "I want to invent something else: a truly decentralized economic mechanism.  Research that points in this direction includes the sub-field of "algorithmic mechanism design" within economic game theory, some peer-to-peer research such as GNUnet, Wei Dai's and Nick Szabo's ideas about "bit gold", Nick Szabo's "smart contracts", and much more.Another inspiration is BitTorrent's tit-for-tat mechanism, which is decentralized and minimal, but gets the job done within its limited problem domain."
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000022.html
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000025.html

2007 Szabo Blogging about two ideas. BitGold and Scarce Objects(finite supply like Bitcoin) plus “Nanobarter”
Note: These ideas put together with Zooko’s “p2p with nodes” (Nanobarter) is Bitcoin
http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html

-2008 Szabo calls out to the cypherpunks for help to finalize coding BitGold and run a test net a few months before the white paper gets published online.
https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/

*Szabo’s post for assistance:
“Bitgold would greatly benefit from a demonstration, an experimental market (with e.g. a trusted third party substituted for the complex security that would be needed for a real system). Anybody want to help me code one up?”

-Satoshi Nakamoto appears out of thin air and introduces Bitcoin right in the middle of the economic crisis that was saturated in the news at that time and then disappears.

More info:
http://originalcontroltheory.tumblr.com/

@ op

If you want to get consensus from the people about a good bitcoin subject that really needs to be addressed:

The 51% issue and actual possible solutions listed below that actually exist and need to be implemented.

Better way to mine:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281180.0

Proof of idle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN2TPeQ9mnA

Tatsuaki Okamoto was a good candidate, but he had to be ruled due to his location during the months Satoshi was active online...

Satoshi said he started creating Bitcoin in 2007....(The creation of Bitcoin is below, you don't have to make any guesses or assumptions, it's all there with the links to back it up)

2007  
Zooko quote: “I want to invent something else: a truly decentralized economic mechanism. Research that points in this direction includes the sub-field of “algorithmic mechanism design” within economic game theory, some peer-to-peer research such as GNUnet, Wei Dai’s and Nick Szabo’s ideas about “bit gold”, Nick Szabo’s “smart contracts”, and much more. Another inspiration is BitTorrent’s tit-for-tat mechanism, which is decentralized and minimal, but gets the job done within its limited problem domain.”
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000022.html
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000025.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20010331105544/http://zooko.com/

2007 Szabo applies BitGold and his “Scarce Object” theory to Zookos p2p hard drive project with "Nanobarter" (together this creates Bitcoin)
Szabo: “One possible answer to central mint vulnerability is bit gold — a currency the value of which does not depend on any particular trusted third party. Another alternative is (an object barter economy”Scarce Objects”).”  
http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/  
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html

*Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled.  The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him.  Thus ends the story”.

The first credit to Bitcoin in the white paper was a citation for Wei Dai’s “bmoney”.

The first paragraph of “bmoney”:

“I am fascinated by Tim May’s crypto-anarchy. Unlike the communities traditionally associated with the word “anarchy”, in a crypto-anarchy the government is not temporarily destroyed but permanently forbidden and permanently unnecessary. It’s a community where the threat of violence is impotent because violence is impossible, and violence is impossible because its participants cannot be linked to their true names or physical locations”. ~Wei Dai

*Below is a Tim May quote which explains why a system like Bitcoin would have to be created and launched open-sourced and anonymously:(THIS IS THE REASON)

Tim May: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”

"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.

"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".

Note: You can't give the government someone to accuse of being crazy or accuse of having connections to anti-government or terrorist groups.

I got a couple of PM's about leaving someone out of this list so here it is:

Nick Szabo: “(assuming Nakamoto is not really Finney or Dai)”…..Only Finney (RPOW) and Nakamoto were motivated enough to actually implement such a scheme”.

There seems to be one other person with the motivation that Szabo says would be needed to create Bitcoin:

2007
Zooko quote: “Nick Szabo is a very interesting thinker whose domain includes law,  
economics, networking, cryptography, and so on. I’ve been acquainted  with his ideas for many years (starting with his inspiring and mind- expanding “Smart Contracts”, which I became aware of in approximately 1996). He has just now posted a blog entry about Allmydata-Tahoe economics:”
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000025.html

2007  
Zooko quote: “I want to invent something else: a truly decentralized economic mechanism. Research that points in this direction includes the sub-field of “algorithmic mechanism design” within economic game theory, some peer-to-peer research such as GNUnet, Wei Dai’s and Nick Szabo’s ideas about “bit gold”, Nick Szabo’s “smart contracts”, and much more. Another inspiration is BitTorrent’s tit-for-tat mechanism, which is decentralized and minimal, but gets the job done within its limited problem domain.”
https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2007-June/000022.html

2007 Szabo applies BitGold and his “Scarce Object” theory to Zookos p2p hard drive project with "Nanobarter"
Szabo: “One possible answer to central mint vulnerability is bit gold — a currency the value of which does not depend on any particular trusted third party. Another alternative is (an object barter economy”Scarce Objects”).”  
http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/  
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html

2007 Szabo's "Nanobarter" (READ THIS LINK)
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2007/06/nanobarter.html?m= 1

2007/2008 Zooko c++
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/pycryptopp/ticket/3

Zooko quote 26 January 2009(right after Bitcoins release, seems to be pointing people to Bitcoin)

"What I want is a currency which everyone can cheaply and conveniently use but which no-one has the power to manipulate. No-one has the power to inflate or deflate the currency supply, no-one has the power to monitor, tax, or prevent transactions. Truly the digital equivalent of gold, during the times and places when gold was the universal currency. See the BitGold idea by Nick Szabo and b-money idea by Wei Dai, and recent effort to actually implement something along these lines: BitCoin by Satoshi Nakamoto."

Zooko: May 31, 2011 at 6:42 PM

"Gwern's post fails to appreciate the technical advances that BitCoin originated."

"I have been trying, off and on, to invent a decentralized digital payment system for fifteen years (since I was at DigiCash). I wasn't sure that a practical system was even *possible*, until BitCoin was actually implemented and became as popular as it has. Scientific advances often seem obvious in retrospect, and so it is with BitCoin."

Zooko: May 31, 2011 at 6:44 PM

"Oh wait, I have to revise this, as I remember trying to invent a decentralized digital payment system in about 1995, which was before I joined DigiCash. :-)"

NOTE: I emailed Dominic Frisby after he released his new book:

D.Frisby: "Yes, I looked at Zooko. In fact he was one of my main suspects at one stage - although I hadn't seen those posts that you sent through so thank you."

D.Frisby: "I had some people look at his C++ and was told it didn't match. I'm afraid I'm relying on the expertise of others here."

D.Frisby: "Look at Zooko on Twitter and you'll see lots of exchanges between him and Szabo. Indeed Zooko is one of the first people Szabo followed. He's definitely in the mix somewhere."

D.Frisby: "Maybe in the next book I'll look further at that possibility. I found it hard to see beyond Szabo. I'll admit."

I assume that date is for the geniuses block:

"The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"

You are 100% correct.....

The Internet and Bitcoin were created to allow people to solve social problems in a novel way: Instead of the ancient formula of “the strongest wins and then beats the crap out of the loser” we all can achieve a peaceful society where both rich and poor, strong and weak can protect their property and freedom on more equal grounds without relying on violent institutions like governments.

Cypherpunk movement started as a mailing list in 1992.(Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Wei Dai, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, etc…)

Here’s an excerpt from Cypherpunks FAQ:

2.3. “What’s the ‘Big Picture’?”

"Strong crypto is here. It is widely available. It implies many changes in the way the world works. Private channels between parties who have never met and who never will meet are possible. Totally anonymous, unsinkable, untraceable communications and exchanges are possible".

"Transactions can only be voluntary, since the parties are untraceable and unknown and can withdraw at any time. This has profound implications for the conventional approach of using the threat of force, directed against parties by governments or by others. In particular, threats of force will fail".

"What emerges from this is unclear, but I think it will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call “crypto anarchy.” (Voluntary communications only, with no third parties butting in)".

*Tim May quote which explains why a system like Bitcoin would have to be created and launched open-sourced and anonymously.

Tim May: “Anyone contemplating building such a system, or entity, or cybercorporation, should think long and hard about the wisdom of ever having an identifiable nexus of attack. Money must be collected in untraceable ways. This is what I meant about it being time to rethink the theory of the corporation.”

"Where once a corporation existed to both protect the rights of shareholders (against lawsuits and partners having to pay for losses) and to enable the group participation of many workers, corporations for the things Cypherpunks think are interesting is just a bad idea. And given the growing trend toward trying to prosecute the V.P of Yahoo-Europe because some bit of Nazi history was sold to some German citizen, etc., corporations are becoming a liability in cyberspace”.

"The answer is to vanish into cyberspace. Not an easy task, maybe, given the state of today’s tools, but the long term trend".

Edit: I forgot to mention John Gilmore who has fought for our online freedom since the beginning of the internet. Without him standing up for us, we would have totally lost the battle.....
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gilmore_(activist)

History:

-1992 The Cypherpunks create an anonymous mailer for like-minded users to share ideas.(Eric Hughes, Tim May, Hal Finney, Wei Dai, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Ray Dillenger, etc….)
https://www.cypherpunks.to/faq/cyphernomicron/cyphernomicon.txt
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1993/10/msg00759.html

-1995 Tim May posts a call to the Cypherpunks to create a decentralised electronic currency.
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html

-1995 Nick Szabo answers Tim’s call(He also has smart contracts to include once it gets going)
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html

1996 Wei Dai PipeNet 1.1
http://www.weidai.com/pipenet.txt

-1997 Tim Mays Anonymous Digital Cash paper.
http://osaka.law.miami.edu/~froomkin/articles/tcmay.htm

1997 Adam Backs “Hashash”
http://www.hashcash.org/

- 1998 Wei Dai elaborates on Tim’s idea for a digital currency and called it “Bmoney”.(It reads like the beginning idea of BitGold/Bitcoin)
http://www.weidai.com/bmoney.txt

-1998 Szabo had a simular more detailed idea “BitGold” soon after Dai’s paper and he worked relentlessly on making that idea work.
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00988.htmle

-1999 Szabo mentions bitgold and talk of a special “ASIC” type chip that could be used for mining.
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/intrapoly.html

-2001 Tim May explains a system like BitGold/Bitcoin would have to be released anonymous:
https://www.mail-archive.com/cypherpunks@lne.com/msg00080.html

- 2004 Hal Finney’s “RPOW” was the missing piece of the puzzle. “RPOW” was added on top of Adam Back’s “HashCash”. (The solution for the Byzantine General’s Problem which allows BitGold/Bitcoin to be completed)
http://cryptome.org/rpow.htm

-2004 Wei Dai’s c++ library
http://www.cryptopp.com/

-2005 Nick Szabo publishes BitGold paper.
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2005/12/bit-gold.html?m=1

2007 Szabo Blogging about two ideas. BitGold and Scarce Objects(finite supply like Bitcoin)
Note: These two ideas put together is Bitcoin.
http://web.archive.org/web/20070625154046/http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070618142414/http://szabo.best.vwh.net/scarce.html

2007 Satoshi (at a later date) says he started putting Bitcoin together.
http://m.benzinga.com/article/3563567

-2008 Szabo calls out to the cypherpunk types for help to finalize coding BitGold and run a test net a few months before the white paper gets published online.
*Szabo’s post for assistance:
“Bitgold would greatly benefit from a demonstration, an experimental market (with e.g. a trusted third party substituted for the complex security that would be needed for a real system). Anybody want to help me code one up?”
https://likeinamirror.wordpress.com/2013/12/

-Satoshi Nakamoto appears out of thin air and introduces Bitcoin right in the middle of the economic crisis that was saturated in the news at that time and then disappears.

*“Szabo has extensively studied British history for his legal and monetary theories (it’s hard to miss this if you’ve read his essays), so I do not regard the Britishisms as a point against Szabo”. ~ gwern

*Ray Dillenger (Bear) quote: “Look, (Satoshi) was a construction made explicitly for the purpose of launching Bitcoin……That purpose is fulfilled.  The person who created (Satoshi) has no further need for him.  Thus ends the story”.

*Hal Finney quote: “How do you find someone who has spent a lifetime covering his tracks?…For some, he was a guardian angel. others, a ghost, who never quite fit in…What’s the S stand for?”

Looks like the Canadiens have a motive as well. Good catch on those last names. I bet Phinnaeus Gage would have been all over that also. And you know he wouldn't be able to keep quiet on info like that.

The one truth here is Bitcointalk.org "world famous" legendary member Phinnaeus Gage disappeared on June 17, 2014 @ 05:34:23 PM.

His profile is here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=24792


Everything else is speculation on what could have happened.

It seems he was in the middle of uncovering some damaging info on pinkcoin. His last few posts reviled some names and immediately he was asked to contract them in private, looks like to pay him off or they could have been planning his disappearance.

pinkcoin's response to PG releasing some of the names:
tweet me @cryptocayce so that I may share some Pinkcoin love with you as well as a lottery ticket or two.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=624017.msg7367716#msg7367716

Once the smart contracts come into play and even your grandmother has to register her car online through the blockchain by paying with Bitcoins, that's when things will really get real. You have to look at the big picture. Blockchain was created with Bitcoin(p2p payment system) and once the network was large enough and stable, add the smart contracts. Bitcoin is the payment system for the smart contracts using the blockchain. That's been the plan since 1994, it hasn't changed, it's all documented in great detail through the entire process.

Applepay has already had over 1,000 doublespends on cardholders accounts!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=833950.msg9319856#msg9319856

Title says it all.....relayed to me by Nick Szabo
Not even ghash could mess Bitcoin up that bad!

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2014-10-22/bank-of-america-customers-double-charged-in-apple-pay-snafu.html

Nick Szabo found these political views to help him with the creation Bitgold, the direct precursor to Bitcoin. This paper by Szabo is very important to think about in relation to political views needed for Bitcoin. It's a good reference to be used when politicians question what Bitcoin's motive is.

Ronald Reagan Quote:
"You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.'"

"If all of this seems like a great deal of trouble, think what's at stake. We are faced with the most evil enemy mankind has known in his long climb from the swamp to the stars. There can be no security anywhere in the free world if there is no fiscal and economic stability within the United States. Those who ask us to trade our freedom for the soup kitchen of the welfare state are architects of a policy of accommodation."

"Virtually every other revolution in history has just exchanged one set of rulers for another
set of rulers. Our revolution is the first to say the people are the masters, and government is their servant." -- State of the Union Address, 1987



http://szabo.best.vwh.net/reagan.html

I didn't know how bad it was until I saw the video below. Please see that those people in that video are legends and only deal in facts. That's what got a couple of them in trouble.

This is not a Facebook bash, it's a bash about the government considering all internet users as an unprotected third party.

Facebook is control over the people while the government is enforcing their cyber-war against citizens using information technologies.


Facebook = Business to condition people to disclose and permanently record their personal information/thoughts and actions in a legally unprotected third party contract.

Advertiser & government = customer

Facebook User = product/target


*By regeristing you agree you are involved as a third party and have no legal privacy rights that can be claimed as valid(this is a fact and is recorded in thousands of court cases).

**You are rewarded by receiving "Social" credits for reveiling your personal information and agreeing that information can be shared with advertisers and the government at their requests(no warrant needed due to third party legal status).
                                      ~ Jacob Appelbaum


Jacob Appelbaum quote:

"Facebook is control by servalance"
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Appelbaum

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i85fX9-sKYo

I understand Bitcoin with smart contracts would only be general AI, the "Chinese Room" type but it is still is the foundation for the beginning of strong AI.

The Singularity (Strong AI):

The human brain doesn't need to build a smarter brain. It just needs to build something of equivalent smartness (which should be theoretically possible, there's no reason to believe the human brain is the upper bound for all generalised reasoning ability) on a substrate like silicon which is subject to Moore's Law (and thus gets inherently faster with time) and which is immortal and duplicable.

Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and:

- 18 months later you can build one that's twice as fast using the same principles

- duplicate this brain and get the power of multiple people thinking together (but with greater bandwidth between them than any human group)

- run this brain for 100 years and get an older intellectually functioning human than has ever existed before

- duplicate whatever learning this brain has accumulated over 100 years (which, say, brings to the level of an Einstein) as many times as you have physical resources for (so, clone Einstein)
All those are paths to super-human AI from the production of a human-intelligence brain in a non-biological form.

So, if a human brain can make a computer brain, which is a reasonable assumption, then a human brain can make a brain smarter than itself.

Building a human brain in a non-biological substrate is not a miracle. It would be a miracle in the same way that transistors and penicillin are, not in the way that Jesus' resurrection is. I.e., a fantastic, happy, unlikely but possible event that will change the world for the better.

We know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the evidence for that claim inside billions of skulls. The question is then not to push the theoretical boundaries of computational capability beyond some theoretical level - but merely to achieve it again artificially.

1) It is general AI for now.

2) Smart contracts are single-minded even for (AI)'s; while some may have very advanced pattern recognition or legal thinking modules the "only" thing they care about is performing their contractual function. They might know major secrets, but if they are written to be quiet about them they will remain quiet no matter what.

3) It can reach the point where your own pc, house, car or phone might be hired by a contract to check certain information. A high tech "wire tap" investigation of sorts built into the agreement of the contract. This would occur when the contract has started to think one of the parts is doing advanced cheating that it cannot detect online.

4) With respect to strong AI, Nick(as you can read in his blogs linked above) is very close to the problem, and that's the issue. Like any good engineer/scientist, he sees problems everywhere. Yes, there are many problems before we get to strong AI. That's not news. There were many problems to resolve before people could pay a small sum of money and let a giant metal tube take them through the air to a destination halfway round the world without killing them - but those problems got resolved, one by one. Many problems do not amount to an impossibility, only a damn hard problem (which we knew strong AI was anyway).

5) You do see a lot of it in books and movies, some very well thought. Referring back to Nicks blogs, his other assertion, that the concept of the singularity is a fantasy, Nick's main argument is that the singularity will only last "for a time", and that it will turn into a classic S-curve. He waves Feynman's name around as supporting evidence, but does not address the fact that intelligence (and artificial intelligence in particular) is not subject to the Malthusian laws which have caused other phenomena to follow S-curves. Yes, we only have access to so many particles, but the whole point of exponential AI is figuring out better ways to use the same number of particles. There may be a theoretical limit to how efficiently we can use those particles, but even so there are a lot of particles, and if we can manufacture even just human-equivalent computing matter in factories, that's already enough to achieve a singularity.